 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.
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