Perversity

Since the arrival of our shiny new visas, we have spent the last few days acquiring more of the trappings of permanence here. Hence I now have a bank account, a Chinese mobile phone so that I can text Peter or phone other people in China without it costing both of us a bomb, a landline on which it’s now possible to make overseas calls, and a vacuum cleaner (which has no telephonic capacity as far as I know).

You’d think that in a country where a spectacular amount of hoop-jumping is required to obtain a visa, the opening of a bank account would be a tortuous process. Indeed, we had postponed this step until our residents’ permits were in place so as not to provoke any awkward questions regarding our projected length of stay in the country. However, what you do is: you walk into the bank. They photocopy your passport. You write your name on a tiny form in a tiny tiny box (most Chinese names are only two characters long, so they have some trouble with western names which come in three or four parts!), and sign the form. They enter your name and phone number into the computer. You sign again. They give you a cashpoint card and ask you to make up a PIN.

And, er, that’s it. Nobody asked about our jobs, income, ages, or how long we’d been at this or our previous 17 addresses. Nobody appeared to care whether we were laundering vast sums of money for a rogue nation or didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. Nobody tried to sell us a mortgage, a pension or the services of an independent financial adviser. We didn’t have to complete a form the size of a small novel. There was no ‘Your cheque book will take 7 working days and your card another 14 working days after that, and then you might get your PIN and actually be able to use your account sometime in the next month’. We didn’t even have to pay any money in.

Buying the mobile phone – and even the vacuum cleaner – was more complicated and required the divulgence of more personal information than this.

Something is very wrong somewhere.

One other thing. The heating has finally come on. It will now stay on, 24/7, until about March I should think. Maybe April. And guess what? It’s TOO DARN HOT IN HERE NOW.

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.

Fa piao

Above is the only word of Chinese I have used so far. It’s the first one I learnt, and is still the only one that Peter’s boss knows after nearly a year in China. What could be SO important?, you may ask. It doesn’t mean ‘Hello’ or ‘Thank you’, though I can just about manage both of those as well. It doesn’t mean ‘Toilet’, or even ‘Beer’, which are the two words we always say anyone should learn (preferably as a pair!) in any language.

No, prosaically enough it means ‘receipt’. But not just any old receipt. The little scrap of paper printed in purple ink which is spewed out by your Chinese cash register, just like any other the world over, is not a fa piao. Oh dear me no. A fa piao is a special receipt or tax invoice which is issued separately from the basic receipt, and is required for claiming anything back on expenses, which means that we need one for every hotel, every flight, every meal in a restaurant, every trip to the supermarket – be it for a monthly stock-up or just for a pint of milk (not that you can get a pint of milk, but that’s another story) – every household appliance, kitchen utensil, book, essential item of clothing, probably non-essential item of clothing, and so on. Fa piao, fa piao, fa piao.

Here’s how my first attempt at obtaining one went. Last Friday I popped into the supermarket near the hotel in Harbin. Having ridden the storm of Chinese shop staff pestering you with their incessant sales pitch and refusing to be deterred even when you make it clear you have no idea what they’re talking about, which happens whenever you go shopping, I took my goods to the checkout and as she handed me the receipt, bracing myself, I ventured, ‘Fa piao?’

She said something and gesticulated in the direction of the exit. I’d been expecting this, as I knew that it would be issued at some kind of customer service desk, so I smiled, nodded and headed that way. At the exit into the main shopping mall, a bored-looking girl was checking and stamping – well, glancing at and stamping – everyone’s till receipt as they left the shop. ‘Fa piao?’ I tried again, a little less sure of myself. Without looking up she waved her hand further on, and eventually, about 100 yards outside the shop proper, was a desk proudly proclaiming ‘ISSUE TAX INVOICE’ in English, along with a lot of Chinese stuff.

A staff of three girls in red polo shirts were behind the desk, and a lone female customer sat on one of a row of red plastic stools in front of it. Confident I was in the right place this time, I approached the desk and offered my till receipt. ‘Fa piao?’ I repeated once more.

‘Blah blah blah blah fa piao blah-blah blah blah. Blah!’ she replied in some agitation, shaking her head and gesticulating animatedly.

I couldn’t see how this could possibly be the case. As supporting evidence I pointed to the ‘ISSUE TAX INVOICE’ sign above my head with an expression of some affront. ‘Blah blah! Blah blah blah-blah blah. Blah-blah. Blah blah blah!’, she insisted.

‘Sorry, I don’t understand’, I said, feeling like a fool. All four of them were staring at me now. The three girls looked at each other and laughed. ‘English?’ I asked hopefully, although for some reason I found myself pronouncing it ‘eengleesh?’, as though me sounding foreign would somehow help us to understand one another. More looks and more laughter. Laughter in China, I tried to remind myself, is often used to cover social embarrassment and doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re hilarious. Though in this case it may have done. Eventually the lady sitting at the counter came to my rescue. ‘You can take this’ (indicating my receipt) ‘and come back in two days’, she said. Without waiting to try and find out why, I said ‘Ok’ and scuttled off.

At the weekend, Peter went to the same supermarket for more stuff, and came back announcing that fa piao’s were only issued on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I have no idea how he found this out, but on Monday morning I duly presented myself and my two receipts at the fa piao counter. Monday morning was clearly peak fa piao hour. There was a queue, headed by a lady with what looked like her entire extended family in tow and a giant wad of receipts, which the red-shirt girls were arguing with her and each other over, whilst jabbing at a calculator and attempting to convert them into multiple fa piao’s.

I sat on one of the stools and waited. Impatience in China, I intoned inwardly, quoting one of our guide books, is seen as a serious character flaw – though in fact this doesn’t seem to apply to queue-jumping which is more of an Olympic sport, and one at which they excel. The enforced delay enabled me to check out a sign listing the other services offered at the desk, which included ‘Umbrella service on raining days’, ‘Give straws small spoons, toilet papers’, and ‘Filling with air the bicycle wheels’. I also observed the fa piao issue procedure, which involved adding up the receipts and filling in the details in a small triplicate book. This book had no perforations so they sliced each page out with a razor blade, carefully cutting around different sections on the stub according to some unknown criterion, and then finally used the razor blade again to slice off the bottom centimetre of the till receipts showing the totals, and stapled these to their copy of the fa piao. Nothing to it, I thought. I can handle this.

I did notice that the customers appeared to be telling them what to write and that they were asking a lot of questions, but thought maybe these people had special requirements or that they were just chatting. However, when it finally came to my turn (which wasn’t before extended family lady had left, come back again and leaned over my right shoulder to rant loudly for a full five minutes) she asked me a question. I looked blank, so she turned over the receipt, wrote something on the back in Chinese characters and looked at me expectantly. I shook my head again, she gave up and went on the the next person (a guy on my left who’d been desperate to push in front of me the whole time). I waited a minute, saw she had no intention of pursuing my case and then left.

Peter, at lunch: ‘Oh, they just want to know who to make it out to.’ (How does he KNOW this stuff?). ‘Here, take my business card. Give them this company name. It’ll be fine.’ ‘Are you sure that’s all they need?’, I say. ‘Oh yes, definitely’, he says.

So, fa piao, Take Three. Monday afternoon. I return to the desk. Smaller queue. Girl who tried to serve me in the morning goes past, smiles at me. I wave the business card with a knowing look. She smiles again. Guy with the girls behind the desk this time, who seems to want to take charge. ‘Blah blah fa piao blah-blah?’ he enquires on seeing me. I nod. He nods and indicates the queue. I nod again. So far so good. I wait. Again.

Alas, however, the magic business card seems to cause no end of confusion. Whether this is due to the fact that it’s a company they’ve never heard of, or the illegibility (to a Chinese person) of the acronym-style logo, or what, is unclear, but the girl runs off into the back office with it, gets all three of them looking at it; they turn it over and over, looking at both the Chinese and English sides; lots of animated discussion. I keep trying to explain, but the girls seem determined not to understand, and the guy keeps writing long screeds of Chinese on a piece of paper, finishing with a question mark, and then pushing it towards me with an enquiring look. For goodness sake, I want to say, I’m foreign, not deaf – how is you writing it down supposed to help?

Finally he takes the card and writes some version of the company name on the fa piao. He gets the calculator and tots up my receipts. Great, I think, hallelujah, we’re there. But no. He asks me something else. I shake my head. He goes through the ‘writing it down’ pantomime again. Exasperated, I say in English, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t read Chinese!’ This results in him getting his mobile out and calling Management. The conversation was, obviously, all in Chinese but was utterly comprehensible.

Fa piao guy: Sorry, boss, we got a bit of a situation down here. Idiotic foreign woman wants a fa piao but we can’t get any information out of her.
Boss (on phone): How much is it for?
FPG: Not much, about 300 yuan [about 25 quid]. Tracey here says it’s the second time she’s been in today. Doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. Bloody ridiculous. Thing is, she’s holding up the queue and we wouldn’t want anyone getting impatient for a minute, now would we?
Boss: Well it’s not worth losing sleep over, Dave. Just give her the damn fa piao and get rid of her.

So they did. I suspect all of us are traumatised by the experience.

One Week in China

Welcome, folks, to the inaugural posting on my China blog. Wonderful wonderful technology allows me to bring this to you with -hopefully - no interference from government internet censors (the ‘Great Firewall of China’ of which you may have heard tell). I hope over the next couple of years to keep you all updated regularly with developments and observations on this truly bizarre new life of ours. Please feel free to pass on the link to anyone I’ve missed but who you think might be interested (within reason!).

Peter came out a week before me as you know, and had a chance to go to our home-town-to-be, Harbin, to look at a couple of flats, on which more below. His initial stay there was remarkable mostly for the novel definition of ‘room service’ embraced by a certain French hotel chain which shall remain anonymous. On his first afternoon he was just trying to take a nap when the phone rang in his room. A woman was whispering something in Chinese. For some reason he got the impression that it was the wifie who had cleaned his room that morning who was worried he might be unhappy about something. She kept saying ‘Rooma rooma {incomprehensible Chinese word} one, two – yes, no?’ After several minutes of What? and Sorry? and repeating ‘Don’t understand’ in Chinese, he hung up. A couple of minutes later the phone rang again and after going through the same non-conversation a second time, he finally said ‘Room hao’ (good) to express that he was quite happy with it, thank you very much.

The next thing he knew, the room doorbell went and there was a small woman outside with large sunglasses on. She marched in, deposited a carrier bag on the floor, turned round and repeated the ‘Rooma {Chinese} one two yes? mantra but this time she made a massage type action with her fingers. He said ‘Ah - no thanks’, shook his head and went back towards the door - but she wasn’t taking that for an answer. Pointing at his willy she said the Chinese word again. He said ‘NO!’ but as he headed for the door she made a lunge for his privates. He opened the door, grabbed her hand an inch from his bits and pushed her out. She skipped back for her carrier bag and beat it immediately. When he reported this encounter to his interpreter the next day, the lad nearly wet himself laughing. ‘She wasn’t saying “rooma” she was saying “woman”’, he said. ‘She wanted to know if you wanted one woman or two, and when you said ‘room good’ that was an invitation to go ahead!’ Peter asked him if this was common and he said ‘Oh yes – all the hotels have an arrangement with locals to make sure every need is satisfied. Many people require this service’!! What would Basil Fawlty have made of it all, I wonder?

Having escaped with his virtue intact, it was back to Shanghai to meet me off the plane and begin the tiresome task of applying for our residency permits etc. The first requirement for this was to undergo the ‘Aliens Exit-Entry’ medical (something painful involving Sigourney Weaver surely?). This is essentially a ridiculous production line designed to ‘process’ as many ‘aliens’ as they can in the shortest possible time. They get through probably 40-50 patients an hour, chiefly by having a clutch of nurses running up and down the corridor barking orders at you: ‘Go in there! Take off shoes! Lie on bed! Breathe! Hold breath! Again! Finish! Now wait outside room 206! Next!’ It was probably just as well I was in a jet-lagged haze, having been forced to endure this less than 24 hours after landing. Perhaps Peter’s Harbin hotel friend intended to conduct her business in a similar fashion? Anyway I can only assume it’s been designed purely as a money-spinner, as the relevance of most of the tests escapes me. A blood test for AIDS and TB I can understand but honestly, an eye test? Peering in the ears? Poking my stomach for 20 seconds, a quick ECG and an ultrasound of my liver and kidneys? How exactly do these determine whether I should be allowed to stay in China or not?

Peter had already had his medical before I arrived and his results happily came back as ‘Normal’ - “Even my liver!” he announced with some surprise. (No one can tell us what happens if your results are not Normal. They certainly don’t treat you, and may indeed ship you home, possibly dumping you overboard into Japanese waters as they go.) Unfortunately though, even the Normal are subject to the whims of the Chinese authorities who have decided, it now transpires, to change the rules so that Peter will have to fly to Hong Kong or possibly even back to the UK to get his visa sorted. By spectacularly bad timing our arrival has coincided with ongoing Olympics-induced visa paranoia, so we remain somewhat in limbo at the moment.

Apart from that our stay in Shanghai was unremarkable, owing to the fact that I’m still waking up at 4.30am every night so I’m permanently too tired to go out unless I have to. I have no idea why 4.30am, as that’s 9.30pm UK time, but that’s jetlag for you. My Dad never believed jetlag existed (then again, he never believed stereo existed either) and I so wish he was around for me to set him straight.

Anyway, due to this it was somewhat reluctantly that I flew up to Harbin with Peter on Wednesday so that I could see our new flat. A couple of pictures above. It’s the most extraordinary place I’ve ever seen, with décor like something out of a 1960s sci-fi film and a whole host of gadgets, including an all-singing all-dancing shower complete with lights, massage jets and sound system, of which the owner guy was immensely proud. It’s got 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a central air-con unit and under-floor heating throughout. The contract should hopefully be signed today, and with any luck it’ll be available for us to move our stuff into within a few days – if not ourselves, as we have to go back to Shanghai next week to sort things out, so it’s a couple more weeks in hotels unfortunately.

Our goods which we sent out by air freight have arrived and look very strange and surreal sitting in the corner of Peter’s office. The rest of the stuff (19 boxes thereof!) will take about 3 months by sea, so we took the precaution of flying out our winter clothes, as it’ll be below zero in Harbin by mid-November. It’s still in the mid-high 20s here now (not counting this afternoon’s sudden torrential storm), but public buildings have had their air-con switched off as of 1st Sept as it is now officially ‘cold’, having been up into the high 30s in July & August. Then in winter it’s minus 15 by day, minus 30 by night. Actual proper seasons; that’ll take some getting used to.

Peter’s job is going well and they are busy building the team for the new business. All are apparently very impressed with his couple of sentences of Chinese. Getting lost walking back to the hotel and a trip to the supermarket on my own have almost been enough to shock me out of my denial with regard to learning the language. If I can at least master ‘I don’t speak Chinese’ it’ll be an advantage!

Before you go, scroll back to the top to check out a couple of the spectacular photos which Peter managed to take from the plane over, we think, Mongolia at dawn.

Keep us posted on all the news from home.

Love
M&P