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I've just booked a plane ticket. On 15th October, after an expedition by bike and horse through the Tibetan plateau, and a slow meander through the lush landscapes of Yunnan province to Hong Kong, I'll be flying home for the first time in over a year. It's the longest I've ever been away from home, and though it's not really that long and I'm pleased beyond measure that I came, it has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging years of my life to date. In a tidy, cliche-cos-it's-true kind of way, that's also why it's been one of the best.
Pre-China, I used describe adapting to somewhere new as being a bit like learning a new dance. In some places, it's easy: I tumbled headlong and grateful into the mass of London's ever-evolving rhythms just as I did the downright dirty electro pulse of Berlin, and the heady, intoxicating rush of Kashgar. In other places, it's more difficult - I never felt I quite waltzed in step with Paris' louche, airy aloofness, for example. At the end of my time here, however, I recognise that wherever I went before, at least I vaguely knew the steps. Living in Chengdu has been less like learning a new dance, or even learning to dance - if anything it's been like re-learning to walk - and I still have times when I feel uncomfortably out of synch with the city, as though I am clumsily stumbling through a dancefloor full of people moving in perfect unison and greeting the sight of me with a disconcerting melange of bemusement, irritation and vitriol.
My foray into learning the language has been one of the most important parts of my wider attempt at adapting to Chinese life, and fits the re-learning-how-to-walk mould with unsettling precision. The best advice I had on this process was to throw out the rule book on everything you thought you knew about how words happen (including the concept of 'words' at all), and prepare for a long, hard slog which would redefine the phrase 'delayed gratification'. And so it was: six months in and I could understand a fair bit, if spoken slowly and with the Sichuanese bits taken out, but often the key verb or phrase got lost, and as for making myself understood in return, I was a goner.
My turning point came on my first day in Xinjiang, the so-called 'Uighur Autonomous Region' in the far North-West of China. There has been a lot of well-documented unrest in this area, which has never quite been a part of China proper but has also never quite been the independent East Turkestan many desire it to be. The local Uighur people speak an entirely different language, written in Arabic script, are Muslim, and have a strong culture which feels more rooted in the Middle East than the Middle Kingdom. Gone are the red lanterns and monolithic architecture, replaced by bazaars down winding, rickety streets off the square from the Mosque, selling camels side-by-side with Persian-style carpets.
Resentment (justified, as far as I could see) of Beijing rule is palpable. It seems set to be a long and bitter battle, with the many bloody uprisings in the region going unreported in and outside China. Day to day, however, it manifests as a kind of weary nose-thumbing in the direction of the capital, down to no one setting their watch to official Beijing time (which would mean it was daylight until 11pm) but going about their business two hours later. Coachloads of Han Chinese tourists, milling confusedly around shops at 9am BJT wondering why nothing was open, are a common sight.
In the midst of such high-running tensions between Han and Uighur, events took a turn I had not expected. Both sides being preoccupied with denouncing each other as foreign, as a white woman in the middle of the two I - and my attempts at communication - went relatively unremarked. After the foreigner-in-China experience to date, this was seriously liberating: my language, like my face, body and marital status, was no longer remarked upon and scrutinised as it had been in Sichuan. Still more, rather than writing me off at the first unintelligeable tone, or request to repeat something, people simply seemed interested in effective communication. In return, and possibly even more importantly, I stopped expecting to be written off. Instead of approaching every interaction feeling stressed and doomed to failure, I started to relax and to enjoy navigating my way around this new language. It was far from amazing, but like that third Stein of German beer over the table from a philosophy student named Wilhelm with soulful eyes and a guitar it opened the floodgates of dormant vocabulary in my brain and - much more importantly - gave me the confidence boost I needed. From there, I spoke mainly Chinese for the remainder of my trip. Bad, terrible Chinese, but Chinese that got me around and got me understood. Upon return to Sichuan, I was determined not to let it slide, and I feel like in my last few months here I really have achieved the delayed gratification I was promised as a result. I can't say that I'm anything approaching good, but I have managed to make the first friend ever to know me only by my Chinese name, which feels like something of a milestone. He's a fellow cyclist who works in the building next door to me and speaks no English, so we get by on bad Chinese, the dictionary on his phone, and the international language of the drag race.
Every time I travel, I'm fascinated by the interplay between culture and language; at how you cannot gain understanding of one without the other. Friendships, and a wider window onto a new culture, have opened as I've learned Chinese; with them has come a better understanding of a way of thinking inarticulably removed from my own. At the same time, trying to force my thoughts, with their finickety European insistence on tense and gender; their removal from their written form, through the machinery of a grammar and a vocabulary that just isn't made for them makes me understand why this way of thinking exists at all.
- comments
Richard You are spectacular. I am emailing you ASAP. Love you.
roslyn What an incredible year. I feel inspired. You go girl!
Yerma What a fabulous girl you are - and how we've missed you. Can't wait to see you in October.
Terry Fab!x
Shona Another fantastic post, Lucy - we are all so proud of you! Looking forward to seeing you back home again