The Bureau

That wag Tim Footman has managed to prick my conscience into getting me to write a second blog post in a month - my pathetic rejoinder to all the 'blogs are dead' noise on Twitter.

As my life at the moment consists almost entirely of exam revision, lesson writing and cat grooming, I have to plunder my memory for entertaining content. On Facebook this morning I came across this photograph (which I'm hoping Jason and Jennifer don't mind me reproducing again).



These are the kids of two friends I made in China, now happily settled in New Orleans. This picture reminded me of the two of them, but also of the immense amounts of fun I had during my first year in Shanghai (subsequent years were also fun, but there's nothing quite like your first time in a crazy foreign land).

I went out there in April 2001, with nothing but a TEFL certificate, the telephone number of the school I was to be working at, and a few hundred quid, kindly provided by Patroclus and my friend Doctor B. I knew only one phrase in Mandarin ("ni hao" meaning "hello", which was taught to me by a Pakistani newspaper vendor in Charing Cross Station).

On the flight on the way over I remember looking at the map on the TV screen with a line tracing our trajectory over Russia and Mongolia. I'd never been anywhere more exotic than Toronto before, and I had to lock myself in the bathroom at one point and do a silent scream in the mirror and jump up and down with suppressed excitement. When the plane touched down my nose was pressed against the glass of the cabin window. Would I see Chinese people in straw hats riding bicycles? Yes! Would I see a large billboard of British snooker player Steve Davis? Er, yes! (This was the point when I realised that China probably wasn't as otherworldy as I'd allowed myself to believe.)

Unperturbed by the prevalence of McDonald's outlets and the fact that vast parts of my new home were clearly far more developed than anywhere I'd lived in Britain, I set about exploring Shanghai. The few hundred quid in my pocket kept me alive until my first pay cheque. In fact, it wasn't a cheque, as foreigners weren't allowed bank accounts at that time. For my first year I was paid monthly in cash, and had to carefully protect my small stack of 100 renminbi notes.



For the first few months my concepts of money and distance were terribly confused. I was terrified of taking taxis as I assumed they'd be expensive as in the UK. I would walk for miles and miles to meet friends, until I realised that most taxi journeys cost less than a pound. Expat bars and restaurants were an extravagance to be enjoyed once a week perhaps. For the rest of the time I ate in what can best be described as a shack opposite the school where I taught. The shack was run by a cheerful family from the north east of China. The foreign and Chinese teachers would eat together there, in an annexe to the family bedroom (we would have to traipse past the beds on our way to the table). The food was some of the best I have eaten before or since - heavy noodles in oily sauce, shoots of unfamiliar green vegetables with strips of succulent pork, cubes of chicken hidden in a deluge of fiery chillies. I quickly realised that the Chinese food served up outside China is some kind of twisted joke. Real Chinese food is unimaginably delicious, and I can only speculate they don't export it for fear their country would be overwhelmed by salivating immigrants.

I found most of the British expat teachers at my school to be your typical stereotype: rude about Chinese people, disparaging of local culture, perpetually complaining about everything. I avoided almost all Brits for the entire four years of my stay, and instead hung out with the Chinese teachers, and later the myriad other nationalities I encountered. My best friend for the first few months was Lilia, a girl who had never left China, but who spoke flawless English with a strong valley girl accent. She'd picked it up entirely from watching American movies. We would sneak off to the local Korean restaurant for lunch. She taught me to enjoy cold noodles, how to snip them into smaller pieces with scissors, and how to manipulate metal chopsticks. The other female teachers hated her, because she was incredibly rude to them, which I of course, secretly enjoyed.

Due to some administrative cock up I lived in Puxi, which is the older part of Shanghai to the west of the Huang Pu river, and worked in Pudong, to the east. My commute to work involved a twenty-minute walk to the subway, a change of lines at People's Square, and then a bus journey to my final destination. If I was in a rush I wouldn't wait for the air-conditioned bus, but jump on the cheaper rickety bus, jostling for space besides sacks of God-knows what and a load of sweating travellers. I quickly learned the Shanghai traveller's etiquette of elbow-blocking, shoving and full-body seat diving. No one ever berates you for getting to a seat before them. You have 'won', and that is that. Eight years later I am finding these skills very handy for roller derby ;)

Oddly, considering how interesting my life was at that time, I found my students to be rather dull. For the most part they were young professionals, learning English in order to get promoted at work. They all seemed to have the same ambitions: to do an MBA at Harvard or Stanford and then become the CEO of a Chinese company. They all parroted the same lines: 'China's economy is growing very fast' (true), 'Shanghai is very beautiful' (not really true), 'Your Chinese is soooo good' (not true at all). There was the odd exception, but it wasn't until I started teaching young children that I realised what the problem was. The kids were as interesting, creative and unique as British kids, until they reached the age of about 14, whereupon their personalities seemed to be subsumed by the system. At mainstream school they sat in classes of fifty or more, hands visible on their desks at all times, rote learning facts and being encouraged to cheat at every opportunity. (The very limited number of places at good schools and universities in China means cheating is often the only real chance for many to succeed. All my students cheated in tests, and after a while I gave up berating them for it. They thought I was stupid for trying to stop them, and I started to understand their point of view.)

As I grew to know some of my adult students better, traces of the person beneath the veneer emerged. I met many students who had wanted to be musicians or designers, but who had 'chosen' accountancy or banking because their families were (legitimately) concerned for their future security. Later on I would start to meet high-level managers at foreign and Chinese firms who would bemoan this lack of personality and creativity in their Chinese employees. The most common complaint was that Chinese employees had no problem-solving skills. When I left I was starting to hear rumblings about reforms to the education system. How do you educate a billion people to be both docile and go-getting? This I think is a far more interesting question than whether China's economy will continue to flourish.

I gave up teaching after a year and moved on to publishing, which was far more interesting. A group of students took me out for a meal at the end of their course, and I remember it for two reasons. Firstly, there was an area of the restaurant devoted entirely to the carving of fruit and vegetables into ridiculous shapes (all carvers smoking furiously over their creations). Secondly, the little cretins tricked me into eating chou dofu (stinky tofu), which is possibly the one Chinese dish I can't abide. It is so foul-tasting and smelling that it almost negates the deliciousness of the rest of their cuisine. Almost...

God, I've been rambling on for ages. I could write a million anecdotes about that first year, but my abiding memory of it is the feeling of constant enthusiasm I felt. I woke up each day as high as a kite. Nothing, not the appalling heat, the terrible manners, the endless inconveniences, the pollution or noise, stopped me from feeling like life was incredible, rich, exciting and fulfilling - and so it was.