According to the countdown that greets me every time I access the university portal, I have 18 days until I am legally required to leave the country. Accordingly, I have 17 days until my flight home, and 15 days till my last exam. I know, they really didn’t give me much leeway in terms of time. I can’t even be here for the certificate ceremony or whatever on the 30th. It’s really confusing to me that they only gave me 130 days, while they gave Håkon 180 days - they should like me better, because I speak Chinese. But my dad reckons that’s precisely why they want me out so fast - they’re worried I’m a spy. In any case, I have less than three weeks left in China. I’ve bought my extra suitcase, I’ve started getting things for my friends back home. Unlike some of my international student friends here, who seem reluctant to return to their countries, I’m very excited. I’m so confused by their unenthusiasm towards leaving, especially given all of them have been here a whole year - how can you want to live like this, in a place where it is made so clear you don’t belong? My friend Marianna actually announced the other day that while she is going home for the summer, she’s coming back and starting over the bachelor’s degree she started back home, here at SJTU. That means she’s here for four more years. And I’ve looked at other student's blogs about their experience living in China. They all seem to love it - though I suspect most of this is disingenuous, because people don’t really say much else other than wow so modern! So international! Neither of which it really it is.
Nevertheless, there are many things that I’m going to miss about living in China. I’m not going to write about the things I won’t miss, because that’s unproductive, and there’s no way to separate it from racist prejudice. I should even be careful saying what I do like. This also seems like a good time to say that my experience, barring a few weekend trips, is entirely Shanghainese, and shouldn’t be generalised. North and South Chinese culture is very different, and in South China, Shanghai is the safest, richest, most developed city. So take this as “what I’m going to miss about Shanghai.”
- Lack of Personal Space
This might seem a bit weird, but I explain it here. Basically, it’s very nostalgic, because it’s the same in Singapore. There isn’t this whole legal tetchiness the way there is in Australia, where students can’t even be friends with their teachers on Facebook. Here, people are close, literally. They’ll touch your things, touch you, you’ll be up close and personal. And, weirdly, I like it. It’s comforting. There’s a sense of closeness about it that I miss.
2. Anyhow systems
Had to use a Singlish word here, because I don’t know how else to describe it but “anyhow”. In a similar vein to number one, in a way, regulated processes are a little less by-the-books. I wonder if this stems from the way the government can change plans whenever they like, or if they’re just correlated by a mutual causation. Either way, things are more anyhow, but it still works. For example, I tried to buy Laura a [redacted cause she’ll read this] on taobao. The seller texted me just then, saying “sorry we’re out, can you just cancel the order and I’ll send your money back.” It was all chill. In Australia, well first of all that wouldn’t happen, but also there would have been some sort of email process and bank refunding and shit. This is less scary.
Most of all, I’ve noticed this anyhow system in terms of traffic. It was really jarring when I first arrived, because you’ll be crossing the street at a green light and suddenly a car will unapologetically drive past right in front of you. The ubiquitous scooters’ adherence to traffic lights, especially, can be at best described as ‘loose’. But, weirdly, you’re completely safe. They know what they’re doing. You can’t hesitate or panic; you just have to keep doing what you’re doing and they’ll drive around you. If you try to move out of their way, that’s when the trouble starts, because they don’t know what you’re about to do next and don’t know how to manouvre past you. I’m guilty of this, too - like everyone else here, I just walk all over the road because it will work out. I can jaywalk across the road and, more often than not, the car heading towards me will slow to a halt to let me cross. Weird, right? I’m gonna end up walking all over the roads when I first get back to Australia and drivers are NOT gonna be happy. The government’s trying to regulate this, what with the cameras everywhere that deduct points from your social score if you commit traffic offences like that, but it’s still pretty anyhow at the moment. It’s its own non-system system, and I actually think it’s more efficient. A car’s not going to 乖乖地 wait behind a red light if there are no cars or pedestrians on the perpendicular street; it’s just going to go - and just like that, someone is where they need to be faster without anything bad happening. It’s an injection of common-sense irregularity into necessary regulation.
(That being said, the other day I did witness an old man on a scooter driving in the bike lane on the wrong side of the road, keeping his hand on his horn continuously as if to let bikers know “bitch I’m here and you better move for me” ahhaah.)
3. Mobile payment
This is fairly self-explanatory. Here, to pay for things, you use WeChat or Alipay, which your card is linked to, and in shops, they just scan the barcode on your app. If it’s a smaller vendor, you scan their QR code and transfer them money. Here, even beggars have QR codes for your to scan to give them money, because no one has cash anymore. It also makes it really easy to transfer money to your friends to pay for your half of dinner or whatever. And, on Alipay, you can pay your utility bills, top up your school card or transport card, buy plane and train tickets, top up your phone plan, even scan and pay for public bikes. It’s great, and it’s going to be very jarring coming back to Australia, where I’ll have to take out my debit card, and possibly even - gasp - enter my PIN. And to transfer a new friend money I’ll have to enter their bank account number. How fucking ARCHAIC. I plan to get apple play on my phone anyway, but I know people aren’t going to be used to that and it’s going to be a rigamarole.
4. Low cost of living
This applies for pretty much everything. Data is 25 Australian cents per GB, whereas it’s like $10 in Australia. Food - at least local food - is MAX $5AUD for a big ass meal. Western food is more expensive, but still cheaper than Australia - maybe around 12 or 15 dollars. My rent here is less than half of what it is in Canberra (though I’m not gonna front like a pay my own rent lol because I don’t). And taxis are as cheap as they are in Singapore, which is blissful.
5. Public bike system
I know they have these in Australia, but it’s just not the same. Here, the bikes are literally EVERYWHERE, so if you need a bike, you can just walk out onto the street and you’ll find what you need in about two minutes. And they’re really cheap - like $1AUD an hour. And, as I said before, you don’t need a separate app for it, because you can access them via Alipay. There are a few different brands, but I like Hellobike, mostly because, after you unlock them with your phone, the bikes play a little jingle and then go “Allo~!”.
6. Delivery everything
I’ve talked about it here, and here, but it deserves to be repeated: delivery systems in China are incredibly efficient. This encompasses both food delivery and parcel delivery, and the efficiency encompasses both time- and cost-. With its version of ubereats, eleme?, delivery costs will be $1AUD, max. Very few people cook in China, at least among students and other such youths, so this form of takeout - known as “外卖”, literally “outside purchase”, - is very, very common, to the point where most apartment blocks, dormitories, and sometimes even office buildings will have a dedicated shelf in the lobby for the delivery guys to leave the 外卖. And since (at least local) restaurant food is so cheap as well, it really isn’t very cost-efficient to cook. Which explains, I suppose, why my dormitory has no kitchen beyond a microwave. In terms of parcel delivery, I’ve talked about this a lot, so you’re probably hella sick of listening to how efficient it is.
7. Chinese language
There are certain aspects of Chinese that I’d never appreciated or even realised before living here. You know how, in your native language, you don’t actually know how the language works? Like, I don’t know what the fuck a present perfect is. I’ve only just learnt nouns, verbs, and adjectives - adverbs are beyond me. Well, Chinese is like that for me too. I was just thinking today about how there’s no “had done” tense in Chinese, whatever the fuck that’s called. But what I hadn’t realised before is how flexible Chinese is. I’d just never really thought about it, but it can bend so well to your aesthetic purpose. Words can be halved, and retain their meaning within context. For example, the word for “can” is “可以”. If sounds prettier, or you’re short on words, you can just use “可“, and since it will be in front of a verb (look at me go!), it will be completely understandable.
This is how 成语 are made - the four character idioms. The four main characters of an ancient story or saying are chosen to very, very briefly summarise, and its meaning is the story’s moral. Like ”画蛇添足“, literally, “drawing a snake and adding legs”. It references the story of a painting competition, where the emperor instructed them all to paint a snake, and the best painter would win something, I forget, I learnt this when I was like 9. Anyway, there was a really talented painter. He painted a great snake really quickly, but he just had the rest of the time to stare at the painting, and he began to feel dissatisfied with it. So he decided to paint on some legs for an extra ~flair~. Of course, this made it a painting of a lizard, so even though he’d actually originally had the best painting of a snake, he lost. So the idiom, “画蛇添足“, means to add unnecessary things to something good, often by way of overthinking. Kind of like the phrase “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, but wider-spanning and more literary.
I have also only just started, here in China, to appreciate the fact of characters. One of my professors said the other day that Chinese is the only language that has retained script with meaning inherent to them - most script is now just a phonetic mirroring of the spoken language. Whereas, infamously, in Chinese, you could read an entire page of writing, understand it all, but not be able to speak a word of it, because there is nothing in the characters that tells you how to pronounce it. This is of course, incredibly frustrating when you’re learning, but it’s also so beautiful. I can look at a new character and know roughly what it depicts, just based on the radicals and the (now very abstracted) “drawing” depictions of the characters. I guess a good example is the chinese periodic table (I’ll use the traditional characters, because it’s easier to see the original meaning than modern):
You’ll see four main radicals here (by the way, radicals are like the elements of the drawing): the “air” radical, the “water” radical, the “gold” radical, and the “stone” radical. These radicals indicate the state of the usual form of the element: so whether it’s typically found as a gas, a liquid, a metallic solid, or a non-metallic solid.
I also find it beautiful how a single character can have so much meaning embedded in it. What is “金“ but a little drawing, and how can it mean so much? It has so much history behind it. The mere fact that the word for gold is the word for metal tells you so much about ancient China. The other day I was walking around outside campus, looking down at the ground, and I was overcome with emotion at seeing “雨” printed on a manhole cover. That’s the word for rain, which you can see in the character itself if you look hard enough. That’s all it needed - 雨. One little scribble told you all you need to know, that it’s a manhole cover for the gutters that drain out the rainwater. In China, you live in a world of drawings. To communicate through drawing - how special.
8. Being able to do weird shit in public
I’m going to end it on a less profound one to lighten the post again. Without the centre of Western propriety, people - particularly old people - do really weird shit. You’ll see old men riding bikes down the street, singing at the top of their lungs. At the oval on campus, old people love to go there and “exercise” - walk backward, hit various parts of their bodies with their fists and on trees, and walk while doing various swinging arm motions.
While that in itself is quite endearing, it also means that you can do weird shit in public and it’s not too big a deal. It’s not weird to just squat wherever you are and eat, or talk on the phone really loudly and animatedly, or crack your back really loudly in the library, or - fuck it - work out in the gym in a business suit (yes, I have seen this).
Then again, of course, you will get stared at for entirely normal things, like wearing a skirt in summer, or just existing. But be quiet, Sa - that’s not productive.
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I suppose the fact that I am excited to go home, while my friends are not, is a testament to my privilege. As my mum, in a slightly less self-aware manner, said while she was here, “people keep asking me if I’m liking Shanghai. I live in the best city in the world; why would I like Shanghai?”. And that’s not to mention I lived in Singapore before Sydney and Canberra. So, you know, I’m a tough crowd. The friends who aren’t excited for home are from Columbia, Eastern Europe, Egypt - places where life is harder, I guess, less safe, less advanced, less coast-y (in both senses of the word). I’m just very, very lucky.
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