The unbearable weirdness of being….an expat in China

Sorry, haven’t blogged so far this week: partly because I’m in Shanghai and my blog’s meant to be predominantly about Harbin – not that I feel I can’t talk about our travels to other parts of China, but there are others who write about Shanghai so I don’t want to tread on anyone’s toes. Funnily enough, no one else writes about Harbin (see below!).

The other reason is that I’ve been engrossed in an excellent book, The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday, which was a quick-grab purchase by Peter at the airport the other week (he’d read this guy’s first book). I am having to force myself to stop reading it and do other things because I like to savour books and not finish them too quickly. So here I am.

I was going to talk at some length about the fact that unlike Harbin, Shanghai has a proper expat community, which I’ve glimpsed a little this week for the first time really. In Harbin - unless there’s a secret westerners’ enclave upon which we have yet to stumble - the nearest thing we get to an expat community is occasionally seeing another non-Chinese person in the street, both of you grinning delightedly and then gazing longingly at the other’s retreating back, before you realise they’re most probably Russian and therefore unlikely to speak enough English to become your best friend.

We don’t really mind this too much at the moment, but in the interests of research I was going to do what my history teacher would probably have called ‘compare and contrast’ with a city which is used to, and actually caters for, foreigners. But then I decided that was very dull. So instead here’s a brief list of things I like about being a foreigner/expat in Shanghai, based on my limited experience thus far.

1. English language bookshops – fantastic. I don’t care if a paperback costs a tenner.
2. The Metro. I could happily ride around Shanghai all day on it without ever surfacing above ground. It’s bilingual. It’s brilliant. And I love it.
3. People not staring at you every time you step outside.
4. Seeing the occasional other foreigner and thus not feeling like a total freak (see 3).
5. Foreign supermarkets selling a random and not enormously wide selection of strange imported products (like Lidl gone horribly wrong). The goods for sale are mostly American but there’s some German, Dutch and French stuff; not much British and a very sorry lack of Marmite, but at least you can escape the smelly meat and live seafood sections which you get in Chinese supermarkets. Apparently M&S has just opened here too!
6. The likelihood that staff in shops may speak a little English, or will at least comprehend that if you don’t look Chinese, chances are you won’t understand them however much they follow you around trying to sell you stuff. (NB. Not foolproof, this one, however. Some of them follow you round trying to sell you stuff in English. Some just carry on in Chinese anyway. It’s a gamble.)

There are, of course, disadvantages – the most irritating probably being everyone’s desire to practise their English on you, which means that a simple stroll through any tourist area becomes a race to dodge groups of students shouting, ‘Helloooo!! Please, may we talk to you?!! Where are you from?!!! Please, come with us, we will show you Shanghai!!!!’ in a somewhat manic fashion.

It’s best to pretend to be French. When Peter’s really had enough he occasionally even answers them in Gaelic. That usually throws them.

So, anyway, what I decided to tell you instead of all that, was that on Wednesday we had a grand day out at the police station applying for – roll of drums and fanfare here please – our Residents’ Permits!! (I won’t tell you the whole story behind this until I know it’s gone through and my passport is safely back in my hands, but suffice to say it’s the culmination of weeks and weeks of ridiculous bureaucracy and hassle.)

The Alien Assimilation Centre or whatever they call it is a huge modern building in Pudong – the posh, new part of town, full of futuristic architecture and manicured flowerbeds. I’d assumed it wouldn’t be a speedy process, as most things in China involve waiting; even in Harbin the police/visa thing took an hour, and there were hardly any other foreigners there. But even we weren’t prepared for the epic scale of this particular round of doing nothing while other people shuffle paper pointlessly.

Our little helper Candy – who is as sweet as her adopted name suggests and who has been FANTASTIC and unerringly patient throughout this whole process – warned us that the minimum wait was usually an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. But when we reached the top of the escalator, passing a huge room full of Chinese people applying for visas to visit Hong Kong and Macao, into another huge hall which closely resembled the departure lounge of a large airport, with back-to-back seating all of which was occupied, we were issued with a little ticket like the ones you get in the booking office at the station or the deli counter in Sainsbury’s to tell you when your number’s up. Our number was 496. A screen showed that they were currently processing number 258.

Candy ran off to fill in forms for us, while we sat regretting not having brought our books, laptops, ipods, tea, coffee, sandwiches, intravenous vodka drips, stink bombs, hand grenades or anything else which might get us to the front of the queue faster or make the time pass more quickly. We did a bit of nationality-spotting, but as most people looked Chinese (but were probably Korean or Taiwanese) or American, it wasn’t that absorbing. A ginger-haired Italian and a woman who turned out to be from the Philippines and looked as though she had a shrunken head were about as interesting as it got.

We watched the time ticking by and tried in vain not to watch the numbers ticking by much more slowly. Dolefully we calculated that they were processing about one person per minute, which meant we had 200 minutes to wait. It was 2.30pm when we got there and the place closed at 5pm. Sleeping bags, camping stove, phone number of the British consul, cyanide capsules – why did no-one tell us to come prepared? If it had been an airport there would have been a Starbucks, vending machine, photobooth, newspaper stand, stall selling souvenir pens and T-shirts with ‘I’m a legal alien’ printed on them, branch of Cyanide-Capsules-R-Us, you name it. Marketing opportunities just passing them by.

One side of the room was lined with counters – not many of them actually staffed – and when your number came up we reckoned you had about 30 seconds to notice it on the screen, see which desk you were being called to, identify it and run up there, before they assumed you weren’t there and pressed a button for the next number. This was slightly nervewracking, and we were just devising a formation in which the three of us could stand spread out along the length of the room so as to cover all bases, when at 3.45, when they were on about number 320, a uniformed man with a megaphone strode into the room and starting shouting something.

Immediately there was a surge forward to the desks. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Candy. She removed her ipod and listened thoughtfully for a moment. ‘All numbers before 380 can go up now and stand there’, she said. A young Israeli man who was sitting opposite us with his mum showed Candy his ticket excitedly. He was number 500. ‘No’, said Candy.

The ticket system now being given up as a bad job, small queues formed at each desk, intermittently shepherded and shouted at by the man with the megaphone, whose job it clearly was to harry people. He was the Harrier. His patch covered half the room and another, younger man who obviously hadn’t passed Grade 1 Shouting yet was patrolling the other half, looking menacing and regarding his colleague’s megaphone with envious eyes.

After the queues had gone down a bit, the Harrier decided they could handle the next wave and called numbers up to 450. Despite being the foreigner-processing area, all the announcements were in Chinese only. The Israeli boy tried again and was sent back again. We moved closer to the queues so as to be ready to leap when our turn came. A large Egyptian man tried to go forward too early and was sternly reprimanded by the Harrier. Then we spotted Candy making an audacious break into one of the queues, ahead of the Filipina and her pals. The Harrier hadn’t seen her. We held back in British anxiety until she reached the front and then joined her, but a surprisingly friendly policewoman told her to go back and wait.

Then at last – yes! – it was all numbers up to 500. Candy leapt forward. The Filipinas were too slow and ended up behind me, trying to work past me using only their hair. We were third in the queue. When we got to second, Candy turned to me and hissed, ‘Stand there. I’m going to see which line is faster’, and moved a few queues down. This caused consternation as she had now crossed into Junior Harrier’s patch. Senior Harrier finally spotted her and for a minute I thought we were for it. Fortunately, at that precise moment the person in front of us finished, and like lightning Candy was back with us and we reached the desk.

A certain amount of pushing, shoving and a bit more waiting later, they had looked through all our papers, taken our picture (I had to shove a woman’s arm out of the way when they did mine, otherwise it would have been right across my face on my photo), retained our passports for a week and sent us on our way.

This, then, my friends, is what it takes to be a foreigner in China. I can’t help feeling that if they told people about this in advance, they could probably ease their population problems quite significantly.