Grim up north

In the course of his work, Peter sometimes has to travel to see customers. Last week he made his second trip to Yi’an, which is about 180 miles north of Harbin and thus about 180 miles colder and grimmer. People in the villages nearby drive little three-wheelers and live in huts, each with its own pigsty attached. To give you an idea – and to satisfy those blog fans who crave pictures of the grittier aspects of modern China – here are a couple of photos. The temperature gauge one shows the temperature outside the car at about 10pm one night a few weeks ago, I hasten to point out, but I felt you needed to see it for the record!

The trip takes 4 hours by car on a good day, seven on a bad one when roads are closed by snow or suchlike. Potholes, and other hazards such as the occasional very large pig in the road, abound. Luckily we are blessed with Mr Li who is so besotted with his people-carrier with its fur-lined seats that you can see him physically wince every time he drives over the slightest bump. I swear if it weren’t for Mr Li I would be a nervous wreck by now. He is without doubt or exception the best driver in China, by about a million miles.

Of course on occasion we do have to endure less comfortable modes of transport such as the infamous Shanghai Van (or the Sciatica-Mobile, as I’ve decided to christen it) which not only lacks seatbelts or suspension but also reeks of farm produce. This is the vehicle which they sent to pick us up from Shanghai airport the very first time we visited China to see if we wanted to live here, and so were presumably attempting to impress us! Lovely. But after having my bones rattled one time too many, I think I’ve managed to put a stop to that one by saying if it ever shows up there to collect us again I’ll let its tyres down and wait at the airport until they send something else. Big Boss now says if we phone his secretary she’ll make sure they send a nice car for us. Job done.

But anyway, to return to the singing farmers of Heilongjiang. By a grave oversight I omitted to tell you about these in my account of the CCTV New Year’s Eve Gala the other week. I’ve no idea how they can have slipped my mind as, being our local boys, they were definitely the highlight of the show for us – so much so that we considered voting for them as our favourite act, as we were continually exhorted to do by the presenters. We could even have won a golden statuette of an ox, I think it was – but in the end we decided this prize should go to someone more deserving.

The Singing Farmers of Heilongjiang appeared courtesy of the Chinese equivalent of Pop Idol or those Graham Norton ‘Let’s-find-a-nobody-who’s-never-been-to-drama-school-or-anything-and-make-them-the-star-of-an-outdated-West-End-musical-thereby-really-pissing-off-proper-hardworking-actors-who’ve-been-desperate-for-a-break-like-that-for-years’ shows. (Sorry, had to get my gripe in there; working in the theatre I have serious issues with this type of programme!).

However I don’t think China’s professional singers need worry too much about the Singing Farmers. One, a chap with a large bouffant and the ubiquitous gold jacket, did a reasonable Pavarotti (when helped out by a proper singer), but then he did train, we were told, by lying with a giant rock on his stomach and repeatedly lifting it using only his diaphragm muscles. The other guy, who had a craggy face and appeared to be still wearing his original Mao suit – and who had actually pulled out of the final of the talent show due to an unexpectedly good harvest - really shouldn’t give up the day job, but he got a good cheer anyway.

So when Peter made his foray into the wilder parts of northern Heilongjiang to meet farmers, I was hopeful that he might run into at least one of these celebs. I told him to listen out for the strains of ‘Nessun Dorma’ rising from the cowsheds and get the autograph of anyone in a Mao suit and/or with a rock balanced on their stomach, just to be on the safe side. But sadly it wasn’t to be.

Instead, he met a man who had a bedroom and en-suite bathroom attached to his office, both decorated from floor to ceiling in baby pink with lace frills all over everything, including the toilet seat. Something tells me if this guy does any singing it’s likely to be less ‘Nessun Dorma’ and more lip-synching to ‘I am what I am’ – but you didn’t hear that from me.

But it’s the food and accommodation on these trips that’s the high point - if measured on an oddness or a ‘let’s experience the real China’ scale, anyway. At one ‘motorway services’ café, on each table there was a dish of whole, raw garlic cloves. Peter (a garlic lover) asked his colleague what these were for. ‘Am I meant to just eat one?’, he said. ‘Oh yes,’ came the reply. ‘If the food is bad, they will help to fight off infection’. Ah. So it’s like that.

The hotel he had to stay in is apparently the best in Yi’an, but would barely merit one star by our standards. Its price list read:

Suite: 260 RMB [approx £26]
Room rate: 100 RMB
O’clock rate: 50 RMB

‘What’s “o’clock rate”?’ Peter asked another colleague, innocently.

‘Ah’, said colleague. ‘This is for when people want to have sex in the afternoons so they get room for an hour.’ Peter must have looked shocked because his pal added, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Or perhaps they are just sleepy.’

Fortunately - unlike the 5-star hotels of Harbin - they didn’t actually attempt to provide Peter with an, erm, companion. Instead he was given a room which appeared to have no light-switch. Even the landlady didn’t seem to know where it was and spent ten minutes looking for it in the pitch blackness until Mr Li found it, concealed under a shelf. On seeing what the room was actually like, Peter asked to move. The second one wasn’t much of an improvement (only one working light and a quilt of dubious cleanliness), but did come with a fascinating range of freebies. I thought the things which normal hotels habitually give away were weird enough but these take some beating.

Guests were provided with the following [all sic, naturally!]:

- Tissues
- Ashtray
- Two cups and a teabag, but no means of heating water
- Wrigley’s gum and a ‘compressed towel’, displayed together on a little presentation stand
- A packet labelled ‘Men’s underwear’ on one side, and on the other ‘Panties – Comfortable Consideration New Vogue and New Character’
- And best of all: a sachet of ‘Uncomplimentary’ Yibashi High-Grade Bathing Lotion (‘Exclusive sale in high standard hotes’). The instructions suggested that if you ‘pour the liquid into the location where water pours’ and then ‘drench the inside bathtub wet and spread the plastics on it’, then ‘The degrakable plastics inside can be used to prevent your ksin from being direstly contacted bathtub’. Now it’s not often you can say that!! ‘Original Lotion Is Imported From Holland!’ the packaging proudly proclaimed, as if this would inspire you to use it.

And all this for a tenner.

This week he has a meeting with a man called Dr Dung Pan Boo (“but you can call me Dung Pan”). The mind can only boggle.

Happy Birthday, Rover

We know January’s a dull and depressing month back home, so we thought we’d give you an excuse for a celebration.

If you have a dog, today is the day to dress up Pooch in his best party hat, bake him a doggy cake and invite all his little doggy friends over for a few games of Pass the Bone or Pin the Tail on the Postman. Yes folks, according to Chinese New Year lore, today (the second day of the lunar new year) is all dogs’ birthday.

Now what could be more sensible than that? All the pets I ever had were born long before we bought or acquired them, so we always had to make birthdays up for them and more or less guess their ages – with the exception of the cat who had the same birthday as me, although I suspect my parents may have made that one up too out of sentimentality. Here, you’ve got your doggy date of birth all sorted for you thanks to centuries of tradition.

Apologies to cat-lovers, by the way, as the moggies don’t seem to get a look-in on this one. Actually I don’t think many people have cats here; I’ve only seen about three (all on the same day, as it happens – dunno what that signifies!). Most people have what we call SLDs (Silly Little Dogs) of the type beloved of supermodels and elderly Spanish ladies. In fact, prior to coming to China I thought Barcelona was the SLD capital of the world, but Harbin or Shanghai may well have stolen its crown.

Now, while I’m on the subject of New Year lore, here are some Errata (tut!) from the previous post. According to Peter, the fires on street corners are NOT made from coals but from paper. (It looks likes coals to me.) If you want your ancestors to get a car, you DRAW a car on a piece of paper and then burn it, not write the word. (What’s the difference if it’s in Chinese characters anyway?!) The third and fourth days of the new year are the ones for visiting graves, NOT the second day – obviously, you’ll be too busy making jelly and ice cream for your dog on Day 2 – silly of me. And you’ll be pleased to know, I’m sure, that Kevin managed to get a cancellation for a second class airline ticket home so didn’t have to fly first class after all – though having flown second class on Chinese airlines many times now myself, frankly in his position I would have stuck to the ‘Oh no, I can’t get a ticket’ line, seeing as someone else was paying!

So, how did we spend New Year’s Eve? The one two nights ago, obviously, not the real one; we spent that, ironically enough, having a Chinese meal in Wetherby and then discoing the night away with my irrepressible in-laws (the oldest teenagers in town) at the Swan and Talbot, and a jolly good night was had by all. I was about to say that this is the first time I’ve ever had two NYEs in the space of a month, but in fact that’s not strictly true. In 1997, if memory serves, we not only had two Hogmanays but even saw the new year in twice in the same night (on about December 19th) - but that’s another story.

I was thinking we could maybe travel the world in search of cultures who celebrate New Year at other times, and see if we can get into the Guinness Book of Records for the most New Years in a year, or something? We could be like that crazy bloke somewhere in England who celebrates Christmas 365 days a year. I can see us wearing party hats all the time, shrieking ‘The bells, the bells!’ in an over-excited manner whenever midnight came and perpetually singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ while attempting to snog strangers at every opportunity, until everyone was thoroughly sick of us.

But I digress.

The main feature of the other night’s celebrations was, of course, fireworks. We needn’t have worried about not seeing any, or having to stand out in the cold to watch them – they were being set off continuously all evening, in many cases just feet from our window.

In the UK when people do fireworks in their back gardens on November 5th, it’s pretty safe, partly because the fireworks are so – well – crap, and partly because everyone has been so indoctrinated into the discipline of ‘lighting the blue touchpaper and then withdrawing’ (always sounds a bit rude to me) and keeping small children and animals at least 20 feet away at all times, that the frisson of excitement factor is generally nil.

Here they like to live on the edge. Letting off fireworks a couple of feet outside the front door of a tower block, so that the flying, burning bits (and boy did they fly) land on people’s balconies and set fire to stuff? Not a problem. The fire brigade were called, and a few people – but not many, really, considering the size of the apartment block in question, which was just across the street from us – sensibly put on their coats, evacuated the building and waited outside until they could see it was safe to return. But most, including the people in the flat ALMOST DIRECTLY ABOVE the one with the fire, stayed in and watched out of the window.

No fewer than four fire engines arrived, which seemed a little excessive in view of the fact that this scenario must surely have been being replicated a hundred times all over Harbin. Two firemen eventually appeared in the window directly above the blaze, which was about 14 floors up. The flat itself was in darkness, the residents presumably absent and unaware that their precious collection of rotting cabbages or whatever they were storing on their balcony was going up in smoke. The firemen tried to hose out the flames, but were unable to get the right angle. They therefore withdrew for a consultation of the type the Chinese do best, discussing the best course of action at length while the disaster unfolds before their eyes (heaven forbid that anyone should lose face by making a quick decision). Finally the guy from the flat opposite the one they were in (the one mentioned above who’d been watching the whole thing from his window), came out onto his balcony and poured a bucket of water over the fire beneath, extinguishing it completely.

Total time and manpower expended by the fire brigade: twenty minutes, four engines, goodness knows how many fire-fighting personnel in each, and one very long hose. Result: zero. Number of people burning to death in other parts of the city while this fiasco was taking place: unknown.

Apart from this, our chief entertainment of the evening was watching the annual CCTV Gala on telly, helpfully partially dubbed and subtitled by our friends at good old CCTV9. Traditionally, all Chinese families would gather round the TV after their New Year’s Eve meal (much like the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show in Britain in the 70s) to watch this five-hour extravaganza. Clearly many people nowadays prefer to be outside setting fire to their neighbours’ balconies and deafening unsuspecting westerners with non-stop firecracker explosions, but the Gala is bigger and better than ever nonetheless.

Words are a poor tool with which to describe this event. Sorry to hark back to the 1970s yet again, but that was the last time that we attempted a variety show to even begin to rival this. There was song, dance and, er, ‘comedy’ on a gigantic scale. The costumes were huge. The hair was huger - and more glittery, and more solid. Every performer was backed by several hundred dancers in elaborate attire chosen to reflect the theme of the song. The set had a jaw-dropping backdrop with vast pillars and a constantly changing computer graphic showing everything from swirling flowers to happy children gamboling in the fields, and even a giant dancing ginseng root for the rap song about Chinese herbal medicine. (Yes really. Choice lyrics: ‘The medicine may be bitter but the affliction is more galling’, or ‘I will write you a prescription to cure the ill caused by fawning on foreign things’.) This was performed by a pretty boy in a gold jacket and a tiny six-year-old Michael-Jackson-alike who could spin on his head.

If the singing was bad, the comedy sketches reached new heights of awfulness. Unfortunately they didn’t subtitle them fully, just gave a summary of the plot, which didn’t really illuminate why everyone was roaring with laughter or why the flippin’ thing went on for twenty minutes. We did laugh, however, when it came to the sketch which for some inexplicable reason was set in ‘an expensive Scottish restaurant’ in a remote Chinese village. (Someone should tell them there are no Scottish restaurants, even in Scotland.) I think the Scottish theme had been introduced for comedy value merely in order to get a camp waiter in a skirt on stage. This chap’s costume was basically a LONG, tartan-ish skirt, complete with white lace frill around the hem and a strange flap at the side. With this he wore a long, silky, white tunic, a tartan scarf flung rakishly around his neck, and shiny black brogues. Presumably this is how they think Scottish men dress (in their ‘stripy skirts’)!! Regrettably we never found out what was on the menu in this Scottish restaurant as that bit wasn’t translated.

In any case, by then the explosions from outside had got so loud that we couldn’t hear the telly any more. From about 11pm, if you’d phoned us you could seriously have been forgiven for thinking we were in a war zone. It was constant, and absolutely deafening. We had to shout to each other to make ourselves heard. Fortunately, as I say, this did succeed in drowning out the finale of the Gala, which consisted of a number of medleys of very scary ‘Isn’t China GREAT??!!!’ songs clearly from a previous era which shall remain nameless.

At about 1.30am, the noise had just about subsided enough for us to go to bed. They very considerately waited until 8.15am the next morning before starting again. It took us most of yesterday to recover.

Thank goodness we don’t have a dog. I just couldn’t handle the stress of a party today.

Digital killed the video star

Pause with me, my friends, for a moment’s silence to mark the passing of our old VCR, which last night passed over to that great electronics warehouse in the sky, to frolic for eternity with all the Walkmans, Betamaxes, Amstrads, reel-to-reel tape recorders and gramophones that have gone before it.

We briefly considered claiming on the insurance from the sea freight chappies who promised we could do so if they broke anything in transit, and who had clearly dropped the box in which it had travelled. But then we looked at the poor thing, which was already second-hand when I bought it in 1996 and had a label on it with a pre-01-phone number (which, sad person that I am, I know means it was made before 1991), and decided its time was probably up anyway. It’s had a huge amount of use and has endured, by my estimation, at least ten house moves, including from Edinburgh to Southampton (via Kent) and back again, plus at least a year in storage, has had paint spilled on it, had the tracking repaired at least once, and I’ve never cleaned the heads. So expecting it to survive a move to China was probably asking a bit much. If this machine were a cat, it would have reached its ninth life long ago.

The truly annoying thing was that we’d got it working. It took us two hours, trying two different TVs and several different aerial settings, but much shouting and swearing later we’d managed to figure out how to change the TV setup language to English – a major breakthrough, though not as helpful as it sounds when your instruction book and remote control are still only in Chinese – and eventually to get the video to play. It happily played all through Toy Story (which happened to be the first tape that came to hand out of the boxes) but alas when it finished and I tried to rewind to the beginning I could immediately tell something was amiss, so well did I know that VCR and its little ways.

It was groaning in obvious pain, wouldn’t rewind, wouldn’t eject. We somehow succeeded in extracting Toy Story intact and tried another tape, but this was too much and the machine breathed its last. Emergency surgery was attempted in an effort to remove the second tape but unfortunately we were unable to save mother or baby.

Which leaves us with a bit of a problem. As far as I’m aware, you can no longer buy VCRs in the UK (except second-hand) and even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to bring one back to China due to customs regulations. (Very irritatingly, it’s probably cost us about as much to get our now-broken machine into China as I paid for it in the first place.) China being slightly old-fashioned – as previously discussed – it is still possible to buy new ones here. BUT China is in a different region, video-wise-ly speaking, so we wouldn’t be able to watch any of our VHS tapes on it.

And boy do we have a lot of them. We’ve got quite a few DVDs too, obviously, but being slightly long-in-the-tooth types we still have lots of tapes which we each bought or recorded off the telly back in our respective heady youths, and somehow ‘upgrading’ these has never been top of the spending priority list. To be frank, we never look at the damn things, but in a moment of insanity we nonetheless shipped EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM out to China on the basis that there might be no TV that we could understand, so that after a year or so we might actually get bored enough to watch them.

Which brings me to the delights of CCTV9, ‘China’s only English-language channel’. Satellite TV is supposedly illegal in private homes here, though apparently you can get it if you have the right contacts (which we probably do) and many people do have it. When you stay in hotels you get movie channels, CNN, BBC World News and National Geographic like everywhere else, but at home we haven’t quite got around to sussing out the satellite thing yet. Which means we have 90 cable channels and only one we can watch – though we have passed the odd amusing quarter of an hour making up ridiculous dialogue to Chinese soaps.

So over the last few months – with most of our belongings still in transit, don’t forget; at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it – we’ve spent more time than anyone ever, EVER should, watching CCTV9.

This channel takes Boring to a level you never knew existed. The worst of it is the adverts, of which they have about six – all from the Chinese Tourist Board of various regions – repeated on a loop. We know them all, including the bloody awful plinky music, off by heart. They repeat news, current affairs and business programmes on a three hourly cycle. All of these have a Chinese nationalist bias so heavy it could send the TV crashing through the floor. The presenters speak in an array of accents you will hear nowhere else, ranging from American to tortured Chinese vowels to English public school circa 1952. There’s a sports roundup fronted by an American man who reports on football (i.e. soccer) with clearly no idea what he’s talking about, carefully enunciating words like ‘penalty’ and ‘striker’ with a fixed grin as if he’s speaking a foreign language.

They intersperse these with programmes about China which try desperately to be ‘interesting’ without ever saying anything remotely controversial. Some of these are just bizarre (‘Sports Chinese’ anyone? Yes that’s right, learning Chinese through the medium of tennis).

Our favourite, however, is a programme called ‘New Frontiers’ which is on every night at 10.30pm. The title is a mystery, as it’s about old things within China. It begins with a charming male Chinese presenter in slightly high-waisted trousers walking onto set in the dark, looking ostentatiously for his mark on the floor and then swinging to camera, before saying something like, ‘Hello. I’m Xiao Ge Jin [or whatever his name is] in Beijing.’ (Every single presenter introduces themselves this way. They are all ‘in Beijing’, so I’m unsure why they feel the need to tell us this. But anyway.)

He continues, ‘Tonight on New Frontiers, we will continue our look at the history of the three-legged copper-bottomed pot from the Shaoxing region of China. Last time, in episode 18, we saw how in the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century, the conservation of these ancient pots was encouraged by the emperors. Tonight, we will see how they began to decline in popularity’.

I’m not kidding; it’s that bad. And all this as if you’d been on tenterhooks since last night waiting to find out what would happen next. Then cut to the documentary itself, which is narrated by a New Zealand man with THE MOST BORING VOICE OF ALL TIME who recounts in minute detail every reference to these bloody pots which has ever been unearthed and repeating important events from their history just in case you missed anything. At the mid-point, we cut back to Our Graham for a quick recap, after which New Zealander starts droning on again.

And so it goes on. Every night. We’ve seen episodes about stamp collecting, Chinese chess, and the current series is about the very very long history of some dreadful Chinese opera genre. It makes the talk we had to sit through this summer in the Czech Republic about ‘the history of floating wood downstream’ (don’t ask) seem like an all-action blockbuster.

So you can see how we might get so desperate that watching the same episode of Bergerac for the 14th time, or a tape featuring a fuzzy Carry On Up the Kyber followed by Review of the Year 1997 (no really, I have this) would seem like a fun evening’s entertainment. Alas, our long-serving VCR sits inert on the lounge floor, its matte-black cover removed, its orange LCD display dimmed forever, its wires spewing forth like intestines attached to the green circuit-board which we had to snap, marking the demise of our youth. Ah, the 80s. Forget what I said last week; they’re dead & gone.

It’s time to move with the times. DVDs for Christmas please. Lots. Thanks.

A one-horse space race

In August, the entire Chinese population got very very excited about the Olympics. At the beginning of September they got pretty damned excited about the Paralympics. And now, just when you thought no further demonstrations of national excitement were possible without mass spontaneous combustion occurring, they’re getting excited all over again about China’s third-ever manned space mission, the Shengzhou 7, and first-ever spacewalk. You wait 50 years and then three come along at once.

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that they’ve launched the spaceship this year, or indeed at this particular juncture when – Tibet and melamine-flavoured milk aside – China’s image in the world is perceived as being a positive one on which they can build. There’s been a lot of talk about ‘confidence’ and ‘transparency’ – the idea being, it seems, to justify the vast amounts of money spent on such projects (each space suit alone cost $4.5 million US) on the grounds that it will attract more foreign investment to China by showing how far they’ve come as a modern nation. One commentator summed it up by saying that the reason why it has taken until now – more than forty years after the first space walk was conducted by the Soviet Union in 1965 – for China to reach this level of technological achievement was that, unlike the former USSR and America, China has not been competing with anyone to show its dominance of space. China is, he said, ‘only in a race with itself’. In which, of course, as in a one-party state, there can be only one winner.

As I’ve had nothing better to do this week, and as we’ve only got one TV channel (assuming I don’t want to sit through hours of Chinese game shows, karaoke shows and badly acted costume dramas; funny how you can tell they’re badly acted even when you can’t understand a word), over the last couple of days I’ve been following live coverage of the space mission, at least for as long as I can stand it. Having been MUCH too young to watch the moon landings this was, as far as I can recall, my first experience of live space broadcasting, and bloody hell is it boring. It was also China’s first attempt at making such a programme (they were going to do a live transmission of the last manned space launch in 2005, but wimped out at the last minute in case it blew up or something), and it showed.

Apart from amusing little touches like the fact that the rocket which launched the spaceship was called ‘Long March’ (how long can they keep milking that one?), and that the rows upon rows of technicians at the Beijing mission control base were, inexplicably, dressed in jannies’ overalls, the programme – whose intro featured suitably Star Wars-type music and graphics – made excruciating watching. Mostly, nothing was happening, but as with all live broadcasts where they’re waiting for some momentous event they tried to fill the time by discussing pointless minutiae and attempting to explain the proceedings to the uninitiated viewer. To this end, they’d invited a couple of experts – a Chinese scientist and an American academic - into the studio, where a female presenter struggled valiantly to make them say something interesting enough to fill half an hour or so.

The trouble was that the Chinese guy had clearly learnt his English from an aeronautics textbook and didn’t know any words of fewer than four syllables. She’d ask him a ditsy question like ‘So where are the astronauts sitting right now?’, and he’d drone on along the lines of ‘ah re-entry module velocity elliptical orbit component verification blah blah’ for about ten minutes in a robotic Chinese monotone, whereupon she’d titter ‘Oh ha ha, I’m getting a bit lost now, this is a bit technical for me, ha ha! Professor Lewis, maybe you can put it in simpler terms for us?’ Unfortunately, however, he couldn’t, being possessed of – if it’s possible – an EVEN MORE robotic and boring style of delivery than the first bloke. Obviously the director had just looked at these guys’ qualifications on paper and decided, ‘Yeah, they sound intelligent, let’s get them in’ – without troubling to audition them to see if they were remotely suitable for telly or should really have been left locked up in a deserted castle somewhere with lots of bubbling test-tubes and a servant called Igor.

On Day 2, the first Chinese scientist had been replaced by a second, whose command of English was sketchy and unintelligible. Professor Lewis was still there and starting to emerge as front runner. By Day 3, with Chinese scientists nos. 3 and 4 trying their luck, he had come to realise that he was the unlikely star of the show, and was warming to his role. ‘Their blood would BOIL !’, he exclaimed with glee - talking about the effects of failure to depressurise correctly - holding up his fingers like an Italian chef savouring a particularly flavoursome sauce. ‘It would cause excruciating PAIN, and possibly even KILL the astronauts!’, he added, a demonic glint in his eye.

Anyway, amidst all this, some facts which may have escaped you in the old west. All the astronauts are aged 42 and considered to be at their physical peak, which gives me hope that I’m not quite over the hill yet. Mind you, for the last two years they’ve been living in special training camps eating space-food, only being allowed home at weekends, and for the last couple of weeks haven’t been allowed home at all in case they caught a virus.

Two of them, Zhai Zhigang who did the spacewalk and his backup Liu Boming, are from Heilongjiang - where we are. Our boys in space; almost makes you proud. They didn’t say they’re from Harbin so I would imagine they’re from little one-horse towns – the equivalent of having two guys from Auchtermuchty and Ecclefechan up there. Zhai Zhigang in particular, it seems, came from a very poor family. His father was infirm and his mother made her living selling toasted sunflower seeds on the street. The story – romanticised possibly – is that when he passed the entrance exam for the army, she borrowed 15 Yuan (about £1.25) from a neighbour to buy him a briefcase, but all she had to put in it was toasted sunflower seeds, so that’s what he went off to army training camp with.

She didn’t live to see her son become a national hero.