Shanghai, part I

The last time I talked about exchange, I was very scared. Now transmute the entire anxiety of that post into an 11-hour plane ride, and you have possibly the worst flight I’d ever had. Not to sound overdramatic, but I knew it was going to be bad the moment I got on the plane. I was flying direct from Sydney to Shanghai on AirChina, and EVERYONE on the plane was Chinese. That sounds really racist and ignorant out of context, so let me qualify: I was getting these weird emotional flashbacks to my entire childhood in Singapore, where I stuck out as the only white girl in my entire school. I could feel the stares again, and it brought up this weird, deep unhappiness I hadn’t had to feel in a while. 

I worried that the flight would be a synecdoche for my entire time in China: I could hear the flight attendants addressing the passengers warmly, respectfully in Chinese, and then they’d get to me and their flow would be interrupted, forced to use awkward, stilted English. I was too shy to let them know in any way that they could speak to me in Chinese, soI was stuck in this weird limbo of my own doing. (At one point, I replied to one of the stewards in Chinese softly, and he looked reproachful).

Beyond this, I was just forced to face my anxieties about the next semester for 11 straight hours with no distraction. I listened to podcasts to try and fill up my brain with words, but it wasn’t enough: I think because there was nothing in front of my eyes to distract me. I need the two dimensions of distraction. I would writhe in my seat in mental agony, anxious too about whether I was annoying the man next to me. I could have read, but I was too anxious to reach down into my bag to get the book. I watched Ladybird, one of the only Western movies on the system, and it wasn’t as bad as I had expected it to be - it reminded me of Ghost City, a little bit. That took up a good 2 hours, but then I had four hours left. As time is in fact linearly ever-moving, the plane did eventually land in Shanghai, into the unknowns that I at least now could start to tackle and not just worry about.

Something strange happened when we landed. There were the typical oblivious rude don’t-give-a-fuck Chinese men who would take off their seatbelt and walk the aisle during decent (which would stimulate mass chirps of “先生！请坐下！” from every flight attendant - but then, as we all stood up to get out of the plane, I heard chatter around me. The man who was sitting next to me started talking to the girl who had been a couple seats behind us, getting her bag for her. She said she had moved to Melbourne, but was here to visit family. They talked about which they preferred, Sydney or Melbourne. Another man from the row across in a short-sleeved polo shirt joined in. They asked him, “aren’t you cold?” He said, “I’m used to it, but my mother made me pack a jacket. That’s why I was in Australia, to visit her, she’s getting old. She’s 94, and still very vivacious, but her hearing’s going.” The other two nodded - Chinese grandmothers are like that. This little conversation made me very happy. The myth about China-Chinese people being rude and unfriendly must be a myth! This was further confirmed in the shuttle bus from the tarmac to the terminal - men were giving up seats for mums with children, old limping ladies, all those typical things. I concluded: there must be a sense of solidarity and decency amongst Chinese people that doesn’t extend from them to non-Chinese. To be further investigated.

The airport was arduous and crowded in an almost amusing way. I went to a booth to get a Chinese SIM card, and spoke fully in Chinese for the first time the entire journey. She didn’t bat an eyelash, and put the SIM in for me and everything. That’s what I like about Asia, and what found strange about Australia when I first moved back. Everything’s so “personal space and privacy” centred in the West: what I found most strange was that it was against the rules to be friends with your teachers on Facebook, which was NOT the case in Singapore. I’ve even been to some of my teachers’ houses. And if you have an e-plane ticket on your phone in Australia, you have to scan it yourself when boarding, because the flight attendants aren’t allowed to touch your phone. Here, the lady just grabbed my phone and swapped the SIM cards without me even realising, and it’s weirdly nice and familiar. I also noticed that she’d talk to me normally, and then a random Chinese person would come up and ask her a question totally unrelated to SIM cards like “what belt is my suitcase going to be on” (very China-Chinese) and she’d go cold, stiffen her face, and answer curtly, then resume talking normally to me. It was weird, but I’m glad I witnessed that, for reasons that will become apparent later on.

In the taxi, I told him the name of my hostel just as I’d rehearsed the entire flight. It was a long, long drive, and I nearly fell asleep, but I kept remembering my mother’s horror when I’d fallen asleep on the bus in Sydney when we’d first moved over: “this isn’t Singapore! You can’t just fall asleep on the bus and think people won’t take advantage of your unconsciousness!” Whether my mum was being paranoid or not, I stayed awake. The place I stayed at was called Hanting Express, and, as in a dream, I kept seeing lit-up signs for it everywhere, even when we were still on the freeway. How many Hanting Expresses are there?

We got to my Hanting Express eventually, and it was as grungey as all the others we had driven past. The lady at the front counter was not impressed with me. She took my picture on a webcam - I had already had my picture taken two other times in my hour in China - once at immigration, and once by the SIM card lady. I stared at the wall behind the front counter, where there was a big sign stating that, as decreed by the national sanitation department, this establishment’s hygiene rating was “😐”. Same. But my booking was there, which I hadn’t been confident about (I hadn’t been confident about the validity of my plane ticket either, because I’d bought both from dodgy third-party websites), and my travel card worked, and I was given the key to room 420, haha. And finally I was here, and I had a bed to hide in. I forced myself to have a shower, put on my hellboy t-shirt for comfort, and got into bed and fell asleep trying to get instagram to load.

I woke up the next morning sad and lonely. The sense of isolation was exacerbated by the Great Firewall of China - I couldn’t use google, gmail, blogger, facebook, twitter, or instagram: I felt locked out of the world I knew. But my podcast app would work, so I put that on, and it helped with the loneliness as I figured out that I couldn’t get past the firewall because the VPN my father recommended does not, in fact, work in China, which you think either he or I would have checked beforehand, but that’s not the Panizza way! And of course, the firewall blocked all VPNs from the app store and from browsers, so I was stuck. So I put my Australian SIM card back in and used the 4G and the VPN I had (as an invisible cloak) to download a VPN that would actually work. And, hallelujah, my comfort was back.

It was at this point that I decided I should go out and explore my new neighbourhood (my hotel was on the periphery of the university). God, that was harsh: it was grey and smoky and cold, full of old people on mopeds staring at the weird tall young white girl walking around their turf in obnoxious #ootd #indie #fashion #alt #grunge clothes. Oh, I understand why you stare, but it makes me homicidal. I get lost somewhere in the Leshan district, but emerged somehow, and walked through the university, which was a much more manageable environment. At some point I acquired coffee from one of the ubiquitous Starbuck stores, and then retreated back to my room exhausted. I hid under my sheets for about an hour, and then re-emerged: this is a residential neighbourhood, I said to myself, things are more rural and backward here. You’ll love the city, it will be all modern and new and cool and no one will blink at your hair and nose. So I resolved to visit The Bund, the name of the river along which the CBD resides. I’d even start sorting shit out by getting a metro card at the train station! And so I walked to the closest station that had a Line 10. There was a handy little machine where I could buy a metro card, but it would shout robotic Chinese instructions at each step. It was so embarrassing; I felt like I was making such a scene, until a withered old man started dong the same on the next machine over and clearly didn’t give a fuck - at which point i remembered that i was in China and etiquette doesn’t mean shit; no one would think twice about the noise. Alas, it wasn’t that easy, because the machine didn’t accept cash or international cards, only Alipay or WeChatPay, neither of which I had yet because the hotel didn’t have wifi over which I could download the apps (I would later find out that the apps wouldn’t accept international cards, so I was fucked either way). I tried over and over again like Einstein’s definition of a madman, on the verge of tears. I can’t do anything right. I went over to a FamilyMart next to the machines, where the shopkeeper had stared at me loudly fail for the past fifteen minutes, to ask if I could buy a metrocard there, as humiliating as that was. Without changing expression or even turning to face me, he said “no.”, then proceeded to ignore me. I walked out, telling myself over and over in my head that it’s not me, it’s just the way it is here. It’s just what it’s like here. I eventually thought to just buy a single-trip ticket for now, and had to put my bag through a scanner like in an airport, and I was finally on the train. One stop in, a frizzy-haired short white woman wearing a purple dress down to the knees and opaque black tights sat down next to me and we spent half the train ride avoiding each others’ gaze, the other half being spent staring at each other, me in my obnoxious velvet maroon puffer jacket. Opaque tights are never a good idea.

The city was kind of cool. From what I could see, it consists of many different medium-sized shopping malls with the sort of shops I had expected of Shanghai - Boy London, Fila, those hype-beast-y things. I was mainly in search of food at this point, because I’d not eaten yet that day and it was 1pm, so I went to the basement of one of the malls and bared the stares and had 麻婆豆腐 - like spicy fermented vegetables with rice. Probably the best meal I’ve had in Shanghai so far, tbh. The name of the dish comes from the fact that the guy who originally sold the dish, 麻, had a wife (“婆”) whose face was so ugly it resembled the fermented vegetables themselves (“豆腐”). So it was mean, but delicious.

After that I sort of just roamed around, looking at the Bund and the beautiful foreign banks on its, well, banks. It was rainy and foggy.

Soon after I started back towards “home”, and lay in bed again. Unwittingly I fell asleep sometime around 4 and woke around 7 to my dad calling. It was nice to hear my parents’ voices, even though it made me more homesick. I showered and fell back asleep again, dreading having to wake up in the morning and face the university and its students.

I did wake up, unfortunately. I dressed defensively: black mock neck long sleeved top, black skinny jeans, gold hoops, hair tied in a high ponytail; and that made me feel a little better, a little more put together, a little more confident. And I got to the international student centre, where I had to register, and immediately wilted. First of all, I had never seen so many white people in one place in days, but some of them seemed to know each other already, and I felt lame and prissy. Then I was balked at for not bringing my acceptance letter, which makes no sense to me - no one told me to, so why would I bring my acceptance letter to the university that accepted me and had me in their system? One of the students in particular who was helping with the registration stared at me like i was the biggest idiot, shaking his head in disbelief, so I stared right back at him. I don’t think it did anything. 

I went down each registration stall, anxious each time that it wouldn’t work because I didn’t have this precious acceptance letter, and passing each one, tears blurring my vision. 

Then I had to pay for insurance, and it didn’t accept my card, of course, because fuck me, and thank fuck I had just enough cash. And, 2 hours later, I was done. The date I could move in was ever-changing, and different with each email I got, but the latest email had said this date, the 22nd. And after standing in front of the front desk anxiously for about 15 minutes, the guy behind me in line just straight up walked into the closed door of a manager’s office, the workers of which had seen me many times as they walked in and out. So I did the same after him, and it was like they had never seen me before! Then they said I needed to pay 100RMB as a room deposit, which was awkward, because I had just used the last of my cash on the insurance. They said there was an ATM in the canteen so, stressed out of my mind, I went into the canteen and couldn’t find no fucking ATM. I asked the security guard in there and he said, quoting directly from Chinese, “go outside and walk in a circle around the building”. So I did that, and still, no ATM. I was scared to go back into the canteen because the security guard would see me unsuccessful and think I’m an idiot. So I walked round the building a couple more times, and then eventually found the ATM in a nook inside the canteen, and I’ve never been so happy to see an ATM in all my life. Thankfully, the ATM would accept foreign cards, and I got my money, and gave it to them, and freaked out because I couldn’t find my passport, and turns out they’d left it in their scanning machine. The groundskeeper-esque man walked me to my room, and opened the door. 

It’s as I had expected, a little shabby, but I was mostly just glad to see that there was bedding as they had states. He opened the bathroom door to reveal a very tiny, run down bathroom. The shower looks prehistoric - it literally has exposed pipes and a water tank in it: 

He checked some valve on the hot water tank, nodded to himself (ooo foreshadowing), and left.

I set down my SJTU Welcome bag gingerly on the desk, and decided that I needed to eat something and have a rest before doing my diagnostic test for the School of Humanities, which I could do anytime over the course of the day. It was only about 10:30 at this point and I felt like I’d been slaughtered. I got back to the hotel at 11:30 after eating food or something, and fell asleep watching Carly & Erin youtube videos (very comforting). I woke up at 3, far later than the 1:30 I’d planned, but surprisingly I didn’t freak out too much. I went to “Lecture Building 1” back on campus and was in another busy registration situation, which I hadn’t expected. I was directed from one room to another, talking to various people who would tick a box on a form I brought around and then state the number of the next room I was to seek out. In room 207, an old man sat me at a computer and said, “you have one hour”. I suddenly had an entire Chinese exam to do. I was like fuck, okay, and did it, and kept getting flashbacks to Chinese exams in my childhood where I’d only understand half the words in a passage and get the narrative of the story entirely wrong. Once, in P3, I thought one of the passages in our mid-year exam was about ants moving ‘house’ using leaf boats. When I reviewed my exam paper weeks later with my tuition teacher at the time (oh god - I HAVE to write a blog post about Lim Lin), I found out that it was definitely NOT. It was about humans, but that’s all I gathered from her explanation, because of my attention span. Anyway, I thought I’d done really badly. I got 62, but when the old man came round and checked my score against a criteria sheet, I was placed in 高一 / Advanced 1! (It goes Elementary 1-3, Intermediate 1-3, Advanced 1-3). I was then shuttled back and forth from different rooms, eventually ending up in a textbook-selling room where the man pulled books out of random piles and said I needed to pay 150RMB. Thank god I had taken that cash out earlier. And I was done.

I decided I would put my textbooks in my dorm room so I wouldn’t have to carry them back over, and decided, you know, I have my hotel room for another night, I’m going to stay there. Which is very unlike me - I’m anxious about FOMO and socialising and all that - what if all the kids in my dorm became bffs overnight and I was left out? I was too tired to care at this point. I went back to the hotel and lay in bed blissfully, then went out and had dinner somewhere. I forced myself to wash my hair that night, because I knew that compared to my dorm bathroom, this dubious bathroom was hospital-grade sterile. That turned out to be a very smart decision.

I went to bed pretty late, taking advantage of my sense of accomplishment that would reset when I woke up. The next day, before our orientation in the afternoon, I wheeled my suitcase without a handle (thanks to my rendezvous with the escalators at the Milan airport) down Panyu Road, through campus, and into my building. I put my suitcase in the middle of the room and closed the door behind me. I was moved into university in Shanghai.