Not guilty

I measure my life in construction sites. One day a crane appears, secretly growing taller as it hauls the latest concrete apartment block out of the ground in my neighbourhood. Every day I watch the green mesh sleeve slip silently first upward, later down. I watch the hundreds thousands millions of trips the simple caged elevator makes up the outside of the building, each one delivering workers and materials, each trip making the tiniest contribution to the overall task of building this monster. But still it goes on and on till the job is done.

So, you see, my life is pretty slow. I've engineered a quite absurd lifestyle for myself. Two (long) weekends of work a month is enough. The rest of my time is my own.

I feel a little guilty about this for some reason. It doesn't seem right and proper. You're meant to to work your balls off to be successful, aren't you? Yet here am I, all shorts and sandals with a beer on the bar and a good book continuously in my hand, living the kind of life you normally spend a lifetime saving up for. I'm not rich by any means (and goodness knows I have no pension plan - apart from planning on dying at some point) but I feel so relieved after spending my fair share of time perched on the hard seats of the gravy train to get here.

So, hang it all, I won't feel guilty.

The 12th of August marked four years for me in China. Yes, The Glorious Twelfth indeed. Wow. Four years seeing things a million miles from Newcastle. Four years doing something I thought I couldn't do (anyone who knows me know that standing in front of fifty people and speaking for an hour does not come naturally). Four years of teaching gave me the experience needed to become an examiner of the 'IELTS' English test (which Chinese students need to pass if they want to study at a British or Australian university). It means I can earn the same each month as I had done as a teacher but in a fraction of the time - and without the additional hassle of writing lesson plans or the stress of bringing those plans to life. It also means I get to visit other cities like Chongqing and Guiyang where testing is hosted too.

Happily, one of the dividends of that four year investment is that I have the time to write again. To blog too. And, since last time I wrote, I've also been taken on as a writer/editor by a local NGO which has made life so much more pleasant since writing comes a lot more naturally to me than teaching. So, in June, I had to take a trip to Hong Kong to renew my visa and register it in my new employer's name.

I loved Hong Kong: a metaphorical breath of fresh air. In Chinese it's called 'Xiang Gang' which means 'fragrant harbour'. I wouldn't fancy taking a dip in it but all the water separating the many different islands that make up the city make it a quite unique place. It must be cool to commute on the famous Harbour Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island every day.

It's also amazing how utterly different this little part of China is to the rest of the country. A sign on the elevator up to the visa office declared that the lift buttons were sterilised every thirty minutes. To be honest, it made me feel a little grubby, unworthy to be using it, but there you go. On the mainland you'd be lucky to get a 'No spitting' sign.

Then, getting the visa was a doddle. This, after a whole two months of delays and setbacks thanks to the mind-numbing bureaucracy in Chengdu to get all the necessary preparatory paperwork done. You'd go to the visa office in Chengdu with all the papers you'd been told you needed only for them to find some tiny discrepancy which would take another trip to another government office in another obscure part of the city before you would return, full of hope and expectation, only for them to find another discrepancy on the same document as before, which they could have but didn't tell you about the first time, which would entail another odyssey to more green-tiled, spit-floored waiting rooms full of visa-worn faces.

That said, the local Chengdu police could not have been more helpful when this jabbering fool turned up with his pitiful Chinese and tried, mainly through hand gestures and a bit of gurning, to explain which official document I needed them to give me to support my visa application. Turned out I was in completely the wrong police station so they threw me in the back of a - rather fittingly for Chengdu - panda car and, lights a-flashing, raced me down to the correct station. Once there, over a cup of green tea, sat outside in the main courtyard of the police station, several cops humoured me until, between their rudimentary English and my hideous Chinese, we communicated.

Yes, the Chinese has not been going well - and that's something that does make me feel guilty. It's frankly embarrassing to have been here for years and be no further on that I was four years ago after my three months of night classes in Newcastle. And the excuses don't cut much ice: "I'm concentrating on learning to be a teacher" at the beginning; "I'm too busy with lesson plans" for the next couple of years; "Nobody in Chengdu speaks proper Mandarin so I can't practise enough"; "It's too noisy in here"; "It's too quiet in here"; "Just not in the mood", etc., etc. Fact is, there's no shortage of 'foreigners' (although, as my old friend William Ward would say "I'm not foreign, I'm BRITISH!") here who have successfully learnt it from scratch. Fact is, I spend too much time at the local English pub speaking, hum, English. Fact is, my memory and application aren't what they used to be. Fact is, I just haven't made enough effort. Nonetheless, I'm giving it one final go now that I have all this free time.

So there is some purpose to life at the moment; I'm not just screwing around. But, for all the hours of study I'm putting-in, once I get outside and come to use it, it's like I'm lingually constipated - nothing with come out - and daily I get more frustrated as though my skull's going to explode and I'll be found one day lying face downwards in a grisly pool of addled Chinese vocab and grammar.

(Incidentally, given Chengdu's reputation of some of the spiciest cuisine on the planet, constipation is rarely a problem. quite the opposite. I went to get some pills the other day for what the Chinese call 'laduzi' - literally 'empty your belly' - and, after asking how long I'd had the runs for, the lady in the pharmacy was a bit taken aback when I replied "For about four years now". Still, I can't stop eating the local food. In fact, my eating habits have changed a lot recently. One of my guilty pleasures used to be have a Big Mac and large fries once or twice a month. You know how it is: you sometimes just get an irresistible urge for a Big Mac and you just can't say no. But, for some reason completely out of the blue, I've totally lost my taste for them. I can't even finish one these days and wonder what the hell I ever saw (or tasted) in them. Ugh.)

Anyway, back to the Chinese: I'm going to give it five months of serious study and, if I can't speak it then, I can at least stop beating myself up about it and so stay here and live with a clear conscience.