A Brief Interlude About Finding A Place To Live And Failing To Blend In: Faulty Memory Series China, Part Two
In which our narrator looks for a home and gets shouted at frequently.
Dog and I were unceremoniously dumped at the gate to an apartment complex straight from the sketchbook of a nihilist German architect: five grey towers clad in black bars and reflective glass sprouting out of a concrete courtyard with garden boxes full of pale shrubs and dead grass.
It immediately started pouring.
“Home”, it turned out, had been designed by a German. I know this because every real estate agent I met in the coming weeks who showed me apartments in the bizarrely named “Beyond City” shared this fact with a pleased, conspiring grin, as though this was our little secret. “This is a German design by a German architect,” they would say. “Many foreigner families here. You’ll like it here.”
I did like it there. Within the context of Hangzhou, anyway. I had given myself two weeks to find a place to live, and in the first few days of being in China looked at about 30 apartments in the Binjiang district, one of the city’s old “new” suburbs.
Binjiang lay to the south of Hangzhou’s Qiantang River, a filthy broad strip of grey water that flows 500km across Zhejiang Province before emptying into the East China Sea. Beyond City, in addition to is dark German architecture, afforded views of the mighty Qiantang and its endless coal barges dredging dully along in both directions. The apartment compound had grey garden boxes and a small grey forested area to walk the dog. It was across from a supermarket and near a 20km walking path that ran alongside the disgusting river. It had a Starbucks and a Costa Coffee. And the apartments I looked at within Beyond City were, by and large, reasonable facsimiles of what my mind conjured upon hearing the word “apartment.”
So many places I looked at in Hangzhou simply did not reach that first, lowest bar: to be a functioning apartment. Before joining Alibaba, I’d asked the hiring manager what to expect to spend in terms of rent. He’d suggested 3500-5000 RMB would get me something comfortable, but that many people paid less. (That’s about $600-$800 USD per month.) I informed the real estate agents that this was my budget, and was soon shown some of the foulest, least livable homes imaginable. Apartments in this price range offered features such as: bathrooms with bedsheets operating as both shower curtain and door; water stains and visible mould covering every wall (“I’m sorry—will someone be cleaning that?” “I don’t think so. We can ask the owner.”); rats scurrying at the opening of the front door; cockroaches scurrying at the opening of each drawer; broken windows; doors hanging from a single hinge; piss- and sweat-stained furniture (“I’m sorry—will someone be removing that?” “I don’t think so. We can ask the owner.”); kitchens consisting of a rusted hot plate and a broken mini fridge. Hangzhou felt like a squatter’s city, a city of transients, a place of millions of empty, uninhabitable apartments.
I upped my price range, and for nearly double that budget saw places with many of the same features as the cheaper apartments (rats, cockroaches, stains), plus bizarre luxury features such as wretched, stinky urinals and heart-shaped beds concealed behind mirrored sliding doors. It was at once tacky and revolting, but most of all it was confusing. Hangzhou was a wealthy city—Zhejiang was China’s wealthiest province—so the standard of living here should have been considerably higher than rural Myanmar, which the apartments reminded me of.
Against this backdrop, paying exorbitantly for a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in the German-designed Beyond City was an obvious and easy choice. And a few other foreigners lived there, as advertised. The Hangzhou International School was just down the street, and some of its teachers were my neighbours. As were various traders and pilots with young children and dogs, and on some mornings—walking the dog and chatting in English about my job or their job or the football scores—it was almost possible to forget that this was, in fact, China. At least until the grey sky opened and spilled the plum rains, that quaint colloquialism given to the thunderous downpours lasting a month between June and July that essentially shut down the city. When the rain began, we were at once back in China, a band of outcasts and misfits banding together against the elements and slightly baffled about what we were doing here.
The Chinese inhabitants of Beyond City were old people and infants. At least, those were the only people I ever saw. As a tech-hub city, Hangzhou attracts skilled workers from around China. Alibaba in particular, and other Chinese tech companies with offices in the city like Netease and LianLian Pay, hired only graduates from top Chinese universities. Salaries weren’t as high as in a Tier 1 city, but were competitive, so the jobs were attractive here and lured hundreds of thousands of China’s ever-growing middle class to put down roots in compounds such as mine. But these young, university-educated people worked every day—and worked very long days at that—so when they invariably produced their only child, one or both sets of parents moved in to raise it.1
So it was around old Beyond City: septuagenarians with toddlers in tow screaming at me and the dog in the lift, screaming at me and the dog in the garden, screaming at me and the dog along the street: a sort-of startled screech that said god-no-please-keep-that-creature-away-from-my-precious-grandchild. When not screaming, they could be seen potty training the kids by pulling down their pants and holding them over a shrub for them to piss or shit in broad daylight and in full view of their neighbours. Or doing tai chi in the early mornings, which was an absolute joy for me to observe until they noticed I was there and screamed and ran off. Or in the evenings, if the parents had come home from work that day and the grandkids were no longer the direct responsibility of the grandparents, these seniors could be found in the courtyard between the buildings, dancing to traditional Chinese pop songs, this scraggly gang of rural implants keeping fit and being social.
Of course, they didn’t always scream or shout, but I was never left with the slightest doubt that someone had noticed that I was there. The response was somewhere on a scale between quiet, pleasant shock that I existed in their neighbourhood and instant distrust and genuine dislike.
There are two commonly used words in Chinese to describe immigrants: weiguoren (literally “foreign country person” or “outside person,” but used mostly to simply mean “foreigner”) and laowai (also meaning “foreigner,” but more casual and playful, less blunt). Laowais like to think of themselves as laowais, but I rarely—if ever—heard myself referred to as a laowai from a local. Whenever I walked to my taxi in the morning, or stepped into the foyer of my building, or into my elevator, with one of these elderly stewards and a child, the word weiguoren would invariably surface. It was whispered, not meant for me to hear.
“Grandmother, who is that weiguoren?” some terrified child probably asks, her hands gripping folds of her grandmother’s billowy dress. I only ever hear the word I knew, that menacing weiguoren.
“Be still, child—” the grandmother would shush back. “It can hear you.”
They would try their best to not make eye contact for fear that I had, indeed, heard them. Should they risk a glance, they would be met with a wide grin and my friendliest nihao. This would temporarily break the spell. Oh, it’s a person, their faces would say, and they would shyly say hello back and quickly stare at something else.
I’m used to being a new person in other countries. I moved away from Canada immediately after university and lived as an English teacher in South Korea, where having a beard and being slightly taller than Koreans made me an instant celebrity. People stopped to take my picture. They sidled up beside me when I walked to the bus to chat and practice their English. They chided their kids to run up to me and deliver an extremely nervous “Hello how are you nice to meet you my name is James what is your name thank you bye!?” Once, sitting in the front seat of a taxi on the way home from the bar in Ulsan, the first place I lived in Korea, the taxi driver mumbled a question I couldn’t understand and then proceeded to stroke my cheek to feel my beard; he giggled, seemed pleased, and said a very polite thank you in Korean, adding the deepest bow he could manage while driving.
Koreans—at least in the mid-2000s—seemed fundamentally happy to have a migrant workforce to teach their children English. Parents were always thankful. The Korean government made it very easy to be an English teacher in Korea, for better and for worse. It’s a national imperative to learn English, so the bar for entry is very low. All you needed a degree—any degree, in any subject—from a university or college from an English-speaking country. That was all it took to get the teaching visa. (Much more on this in a future Faulty Memory Series). Being foreign in Korea was genuinely hilarious, such was the warmth that lay beneath the curiosity. Very seldomly were you made to feel like a Billy Pilgrim in his geodesic dome. Sure, there were mandatory singing and dancing performances at school and my face was plastered on the buses around Ulsan to tout the white foreigner teacher at my school, which was called—in all seriousness—Ding Ding Dang English Academy, but it all seemed like part of a deal. You were a guest, generally valued, and people were friendly and wanted to chat. In exchange, you got taught their kids and made some money and got a free place to live. I later lived in Lebanon, Turkey, Portugal, and Spain, all of with their own gracious and generous welcomes.
Something felt different about the reception and reaction to me in Hangzhou. The scenes in the elevator, that nervous gawking and staring and pointing, and the pretty frequent screaming and running—these decidedly lacked warmth.
At my most generous, I think of this as curiosity buried so deep under shyness that it simply didn’t know how to come out. In some areas of China, especially in the south and southwest, people often show genuine hospitality and warmth. But there are also longstanding fears of the outsider, fears of the unknown, fears of losing face. In those cities in China with a historical population of foreigners—Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, most notably—locals are more accustomed to having a mixed local community. There’s still the odd gawk, but by and large you can stroll down Nanjing West Road or sit in People’s Square Park in Shanghai with a minimal amount of fuss. Not so in Hangzhou, even in areas frequented by overseas students or foreign employees. No, here, people stared. They grimaced. They shouted.
Years later, I’m able to look back and understand some of the complexities of that peculiar attitude and to feel less afraid of it, less hurt by it. But the subtleties weren’t accessible to me at the start of my time in China. It was just me, the mangy dog, and many of the people I met screaming and running away, the other half offering whispers and awkward hellos.
It was part of a broader trend of living there: I didn’t understand anything that was happening around me.
Even though the draconian One Child Policy was relaxed nearly a decade ago and the Two Child Policy implemented fully in 2015 (and a Three Child Policy encouraged more recently still), most families in China still have only one. Kids are expensive everywhere, but especially so in China.