I fell asleep around midnight, not knowing how to feel about class starting the next day.
I should have felt goddamn stressed, that’s how I should have felt. Not exactly because of class, which was due to start at 1, but - ok. So, I decided that that morning would be a good time to try and open a Chinese bank account. I didn’t even know what bank or where, but I went out walking round the periphery of the campus and very conveniently found a very ornately-carved exterior of a BIG ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China). So i walked in, and said what I’d rehearsed “I’m an exchange student, I’d like to open an account”, not even knowing if they’d know what to do with me. But, as I should have expected, they probably have tonnes of kids like me every day, so I was put in the right place right away. I saw two other white girls ahead of me, also waiting for the same purpose. They were called pretty quickly, and they went up together (? were they opening up a joint bank account?). They brought out those fucking admission letters again. I swear, I’m going to be getting on the plane at the end of this semester to go back to Australia and they’re gonna ask for my university admission letter. In fact, I might get home and find my parents have changed the locks and are waiting behind the door to ask for my admission letter before welcoming me back into the house.
It was about 9:45am at this point. Plenty of time. I just caught up on my instagram feed while listening to a podcast. It got to about 10:30 before the girls even started to gather their stuff, and they really only finished up at 11. I still had plenty of time, I think. Then it was my turn, and the lady was nice, but it was kinda awkward because she talked to me in English, and it was hard to communicate properly, but, as is a common theme in this series, I was too shy to let her know I speak Chinese, so we were in this awkward half-communication state. She didn’t need my admission letter, amazingly, because I provided my SJTU student card. I signed many, many papers, and entered many, many different pin numbers. At certain points, the lady would just take out her phone and start looking at pictures of lipstick? I also started to get more and more anxious, as it was getting closer and closer to time for my class, and I still hadn’t eaten or done anything remotely to prepare for class. Nervous Breakdown in a Chinese Bank - romantic name. Anyway. Every time I thought we were done, something new would pop up. She was like, “ok, now you have to download the ICBC bank app.” At this point my phone was on 8% because I’d used it for an hour straight earlier (iphones smh), and my 4g wasn’t working because we were in some sort of black hole. So we were just sitting there, watching the wedge of download progress on the app stay at a solid 5%. I said, “can I just do this part at home?” and she said no. She told me to go out into the lobby to load money onto my new card, and that the cell service should be better there. She was right, of course, and I couldn’t believe it was working, and that my phone had stayed at 8% for like half an hour straight. I thought this was the point at which we would be done, but she was like, no, let me put your bank details in WeChat, which was actually very nice of her, because it involved setting the country of use as Poland (?) which, you know - I’m not even gonna ask. Again, she took my phone and did it for me, which would never have happened in Australia. It felt intimate, and I think there was even warmth in her smile when she said, “it is over.” (she meant “we’re all done”) and I said goodbye, thank you, and she said no need to thank me.
It was past 12 at this point, and my class started at 12:30, so I had to very quickly find food before class (the anorexic voice in my head, as I typing this, is chastising me for acting like I needed to eat, when lots of people would just go without having eaten that day, and just eaten at past 5… But I’ll try not to listen to it). I went to the university cafe, and it was really crowded, so I just sat opposite this girl with a very big coffee looking through her textbooks. I had a feeling, for some reason, that she was in my exact class out of the hundreds on, and that is was going to be really awkward later when we walked to the same building, and then the same room. I was very incredulous about the fact that she was already looking through the class material. Why so gung ho? So I sat opposite her all messy and disorganised just on my phone, feeling like she was judging me, probably because I was also judging her. She left before me, which is good, because otherwise we basically could have held hands walking to class. I found my lecture building and found my classroom - another thing that’s great about here - they assign floor names LOGICALLY! The “”””ground”””” floor is accurately called the FIRST floor. Sorry for the digression, but yes, the girl was in my fucking class. We made eye contact. For the first time, we smiled at each other, and I sat in front of her, sort of to the side. I looked around at the people in my class; it was interesting demographically. I had expected it all to be white exchange students my age, but no, there were lots of Korean, Japanese, even Chinese people, and I’m probably the youngest in the class, most of the others being probably 24, 25, and the ages going up to about 40. There’s a guy in that class called Oscar who reminds me of a dude I work with back in Canberra called Matt, which means i didn’t have a great first impression of him, but he’s actually alright.
God, I’m a BITCH aren’t I? I’m having a moment, lying here in bed typing this, where the performative histrionics of social media and the fantasies I distract myself from reality with have all fallen at my feet, and I’m realising that I’m all alone, in China, a sad scared little girl. And by sad, I mean pathetic. Who the fuck do I think I am, prancing around the world with my obnoxiously high ponytail swinging, expecting things to suit me? I’m tired.
Putting that all aside, class went well. The teacher for this class, my creative writing class, looked really strict and scary, but once class started and she began to talk, she turned out to actually be really sweet. I like this class a lot - this week, our second lesson, we studied the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Chinese, and replicated (lol so Chinese) the techniques that make it legendary, particularly, the stitching together of three temporalities. I nearly combusted at my desk, I was so happy.
We have a little break after two hours, and I knew what I had to do. I turned around and asked Inga for her name. Her name’s Inga. She’s from Russia. She had mentioned this during the class, which formed part of my motivation to acquaint with her - I don’t know why but I think Russians are really cool. It’s probably that enigmatic element Russia has. We started talking, and we started talking to the man sitting next to Inga too, a Japanese man studying Chinese because he intends to begin a tourist accommodation business back in Tokyo. I was overjoyed at this flowing conversation (wow even my English sentences are getting more Chinese), but, luckily, it was artificially terminated by the end of our break.
The classes are long, but they’re getting easier to get through - I hardly ever look at the clock now. This first lesson, though I was enjoying it, went really slow. I was getting these nostalgic flashbacks to Chinese classes in Singapore, and even the Chinese lessons I’d have in the literal backroom of the school library in Australia. The pinyin underneath, the meaning on top, sometimes the other way round. The haphazardly placed accents. Eventually, the time ticked over (Lim Lin vibes) and I was done with the first class of the semester. This day in particular was very significant to me, because I’d been feeling lost in China so far, and this was the day that would dictate what my regular, structured life here would look like. And I was pleased. I liked my timetable (12:30-4:30 every day) - I could do my own thing in the morning, go to class, get back home and chill for a couple hours, then go out and find dinner, then do homework or read or whatever at night (see how I plan, always, being on my own? Does this say something about how I am inherently, or about what my life is like usually?) I got home, exhausted but triumphantly ecstatic. I called mum and talked to her from my bed.
The rest of the night was pretty normal, but now I’ll mention something I haven’t talked about here yet. See - my shower, grungey as it is already, had no hot water. It has that water tank/heater thing above, but it didn’t work automatically, and any combination of switches I flicked and plugs I re-plugged would make it work. Now, as I have beaten into you to death, I am socially anxious, and hadn’t yet mustered up the courage to talk to the handyman/manager of the building. It hadn’t been much of a problem as of yet because I’d only essentially only been there one night, so just skipped showering the night before - not like my depression was complaining lol. But I somehow forced myself to have a very cold shower that night, and also had the pleasure of discovering that for some reason, despite the use of a shower curtain and a ledge at the entrance of the shower (God i’m sorry this is so boring), showers would flood my bathroom. Like, an actual inch of water all over. Which is distressing, because it already wasn’t the cleanest, so this just meant dirty water everywhere. I also had nothing like a mop or even a bucket, so couldn’t really do anything about it. My solution was just to open the little bathroom window really wide and shut the door, hoping that the air flow would let the water evaporate (spoiler alert: it took four days for this evaporation to happen, by which time I had finally been able to buy a mop). So, yes, I had a cold, natural-disaster-inducing shower, then blasted the heater to warm up and just spent the rest of the night writing up my course outlines for the College of Science back at ANU.
The next morning (these before-class mornings would, for a long while, be dedicated to problem-solving), I finally got the courage to knock on the handyman’s door. Another woman who works there came up too. They seemed almost excited - what a mystery! The man was intrigued, but unperturbed, by the presence of a new body of water on the bathroom floor, and waded through. He also fished out two full bottles of water from the toilet canister (?), and toyed with the water heater. He didn’t seem familiar with it. The woman stood back, taking photos of him with her phone. Eventually, he did something for two switches to light up orange and red. Him and the woman both gasped excitedly. He turned to me and said “give it five minutes, and you should have hot water.” I thanked him profusely, thrilled, and the two of them left. Look at me go! Solving shit, getting shit done! I wasn’t going to have a shower till that night, so I just let it be.
It was somewhere around this point in time that I realised my day-old Chinese bank card was missing. That’s right, folks - I had managed to lose my card within 24 hours. I searched everywhere, but I knew it must have fallen out. This wasn’t too big a problem for a bit, because I had cash and a balance on WeChat that could last me a couple days, but I was still very annoyed - one step forward, one step back. I went out to try and find a mop and some other things that I needed, but I couldn’t find any at the supermarket - once again I just felt locked out of a world everyone else was part of. Autism, times two. Defeated, I went to class. There, I met an Australian boy! Meeting Australians isn’t exactly my top priority on exchange in China, but it was cool nevertheless, and nice that I could talk about uni specifically to someone. He was impressed that I was managing to credit this as electives for my Science degree - he said Monash would never allow such a thing. I said, yeah, ANU’s pretty relaxed like that - we’re allowed to do whatever combination of double degree we want, for example.
That day’s Chinese lesson was hard, and it didn’t help that the Australian boy (who told me he was hungover - classic Aussie uni boy) sharing my textbook next to me was very good, and knew how to pronounce all these random Chinese characters I’d never seen before in my life (he’d lived a few years in Hong Kong). But it was very much a flashback to like, reading 西游记 (Journey to the West) and having to stop every second word because I didn’t know how to pronounce it (let alone understand). We learnt so many new words they all became meaningless. That class was exhausting. What happened that night? I think I just sulked about how everything wasn’t working. I’ll find my sulky insta caption. Also, I tried to have a shower and realised that the hot water was not, in fact, working, nor were those lights of before still lit, nor could I get them to light up. So it was in fact two steps forward, two steps back. Three if you count the flooding. I think I just whined to Lachie and insta and went to bed all emo that night.
The next morning I went to the bank bright and early to get a new card. Actually, I woke up early but not bright, because I discovered that my room no longer had electricity. I knew there was some procedure I had to go through where I pay for electricity by putting money on my student card and then used some strange machine to top up my balance? But I decided that was something to deal with later, the important think now being my bank card. I knew, at least, that i wouldn’t have to see the same lady I’d gotten the card from literally 48 hours earlier, because she’d said on the phone to her friend that she was going to BeiJing. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait at all this time, and, when I told the new woman that I’d lost my card, she said, “did you get it here on the 25th?” I nodded, not actually having any conception of when the 25th of February was. She said, “yes, you left you bank card here. Let me go get it.” As she left, I realised that i had, in fact, received by card on the 25th, it now being the 27th. So I wouldn’t have to get a completely new card! I wouldn’t have to redo all the WeChat and ICBC bank app stuff! I was so relieved. It took a surprising amount of paperwork, but I got it back, and loaded more money on it. I also tried to work the electricity machine thing near the canteen, and it was fucking HIEROGLYPHIC. I had to enter a 6-digit pin, which I assumed was the PIN I’d set for the school website, and then this screen came up with a timer for 60 seconds and to enter my 10-digit code, with a 7-step instruction manual in very niche Chinese on how to figure out what your code is. It was like: the first number is your campus, the next three numbers are your building, the next few numbers were your room number BUT you had to add numbers to it? And then all this other random stuff. I kept having to re-enter my details and get back to the page because I would run out of time, and eventually it just locked me out for too many failed attempts. I said fuck it, I don’t really have to worry till sundown.
I had arranged to meet Håkon for coffee before we both had class - even though he’s actually just writing his master’s thesis, he’d signed up for an introductory Chinese class that was on on Wednesday afternoons. I met him at 11:30 and we went to this uni cafe that served absolute BOWLS of coffee, and he produced a chocolate croissant for each of us. I was in a pretty good mood, because of the whole getting my bank card back thing, and because my timetable said that my class for the day was “Audio-Visual”, which someone had said was watching Chinese movies. What a day! But we walked to our building together, and I walked into my classroom and sat next to Inga. We were a little early, so I checked my ANU email, only to find an email from ANU Science Outbound programs, saying that the courses I’d outlined could not be counted as electives because they didn’t match any electives on the science courses list. Now this is my fault, because I’d always just assume you could do any course as an elective, hence the name, and had never encountered any information that says otherwise. But I’d emailed them before I’d even left for China telling them what I was planning to do, and they hadn’t said anything. I was in full panic mode at this moment, and class had just started. I felt like I was going to throw up. I used my phone under the table (Inga must have been judging me) to look up science courses offered by SJTU, and they were either at the wrong campus, or taught in Chinese, which I couldn’t do because I hadn’t taken the HSK. I’m going to have to move to the Minhang campus, I thought. I’m going to have to take the HSK and then start all the courses like a month late, I thought. I was about to walk out of the class - which, by the way, turned out NOT to be a movie - because what was the point? I wasn’t supposed to be doing it, and I couldn’t concentrate anyway. But I somehow managed to calm myself down, and oriented myself in the progression of the lesson and caught up in my head. I started to relax, and calm down, and cheer up. I’m enjoying the courses I’m doing. I can’t really change them. So either I email and get it all solved, or these courses won’t count, and this is just a lil semester off improving my second language and living in another country, and I’ll just be doing an extra semester of uni. Finishing halfway through next year. Or taking it slower and figuring out what I want to do, where I want to live, after undergrad.
As a combination of both this sudden crush of panic, and the boring structure of the class, that lesson lasted a very long time. But eventually I was free, and I legged it back to the electricity machine, because there was only an hour left till sunset. I managed to figure out my 10-digit code, but it kept telling me my passcode was wrong. I turned to a guy waiting in line behind me and said, “have you used this thing before?” He answered in a very American accent, “yes, I have, last night” and tried to help me out. He can’t speak Chinese, so I can’t imagine HOW hard it would have been for him. Apparently he had called his “Life Guide”, because he’s a Masters exchange student, and apparently only Masters exchange students get this privilege? He eventually figured out that what was wrong was that the passcode I was putting in was wrong - it was meant to be the last 6 digits of my student ID’s card number, which??? I don’t know how anyone’s supposed to know that??? And then the money on my student card wouldn’t show up, because apparently you have to go to a re-purposed weighing scale machine at one of the food stalls in the canteen and put your card there, where it will validate the money you put in in AliPay. Again, how the fuck is anyone meant to know this??? They didn’t tell us anything about this at the orientation????? They just talked to us about drugs and visas and where to get food on the wrong campus. The fuck. The guy I’d now made friends with (his name is Isaac) said he was planning on writing a manual for future students from his home uni who would go exchange here, which - lucky them. ANYWAY, I finally, finally, did everything right, and managed to top up my electricity balance, which was in the negatives, because the previous occupant hadn’t paid before leaving, and apparently the electricity guy came back from holiday last night and turned off the electricity of every room with a <0 balance. At this point though, I was had too much of an adrenaline rush from finally getting it right to care about being annoyed. I thanked Isaac, we added each other on WeChat, and we went back to our rooms. I called mum to relay the whole fiasco to her, in the dark of my room because the electricity still hadn’t caught up. (It turned on halfway through the phone call). I also told her about the elective credit course counting problem, and, for context, my mum is a uni professor, so she has a very lax view on uni. She calls undergrad a “glorified baby-sitting service” (so think about that the next time you’re stressed about an assignment or exam or whatever). She wasn’t too concerned, and said eh if you do an extra semester you do an extra semester, everyone does, and also if you email the right person they might be able to figure something out because most uni admin people are idiots (her words, not mine). So that was comforting, even though, 2 weeks later, I STILL haven’t replied to that earth-shattering email because I’m scared lol.
Another cold shower.
Class the next day was quite fun. Our teacher is quite funny, and he wore a hoodie and a scarf together, and his face reminds me of Irene, and I think he might be gay, but he has kids. In the break, I started talking to a girl from Italy, Sardegna to be exact, called Carola. At one point, indelicately, I said, “I know a man from Sardegna. He's an idiot.” She found it funny, thank God, and I suppose that had been my intention. Was I… making friends?
The next day, our strange teacher with a serious combover gave us the last hour of class to talk about some set topics in assigned groups. My assigned group was me, Carola, a girl from Columbia called Marianna, and a married Japanese woman whose name I only know in Chinese, but which applies in Japanese as well if I’m not wrong - 鸟田和。We exhausted the assigned topics within minutes, and so just began to talk about whatever. Now they’d all been in China for much longer than I, at least a semester, and were talking about places to go and shopping centres nearby, and it gave me a lot of optimism and hope. I don’t know, they just all seemed so comfortable here, and I thought, maybe I’ll be like that, too, soon. I 决定-ed (wow my English is getting REALLY Chinese okay how do I say this in English with the same connotation. I verdicted? I decided? I resolved.) to go to one of the shopping centres 鸟田 was talking about, which she said, “有一些比较对年轻人有兴趣的商店“ （”has a few shops that youths are interested in”), mostly because there was a MUJI there and we had to buy our essay-writing pens from MUJI. (Yes, really.) I left class that day hopeful, thinking about Carola’s cat, which she’d stolen-rescued from a woman selling the motherless litter in a cage in the rain on the street in Xi An.
Well, spoiler alert but going to Metro City was a fucking ordeal and a half. The shopping centre itself, which turned out to be really, sneakily close to the uni, was a giant glass ball. It was crowded as fuck, especially in the underpasses that connected all the shopping centres together with the train station. My podcasts wouldn’t play, so I had nothing to soothe me. I went in a few of the clothes shops and they were pretty cool, albeit very Chinese/Japanese fashion-esque, but was too anxious to concentrate. I’ll look properly another time, a weekday - how stupid of me to have tried to go on a weekend. I found MUJI after much searching, got what I needed, and then retreated to campus, to my room, to my bed. (Next Shanghai post, you’ll see that I did not learn from this lesson of mine the following weekend.) I fell asleep and woke up when it was already dark, feeling guilty as hell. I had a WeChat message from Håkon asking if I wanted to go drink. I was scared and sad, so I made up some excuse and arranged to hang out the next day instead. I bought 煎饼 for dinner (a street food - Chinese pancake used as a wrap with meat and vegetables inside), ate it feeling like a loser, and wrote my essay like a loser. It was about midnight at this point, and I went back to sleep. Like a loser.
I met Håkon for lunch the next day, and we stayed talking for like 4 hours. He told me about what it was like doing national service in the fucking winter forest in Norway, which made me very glad girls don’t have to serve NS in Singapore. It was nice, but exhausting for me, and I got very sad after that, also because I felt like I wasn’t doing too well with the whole socialising / making friends thing - Håkon had gone out the past two nights.
That was my first week of university in China. The weeks are going fast, which I can’t say I’m devastated about, because the semester ahead seems very long. I’ll now add little parts that didn’t fit in with the narrative elsewhere.
Somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday, I discovered the beauty that is Taobao. I ordered a mat for like $6AUD including delivery and a mop (for bathroom de-flooding purposes) for like $3. They came within a day or two, and I got a message on the app with a code. I went to this little part of the university campus that had many blue “CaiNiao” lockers. I scanned my QR code, entered the code I was given, and a door popped open with my stuff in it. The next day, I had a genius thought: Taobao has everything - could it have things that I’ve wanted to buy that you can’t get in Australia, even online. I looked, and was pleased. I bought a Brandy Melville skirt that I’ve been wanting:
Brandy Melville is being being mass-resold (I suspect from a girl with access to the Hong Kong outlet). Same with Glossier, which like, no explanation needed. The Glossier stuff hasn’t come yet, but I am excited. What a genius thing Taobao, which could only work in a place like China with its combination of technological organisation and structural/socio-political disorganisation. I’m talking about the combination of technology used like QR payments, mass app storefronts, automated parcel lockers, with a very low wage (for delivery drivers on their scooters etc) and unregulated traffic and post. Speaking of this low wage suspiciousness - I used 饿了么 for the first time the other night. It’s a food delivery app, like ubereats but less partnered, which means you can get food from pretty much any shop; it’s not a limited selection like on UberEats. You see men in blue jackets - yes, the same blue as CaiNiao - whether connected I don’t know) in every restaurant you go to, waiting for the food they’re delivering,; you see them on their scooters on the streets blatantly disregarding traffic lights, with blue boxes behind them. I guess a good comparison would be the PostMates app in America. My delivery fee (which is proportional to distance travelled) was 0.3 Yuan, which is 6 AUSTRALIAN CENTS. Which of course brings up wage questions. Still, that’s unbelievably cheap, on top of the already cheap cost of food here, which reminds me of certain places in Singapore.
The next Monday before class, I went to sign up for the gym I’d seen nearby. They were amazed that I could speak Chinese, in a way I’d not seen in Shanghai yet, where it’s kinda normal for white people to speak. It was kind of an uncomfortable experience. I had already gotten a lot of stares and comments from strangers on my walk over because I was wearing a skirt and no tights (it was a warmer day).
But then at the gym, all the trainers were boys apart from one “T” girl (
)who was rolling up towels, and nice. Her name was Shadow. The other trainers had the names like Time, and Eric. They were kind of joking amongst themselves in like a “ooh check out this young white chick” way, also asking me if I was cold. Which. Fuck off. No. Is your face cold? Anyway, it was kind of uncomfortable, but productive, and then right at the end as they were scanning my passport (they want your passport for EVERYTHING here in China), another trainer called Mars came up and asked to add me on WeChat. I was kinda sus but figured it was for the gym, but then we kept talking to me about doing a “body fitness check” type thing where they measure your muscle composition and fat percentage etc, which a) sounds creepy, and b) isn’t the best thing to do when you have an ED, c) I already know, because I have an ED lol. My fat percentage stays around 21% and my BMI is around 21. (Which horrifies me, but whatever.) So I kind of brushed it off, saying I wasn’t sure when I could do that because I have lots of classes. But he proceeded to continue to message me about it, which made me scared to go to the gym because he’s there, and also because I feared the eyes of the trainers who already looked at me kind of bemusedly. I’ve been since, and Mars wasn’t there, thank fuck. They did comment on the fact that I was wearing shorts though.
The gym was kind of bizarre in itself, too. It was very well-equipped and all that, but there’s like no place to stretch or anything, so you just see hyper-flexible Chinese people warming up in weird ways in the weirdest places. There are also cleaners who stand there, watching, and when you leave a machine they go over and clean it immediately. They also tend to stare. Also, oh my god, the changing rooms. I’d forgotten what old Chinese women are like. It’s hard to get to your locker when there’s a very naked old woman sitting in front of it, chatting happily to her similarly naked friend. There was also a woman just lying naked on the floor of this mini sauna room in the shower section.
I’m going with Marianna tomorrow morning, so hopefully it’ll be a bit easier with another girl like me there. Speaking of which, another little bit of info - Marianna, Carola, and I have formed a little friend group. Carola and I sit next to each other (she has a cool fashion sense), and the three of us will go get coffee together in our break at the little coffee shop in the School of Humanities building we study in. Marianna has hot chocolate, Carola has a latte, and I have espresso.
I’m getting used to not being able to drink tap water - I just buy a 1.5L bottle or 4L carton from the ubiquitous FamilyMarts (yes, the same ones as Japan!), which I have learned from observing people around me. There’s a little water fountain in the School of Humanities with free filtered/clean water, and before class lots of people line up to fill their bottles.
I haven't seen Inga since that stressful Wednesday class.
Anything else?
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