 Hong Kong and Trondheim, my mother’s hometown, don’t have very much in common. Except for one thing: they’re both places where mountains meet sea. There was a place I would always go to, especially when the city got too much, which was a corner of Lamma island where the curve of the banks look a little bit Norwegian fjord-like. I’d close my eyes and perform the little relaxation exercise someone once taught me, where you picture the place in the world where you feel most at peace. I always picture the peak of the little mountain above the family cabin my grandfather built a couple hour’s drive from Trondheim. From the highest point, you can clamper down and perch on a ledge of a lichen-speckled granite, stare out at the fjord that surrounds you, and feel infinite. My brother and I used to act out scenes from Star Wars here. I was always an Ewok. I was obsessed with them. The cabin must have been built forty years ago, in a sea of fir trees. There’s a silly picture of my grandfather with his head popping out of the brand new latrine we had to use until my parents finally got a real bathroom installed that includes this amazing contraption known as the shower. No more jumping up and down screaming and giggling hysterically as ice cold waters fires from the hose my brother once used to rinse the first fish he ever caught, which he was so enamoured with he carried around for days until its head fell off. I never met my grandfather, unfortunately. He died a couple of years before I was born. But I’m sure I would have liked him. He was a gentle and warm man, married my grandmother -- my Mormor -- after years of working as a sailor at sea. They were both so poor, when my mother was born, they had to live with a relative who had TB. If I think of the word ‘soft’, I think of my Mormor. And in this case, it would be absolutely impossible to equate the word ‘soft’ with ‘weak’. She was from northern Norway, from a small hamlet near the Arctic Circle, close to, (and yes, I love this story), one of the world’s largest -- and very deadly -- whirlpools. Apparently, she once told her father she was afraid of it, so the story goes, and so he tied her to his boat and rowed her across. Another slightly grim story from back in the days. I think it might have been about a great-grandmother and a great-grandaunt. These sisters who both worked the land -- not easy land to work at all up here -- while their husbands were at sea. Every so often, the husbands would return, enjoy the companionship of their wives, and leave again abruptly. The two sisters would then meet, have a drink together and cry. Pregnant again. With the fourth child. The fifth. The sixth. And so on. My Mormor contracted rheumatic fever as a child, and had pain all her life. She also skied for long distances, just as she used to ski between home and school back in her childhood days. She chopped down trees, too, even the ones outside the family cabin which she was tacitly told not to. No one could really tell her what to do. And yet she was soft. The pastels of her clothes, the fluffiness of her eggshell white hair that she fixed with Elnett hairspray in the mornings for as long as I knew her. She had a beautiful voice. The Norland dialect is even more tonal than the Tronde tongue, so that every sentence sounds like a song. And she sang lullabies, in the same gentle, lilting and raspy voice she’d use to say ‘good night, little friend’ before you fell asleep. We moved around a lot, so summers in Norway with Mormor (who refused, point blank, to speak English to me) were the constant. For a month each year, I slept next to her, heard her deep sleep mutterings and woke up to be greeted by the sight of her in her frilly, purple and pink nightgown staring through binoculars out at the fjord. After a long and well-lived 88 years, she passed away abruptly. This was around the start of the pandemic (trust her to choose to go with as little fuss as possible.) I was in Berlin. I wrote a speech for the funeral I couldn’t attend. A year later I was in Trondheim, in a bunker where my mum and my aunt had put my Mormor’s things. There’s a doll I remember from when I used to scour the attic as a kid, but it’s placed awkwardly and one arm is upright: Photos albums we used to paw through stuffed haphazardly in a box. An upturned kid’s chair I didn’t know she’d kept. It looked so desolate. My mother was hunched over this one box pulling out things when it felt suddenly like the air from the room had disappeared entirely, and my ears had screwed themselves shut, and I just wanted to scream. And then, there it was. Tears. A lot of them. My mother looked at me in shock. I don’t think she would have seen that since I was a teenager. And she started crying, too. We hugged and I think it was in that moment that our relationship was reborn, in this moment of two women connecting over how much love they had for another woman. Another time I cried like that was on November 18th 2019, at a tax office in Hong Kong, the day before I left. The woman serving me was just so helpful, warm and nice. The way she smiled at me. I just had to take my forms and scurry off into the corridor before that feeling hit me: the airlessness and the ringing ears. And then, tears, and the thought: They don’t deserve this. I brought some of my Mormor’s stuff back with me to Berlin, including old newspaper clippings I still can’t figure out why she kept, and fax pages of a book on the history of Trondheim she’d typed up for her boss. Apparently she sometimes wrote stories herself, but I don’t know what they were about. Stories about home, maybe, which would have been beautiful. I wished she’d have been around to meet my niece, who lives not far from where my Mormor grew up. I met her last year and she’s brilliant. She lights up every room she’s in, she has this golden smile and she thinks everything is hilarious. She’s so gorgeously soft. I asked my brother what his first thought was when he found out he’d be a dad. He said ‘at first, kind of doom-ladden, what with the world we’d be bringing her into’. As I’m sitting here thinking of her now, I think ‘How can the world be all that bad, when she lives in it?’ Here’s a shortened version of the speech. Sjyvotta I’ll remember the way she’d put a spread together every morning for breakfast. Selections of jam, ham, salami, cheese, bread, maybe some yoghurt. Watered-down coffee. Always more than we could stomach, always nice and thoughtfully arranged. And then, there’d be a tin of sugary biscuits she’d have made before we arrived that we’d always get through far too quickly. She taught me to scramble my eggs properly, store leftovers in the fridge for the next day. Trips to the library. I’d get through so many books in those long and lazy Norwegian summers with her. She allowed us all sorts of little indulgences. Hot dogs for dinner, frozen pizza, microwave popcorn dripping in smør, horror films from the local Blockbuster. Back to back Steve Urwin programming on Animal Planet. Bedtimes as we pleased. Friends and cousins round, fun, trips to the chilly sea, matpakke, Mormor stretched out on a deck chair, eyes closed, facing the sun. Thomas and I would catch crabs and pit them against one another in little races we’d hold for them on the sand. I’ll remember Mormor trying to say “hedgehog,” and struggling at the point where d meets g. Recently, I’ve been reading through a piece of writing, a speech from my Edith’s (Mormor’s sister) funeral, that describes their childhood up in Sandmoen. The process has involved looking up a whole bunch of new words, some of which I don’t even know in English. Sjyvotta. Large mittens worn at sea, with possibly an extra pair tucked inside. Life must have been very different up there. Still, it sounds like whatever changes Mormor lived through, she learnt to take them all in her stride. As her grandchildren, we’ll remember her as very strong in some places, and very soft in others. I’ll remember her face, which was always luminescent, and the way she’d say ‘Gud Natt, lille venn’. FIN
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 What is the act of personal writing if not a means of taking a step back from your life to take note of the patterns that inform its momentum? This particular exercise sprung out of the emotions that came with sharing my story about a car accident that happened to me almost 15 years ago (the catalyst that set in motion wheels that led to China). I wrote the text for speech in a longer essay a couple years back, where there were more details. One being that the driver eventually returned to the scene, found and spoke to me while I was in the care of some strangers. I apologised to him, and verbally took full blame. While embedding the traumatic memory of someone speeding into me and mowing me down. In the essay I wrote; ‘when something randomly bad happens to us, we might blame ourselves as it allows us to exert a sense of control over an uncontrollable event.’ In going through these old blogs and taking stock of all this stuff, I’m struck by two opposing thoughts: What a wild and fearless journey it’s been. And, wouldn’t it have been nice to have time and space to really face all those emotions I was running away from back home? I’m also struck by the sheer volume of dangerous situations I’ve escaped that I’ve recorded. Could there have been part of me welcoming them as a means of reclaiming that lost sense of control? Another episode, this one again in Beijing: We’re in a bar drinking counterfeit booze (ethanol), the air stinks and my feet are black with car exhaust. A glass shatters behind me. Turn around to see the bar manager screaming at this one of our party, this guy with a southern drawl and a tendency to antagonise when drunk. Manager is very very angry. So is southern drawl. Somehow I’m wedged between the two, trying to make the shouting stop. Manager’s screaming that we’ve disrespected him. He’s also letting me know that his best friend is a government official who could squeeze us like a pimple. Trying to placate the guy. Apologise profusely. Southern drawl goads behind me. Manager’s telling us that all westerners seem to do is come here and disrespect the Chinese. Oh, and there’s this guy lurking behind manager who happens to have a brick in his hand. Attempt to disarm man of brick. Fail. Brick flies past my face in the direction of Southern drawl. Strikes my friend instead. My female friend. Innocent bystander. Funny how often women are caught in the crossfire of male aggro. I see red. Memory fails, here, but apparently I made quite a scene. Again, reviewing this memory next to the others, I also notice a pattern of being able to completely detach myself from my own fear and respond instinctively but also, calculatedly -- extending those hypervigilant superpowers for however long I needed them. But that definitely wasn’t to say that I wasn’t without panic. I started getting panic attacks some time after the accident, but most were, and continued to be, around feelings of dysfunction in myself. Losing things. Forgetting things. Messing up. Self-blame. It was like my emotions were all crosswired, and the intensity of life in China amplified that. ‘When you spend too long in hypervigilance, you get tired,’ said a Mexican reporter and mental health advocate in an interview I did on refuges for traumatised journalists. ‘And that can get very dangerous, because you lose your danger alarm’. The experiences hardened me. Toward myself and towards the world. The work of reclaiming a lost softness has been ongoing. Work relatable at least in parts to many, given the fragility of the human experience. Looking for and emphasising moments of serenity, perhaps buried under all that cynical nihilistic hardness, is part of the process. So here’s a piece from a short holiday. After that, Urkracs takes a breather. Qingdao, 2013. The Pearl of the Orient. Or, let’s say, the Pearl of Northern China. Or perhaps that’s still a bit generous. OK, let’s go for Shandong province’s pride and joy. Apart from the place where Confucius rode that cow, of course. A coastal city, a tourist hot-spot, an ex-German concession, a beer haven, an up-and-coming second-tier city. The beaches are sandy and bright – though on a tentative dip you might want to keep your head safely above water so as to prevent that thin layer of fermenting algae scum from entering your system. The seafood is fresh and flagrant – witness tourists high on crustacean fluids gnawing violently into the brains of unidentifiable sea creatures. The beer is foamy and flows freely from giant metal cylinders. We arrived in the early evening to take in a seaside sky-line cloaked in a familiar haze, obscuring all but the closest skyscrapers from view. We were informed that it was sea-mist and not pollution, which we chose to believe even though there was an eerie lack of seagulls. What a sea-side it was. A small patch of stoney red sand with about five people per square metre, all falling over each other and fighting for sand castle space. Men with leathered-brown bellies swung their arms around in vindictive circular motions so as to make space between themselves and someone else’s children. Women in victorian-style bathing suits were trying to find somewhere they could take a snapshot of themselves and the sea without rubbish or rubble getting in the picture. My English friend and I stared down from the railing, grimacing and maybe smirking a bit to each other. We turned to the third party, a 26-year-old Shandong native who last visited Qingdao with a tour group when she was 13. (Her parents didn’t really have holidays when she was growing up). She was staring at the same scene, but had an entirely different expression on her face – one of pure delight. “What do you think, Jessie?” I asked and she looked at me, gave me two thumbs up and cried out “this is great!”.. We wandered about for a while trying not to trip over the hordes of tourists with their suitcases and blow-up killer whales. Every so often we’d turn around to find Jessie miles behind, stuck behind a crowd the two of us had automatically shoved past. Jessie is not like anyone I know here. Everyone else seems to have grown with their elbows always pointed outward, posed to fight anyone over what little space there is. She’s a painfully polite and kind-hearted girl. Saint-like, really. She lets everyone go first, even if it means she’s eternally waiting for the crowds to thin. She runs up to strangers holidaying alone in case they might want their photos taken. And she chats to all the people I dutifully ignore because I’m sick of people talking at me in broken English. She’s been showing me up. I want to be a nice and patient person. Sometimes I think it’s also kind of my duty not to play to stereotypes of westerners as out-of-control. But in the face of constantly being shoved this way and that, being shouted at in the face, I find it really hard to be gracious and not take anything personally. I wish I could have been more like Jessie on the trip, but I just kept getting annoyed, as per usual. People pointed and followed and took pictures and asked to be taken pictures with, and demanded to be taught English, and all the other stuff that makes you think they think you’re public property. As per usual, I stifled my irritation and resorted to making sarcastic comments instead. About how ugly things were and what a miserable little place it was. Jessie smiled throughout, and made friends with everyone. Finally we forced ourselves to get down to the beach. We took off our shoes and clambered over rocks and tried not to slip on the algae and grit. And in the distance, through the mist, we saw a woman in a wedding dress. We got closer and realised there were dozens of women in white gowns crouching in rock pools, waiting for their wedding shoots. It was a bizarre sight, like a scene from a fishermen’s myth. There was a troupe of photographers taking snaps and bemoaning how many people they would have to photoshop from their images. Bow-tied grooms stood to the side and wondered whether it was OK to have a fag. And it suddenly occurred to me how beautiful this beach would be – with it’s billions of people, its ice-cream wrappers, it’s soggy gray mist, it’s shitting babies, it’s dying fish – to the people who came here because the place was genuinely special to them and not because they were expecting some kind of an ironic and desolate holiday experience. One they could write something cynical about afterwards. Cynicism is a nice way to deal with feeling excluded. Jessie ran off with a bunch of kids to go catch crabs because she had never had the chance do so when she came that one time with the tour group all those years ago. Someone had drawn a heart in the sand. Fathers were showing their sons how to swim and everyone was smiling even though the mist had gotten so thick people could barely see one another. And I sat down in the sand in my Victorian swimsuit and thought about how nice it was to be there with all those happy people in that eerie sea mist, and not about how ugly it all was. And in that moment, everything was lovely.  2011. Foshan, China.
What hits you first -- with the force of a sledgehammer -- is the humidity. Then, if it’s after dark at a certain time of year, you’ll hear an unending symphony of toads fucking. Which is super eerie. I arrived kind of spontaneously, having applied for a job teaching primary school children English in a city that, when I Googled it, only two images showed up. I’d always, kind of childishly, been attracted to the vibe of middle-of-nowhere places -- petrol strations, empty highways, almost forgotten watering holes -- so it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing about nowhere places is that they are always somewhere places for some people. Was I prepared? Absolutely not. I picked up a beginner’s guide to Mandarin and had to unlearn everything I had tried to teach myself when I got to Guangdong. The process was such a chaotic whirlwind (for which I take full blame) that I arrived at Guangzhou airport only to realise that I’d forgotten to sort out cash before I’d left. I think I had a burner phone I couldn’t use. I luckily got picked up on time, which was uncharacteristically reliable of my employers, and was driven in a white van for two hours to the gated enclave that was our school, where there was a small apartment waiting for me, alongside a bowl of deliciously oily noodles. Foshan: A somewhere place for many years well before the region became the world’s factory. Its (arguably) proudest claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Wing Chun kungfu. Bruce Lee’s mentor, Ip Man, was born in the city. The year I arrived saw the completion of a metro-line connecting Foshan with its neighhour and China’s third largest city, Guangzhou, which neighbours checkered city, Dongguan. This is where, in 1839, a thousand tons of opium seized from British traders were destroyed on the banks of the Pearl River by an imperial commissioner of Qing Dynasty China, spelling the start of the Opium Wars which would ultimately see Hong Kong ceded to Great Britain. Now, Dongguan -- at least while I was there -- is famous for its very high ratio of brothels. A little bit further east, and you’ve got Huizhou. I would need to do a bit more crosschecking to confirm this, but according to one source it is referred to as the ‘Palermo of China’. I.e. a gangster hotbed. Chinese triads sprung out of secret societies in the 18th and 19th Century formed with the aim of overthrowing the Qing dynasty. During Mao’s era, they fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan and further afield. They’ve been reemerging in mainland China since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, where they can exploit favourable circumstances; ‘prevalent corruption, rapid urbanisation and a high demand for illicit goods and services’. Across the special administrative border, Hong Kong’s famous and filmic gangsters were struggling a bit, what with a relatively effective anti-organised crime clampdown that saw a lot of meaningful anti-corruption legislation put in place. I have one especially strong memory highlighting the difference that (now increasingly porous) border made, from a couple years later while working as a reporter in Hong Kong. During an assignment for an investigative piece that involved getting inside a series illegal electronic dumps in the city’s shipping container-lined brownlands, we ended up on the receiving end of a couple of tirades. (To be fair, we were trespassing. But. For the public good). After jumping into our van, my photographer turned to me and said “If we were in China right now, we would have been stabbed.” Subtropical and richly-biodiverse (although, sadly, less and less so) Guangdong is China’s most populous and richest province, boasting more resident billionaires than anywhere else in the country. In Foshan, I taught some of those billionaire’s children. The experience was absurd and frustrating. Effectively, what I was doing was help provide them with a counterfeit education. Anyway, this preamble is long enough. -- 走吧 ...There’s either an army of crickets or an army of toads outside my bedroom window, belching non-stop like there’s an apocalypse on its way and everyone has to know about it. Whatever it is I can’t sleep, not even with earplugs. Taking a walk didn’t help either; a bat nearly flew into me and now the adrenaline’s pumping. So I thought I’d write about a day. I usually wake up to other hellish sounds. My alarm clock tends to be the crashing noise pipes make when they’re incessantly being chucked about by builders who it seems almost never sleep. Or there’s a dull buzz coming from some machine in its death throes, or some spookily toneless Chinglish broadcast outside about pandas. I then pick up my laptop and get an electric shock. It’s probably because my air-con has broken and is spitting water everywhere, so I turn that off. A few hours later and I’m in school. There was a bus, it didn’t fall into the canal as it sped through the slums, so I count myself lucky. I only fell over once the whole time, too, and that wasn’t even my fault - we’d driven into a car. People tutted, but not as loudly as they did the time I knocked someone’s glasses off their face. That was kind of my fault. But standing on a bus here is kind of like surfing, and I doubt I’d be any good at that either. People are rebuilding the school logo again. Apparently the one they’d made a few weeks back just didn’t cut it anymore. And there’s a new pot plant in the loo that’s obstructing my way to the sink. Someone’s been redecorating. Sit down to lesson plan. No internet again, or else the great big firewall is blocking my attempts to download pictures of ducklings. Decide that drawing a duckling on the board will have to do. The ‘Happy Birthday’ song rings out, which means it's time to teach some grade 1 class or another. Can’t find my timetable so I hang around in the hallway until some 5 year old grabs my hand and pulls me into their classroom. I start drawing a duckling until I realise there’s some woman hovering around behind me trying to start her own lesson. I apologise and leave. Another kid grabs my hand, this one I recognise because last time we hung out he wouldn’t stop punching me. ‘Sarah, what’s your name?’ he asks. ‘You know my name.’ I say. ‘My name is 5’ he responds. Teaching English really is fulfilling. But to be fair, at least this guy remembers where I’m supposed to be. I’ve just sung that ‘5 little ducks’ song and the kids seem to be enjoying it. Until I get to the last line at which point they all start to boo and hiss. My teaching assistant looks up from her phone and asks them what’s wrong. She then turns to me. ‘The student’s want to know why all the little ducks come back to their mother’ she says. ‘Er… because it’s a nice song?’ I respond. She looks baffled, but turns and translates what I said anyway. They then start laughing, and I feel horribly naïve and lame. ‘Fine,’ I think. ‘Next week we’ll watch Blade Runner’. Head back to the office after lunch, move out of the way of stampeding grade 6s. Meet a colleague along the way. Marvel at her outfit; frilly rah-rah skirt of the kind you’d see in a preteen magazine, sparkling pink top with some Chinglish slogan like ‘Happy Happy Apple’ on it and six inch patent leather stilettos. ‘Oh, Sarah!’ she says, and giggles manically. I sort of laugh. ‘Your hair is always so messy!’ she says. I try to smile at her to show I’m a good sport but she’s already disappeared. Back in my ‘office’. A kid turns up to give me an apple, so I give her a lolly in return. Seconds later and kids start swarming my office demanding candy. I try to explain to them that it’s rude to order grown ups to do things so instead they start rifling through my desks. I start shouting and they saunter off. ‘Happy Birthday’ followed by a verse from Puddle of Mudd’s ‘She fucking hates me’ rings out and I’m headed towards my illustrious international class, an extra-credit thing that was designed for the best students in the school but is really a rather expensive playgroup for the ones with the most money. I arrive early but there’s still a bunch of kids crowded around my computer playing games. I ask them to sit down but they all have that manic ‘I’m about to beat the boss’ nerd face on and it’s only when I put my arms around the monitor and start shouting ‘My computer! Mine! Mine! Mine!’ that they go away. Students turn up and start chasing each other around the room. 4 or 5 boys stand in a row hopping until they lose their balance and the last one hopping cries out triumphantly. Two kids come up to me, one gesturing wildly and the other bobbing his head to his MP3 player. The latter says nothing but hands me his headphones. I listen politely for 5 seconds and hand them back. ‘Is Taylor Swift, Sarah.’ He says. ‘Is cool” and carries on bobbing. The other kid pushes him out of the way. ‘Sarah, Sarah, I….’ I turn to him. ‘Sarah…I…Sarah….me…..er…er….Sister’ and recounts the rest of the story through the medium of mime. Think he’s trying to tell me that he had fallen into a pothole over the weekend, and had to have his sister pull him out. Pat him on the head and ask them both to sit down. Realise I’m supposed to teach them all about gravity and that my teaching assistant’s nowhere to be seen. Drop a pen a couple of times and hope they cotton on, with moderate success. Five students join me on the podium and start debating what the hell I’m on about in heated Cantonese. I look on gormlessly for about 10 minutes until I hear one of them say ‘Ne-u-to-ne’. My cue. ‘Yes. Yes. Newton. Right. The apple. On his head. Excellent’ and try to reclaim the podium. I draw some dodgy diagrams on the board, drop more pens (some by accident) and spend the rest of the lesson working on how to pronounce “Newton” with them. A tango rings out and it’s time to go. I walk through the hallway and bump into the absent teaching assistant. ‘Ah, Sarah, because today I had a meeting with the team leaders, so I couldn’t come.’ Damn those pesky team leaders, always foiling my plans to give vaguely comprehensible lessons. She smiles weakly. I nod and ask her if she’ll be there tomorrow. She looks worried. ‘Um. Maybe not’ (Chinglish for ‘Hell no’) ‘Because the team leaders…’ she starts, but then walks off. Another meeting, I assume. I wonder if the team leaders actually have names, or whether they’re just some higher power intent on ruining my life. I assume they do have names, but reckon I’m not told them in case I were to try to talk to them directly instead of through my immediate superior, thereby rupturing the entire fabric of the universe. Go away toad. Grab my things from the office. My friend hands me a pile of papers with ‘what are you wearing today?’ written on each page and the outline of a body over which students are supposed to draw clothes. She looks kind of disturbed. I leaf through the pages to see that most have been decorated with penises, boobs and piles of shit. I try not to giggle. ‘They’re only 6 years old.’ she laments. ‘Why are they all so evil?’ Dash out of the school and attempt to cross the road where the bus stop is, but it’s as big and scary as a motorway and some of the cars are driving in the wrong direction. A Chinese woman strides past me without a second thought so I run along beside her, using her as a kind of safety buffer against the traffic. Once we reach the other side I take a better look at my bodyguard, and notice that she’s heavily pregnant. I think fondly of the days where crossing the road only cost me a few teeth and not my whole moral compass. It’s gone dark within seconds so I look to the sky. A big gray smoggy cloud’s speeding towards me, like the end of the world monster thing in The Never-ending Story. It’s karma in the form of a vehement and completely unexpected thunderstorm and it’ll be here in seconds, so I start sprinting. I see my bus is in the distance and flail my arms while wailing at it but it drives off just as I reach my destination drenched in acid rain. I sulk until a girl takes pity on me and shields me from the storm with her umbrella. She starts speaking Mandarin – I think I can work with this. ‘My teacher said English people never leave the house without an umbrella, because it always rains in England.’ She looks me up and down as I sweep my soggy fringe aside. ‘I forget it at home’ I respond, putting some new vocab to good use. A lie, but I’m too damp to piece together the response; ‘English people see good weather and assume it’ll last for at least 5 seconds’. We exchange numbers and agree to be best of friends. By the time I get home, a swamp has formed all around us, and I enter my flat stinking of sewers, calves caked in mud. But at least toad’s loving it, he’s croaking away jubilantly like his paddling pool magically transformed itself into a water park. Shower, socialise, go out onto the balcony to try to shush toad (students are a lot more responsive), go back inside to read. Something flies into my hair. Jump up and wack my head about a couple of times until a cockroach plops onto the sofa and starts to scamper about next to me. Resist the urge to squeal and run away and instead pounce on it like a ninja (the kind that uses insecticide sprays on their victims). The winged ones have eggs, apparently, so I keep on spraying it well after it stops moving, as I don’t want to end up playing host to roach orphanage. But now I have to sit on the balcony as my flat smells as I’d imagine Napalm would and I don’t want to be found lying on the floor with my legs in the air like dear old mama roach. But I’ll be OK out here for an hour or so - I’ve got my book, I’ve got my laptop, I’ve got my toad. It was the year 2013. I’d arrived in Beijing after a year in the middle-of-nowhere Guangdong swamplands turned sea of industrial mega cities that is the Pearl River Delta. By day I was teaching adults English, and by night, mostly reviewing the city’s many bizarre bars that spoke to a gimmicky and perplexing wild-west-like nightlife scene that drew in fake-alcohol guzzling expats from all over the world like moths to the random Vampire Diaries-inspired watering hole. If the fake alcohol wasn’t getting you drunk, then the crazymaking jitteriness of a city careering full-speed into its high-octane future in a cloud of inescapable smog definitely would. Politically, things were eerie and confusing. South China Sea squabbles persisted, which meant signs banning Japanese everywhere. That outsider-adversarialism stretched over into how foreigners were perceived, with sly comments here and there of our corrupting influence pockmarking otherwise innocuous conversations. Not that many of the expats I hung out with initially seemed to care, really. They were in their own playground where anything and everything was possible. And their playground had a name: Sanlitun. It was also, most significantly, the year Xi Jinping rose to power. Hopes had been, in the world of clever, clever political analysts, that the changing of the guard would see even more opening up since the world’s economic miracle opened its doors to global trade in 1978. They were wrong. The year Daddy Xi rose to power was also the year I met my ride or die, Maria. She’s a sensitive and beautifully complex Hispanic Houstonian who comes out with stories like “and then he held up his gun and I said ‘Sir, put that gun down!’. And he did.” Here is an excavation blog of one of our very strange adventures from that monolithic period, written in trademark Kracs-in-her-twenties cynicism (annoying bits edited): ...It all started on Beijing’s Bar Street, known to some as Sanlitun, and to most as the vilest place on Earth. It boasts a cluster of wretched and vomit-filled bars serving counterfeit booze (ie. ethanol) and the expat scene’s burgeoning sex-pest community. I like to pretend that I avoid this place like the plague – it stands for pretty much everything I hate. But, well, people I know go, because people they know go, because, potentially, other people they know might go, and, I don’t know – that sheepy desire to belong a tribe is kind of hard to shake when you’re a million miles away from home. Besides, drinking ridiculously cheap mojitos served by a very pleasant Chinese man is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you on your night out – especially when you’re sitting in bar so small it fits no one but you and your three friends. Almost as fun as drinking at home – and with none of the stigma attached. A lone Italian man wanders in at one point, congratulates us all on being capable of enjoying ourselves without the company of men. Looks each one of us blearily in the eye, intrusively leans over and insists he’s a good guy. Responds to each sarcastic comment as if we were inviting him regale us with his musings on the Modern Woman. Does not clock that when we all look and edge away it means he’s unwelcome. Bartender asks him to leave us alone. Lone Italian ignores him and doubles his efforts. Bartender kicks him out. We cheer and thank our new found ally in the war against Sanlitun walking dead sex-pests by buying a billion mojitos. A few hours on and things are a bit blurry. There are other people, we’re somewhere else by Worker’s Stadium which is supposed to be another nightlife hub but is about as uplifting as a mortuary. Some people are shouting angry Obama-related stuff and someone starts singing Spanish songs. And we’re in something that approaches a club. I don’t know why, but there are barrels and potted plants. It’s that point in the evening where things become uninspiringly absurd and it’s time to go home. Friend’s swaying and needs to be propped up. Take her outside and she starts spraying mojitos and bile into the gutter. Everyone else leaves hoping to find life elsewhere in Sanlitun, if that's at all possible. Friend seems to have stopped vomiting. Time to play the “let’s pretend friend is sober so cab drivers won’t speed past us in disgust” game. Not before friend vomits on a Mercedes Benz – and then politely apologises to it. The Worker’s statue across the street looks rather pleased. Get into a taxi, friend falls asleep in the backseat, rousing occasionally to make little whinging sounds and apologise. We stop to drop off our two other friends, and which point she comes to, and, as we drive off, opens the window to pop her head out. She coughs, hiccups, and dribbles onto the outside of the window. Cab driver slams down on the breaks and starts shouting. Friend keeps dribbling, I try to apologise but he's not hearing me. He's losing it. I attempt to tap into his paternal instincts instead. “We are girls. Please take us home.” Friend echoes “please” between dribbles. But he continues to shout – belligerent, hateful, vindictive shouting. I try to stare to him out, hoping I appear both helpless and stubborn – which is close to how I’m feeling. I have no idea how I’d get friend home if he ejects us. But he points aggressively at friend, storms out of the car and pulls open our door. And out of no where, friend starts screaming. He goes still, gets back into the car and turns on the ignition. Friend has passed out again. I sit back and relax only to realise he’s taken a wrong turn. Lean towards him quizzically but he ignores me, and then pulls up in front of these vast iron and spiked gates behind which looms this monstrously brutalist building. I look out and there’s a huge hammer and sickle hanging over the entrance. I look closer and beneath it reads “Police Station.” There are posters dotted around Beijing with cute cartoon policemen and women smiling out at the masses with what looks like something close to parental adoration. This appears to be only measure ever taken to inspire trust in the long arm of the law. Cab driver slowly opens his door, and I’m not even thinking straight at all, I’m not thinking of all that stuff they say and that I’ve read, or that the worst that would happen is they’d make us stay the night, have us bribe them or whatever – like they’ve done to other expats – that chances are they don’t put girls down for dribbling out of windows. I’m not thinking at all – I just know it’s time to run. Shake friend furiously and I don’t know how but she manages to pull herself together and get out of the car. She grabs my hand and we start running. Cab driver is pacing at our rear, flailing his arms and screaming that we haven’t paid him but as we turn the corner he gives up. We wander around around abandoned tower blocks for what seems like hours (OK, probably about 10 minutes) until we find a main road, a new cab and a vague sense of closure. Epilogue Take friend back to her flat and walk home thinking about stuff. About expats, about escapism, about autocracy. I think of the signs on shop doors outlawing Japanese (and dogs) and how people I know don’t talk about it and about how quickly an entire nation can turn against another and how scary that is for everyone. I’m thinking proper deep stuff. But what’s really swilling round my mind is the single question: What the hell am I doing here?  SMZB, from the pit (2014. MIDI festival) |
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