Tag Archives: Shanghai

BBC China: My experience as a bridesmaid in China

Posted on by

特写：BBC 记者体验中国式婚礼

BBC新闻记者 约瑟芬•麦

 更新时间 2014年7月2日, 格林尼治标准时间15:51

维佳和新郎

新郎和新娘向新娘父母敬茶鞠躬

我七年前在上海居住的时候就认识了维佳,没想到我今年能有幸参加她的婚礼,还有份成为伴娘团的一员,一同折磨维佳的丈夫-来自英国韦尔斯的约翰.伍德伯里。

在王维佳出嫁当天, 我穿着一袭乳白色的长裙, 站在新娘家中的阳台上,看到三位西装笔挺、外表英俊的男士站在距离阳台一百米的地方。这无疑是一幕非常浪漫的画面。但是不久后就听到像机关枪一样的一阵响声，原来几百个炮仗投向了前来接新娘的新郎和他的伴郎们,作为欢迎他们的到来。而新娘、伴娘和新娘的家人在等待新郎来的时候，就像出战前的战士一样。

在中国的婚宴，新郎和新娘都需要向每一桌的宾客敬酒。

Continue reading here.

In English:

Had we maimed them? Three smart-looking men in suits had appeared 100m from the balcony where I was standing in a full length cream gown. It was a romantic scene. But moments later hundreds of small explosions had gone off sounding like a machine gun. Big red wheels of poppers suspended on a clothes drier greeted the groom and his best men as they tried to approach the apartment where my friend, the bride Wang Wei Jia 王维佳, us – her bridesmaids (阿姨) and her entire family lay in wait like combatants.

But had we gone too far and hurt them or even killed them, blowing them up with the traditional wedding day fireworks? It was impossible to see anyone outside any more because of all the smoke from the gunpowder.  “They have a strange way of treating the wedding party in China” I thought to myself.

A knock at the front door proved the groom had survived but if he was after a warm welcome he had come to the wrong place. The other bridesmaid, Li Yong Jiao 李永姣 leapt to the peep hole and demanded: “Who is it!?”

We knew full well who it was. We had been preparing for his arrival for two hours, but we were going to make him suffer before he could collect his bride. This was my introduction to a Chinese wedding.

I felt privileged to be asked to be maid of honour for my friend Wei Jia whom I met in Shanghai in 2007 when I was working for China Daily.

I didn’t know then that seven years later I would be demanding her boyfriend, John Woodberry from Wales, sing the words of the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to the tune of the Chinese national anthem, before I would let him across the threshold to fetch her for their wedding day.

Wei Jia told me to be tough. He had to be put through his paces and made to prove his love, she said.

I had been a bridesmaid three times before at British weddings but I could tell this was going to be unlike anything I had experienced. Testing the groom with press ups, Maths tests, and demands for declarations of love marked the first major difference of what I knew would be an incredible day.

For all the teasing of the beleaguered groom, the love and respect shown to Wei Jia’s parents was awe-inspiring. The mother of the bride has no role in a western wedding ceremony, unlike the bride’s father who is permitted to give his daughter away, escorting her down the aisle. So it was touching to witness the bride and groom bowing and thanking both parents for raising Wei Jia in a tea ceremony. Wei Jia had the chance to formally say goodbye to her mother as she left her old, unmarried life behind. I pitied western mothers who are denied this.

During the ceremony, the symbolic removal of the seed from the lychee in the sweet soup was the first of many reminders through the day of the children expected through the union. Another big difference, I thought. British people are too reserved to say something like “zao sheng gui zi”.

The bride changing dresses five times was another major difference to western weddings. As part of my role I became a doorman – forcing the changing room door shut at the hotel where the wedding took place so that enthusiastic friends and relatives did not barge in and see the bride undressed and then stand chatting to her, delaying proceedings.

I had been told another important task would be to stop the bride and groom drinking too much when they went to each table at the wedding banquet to be toasted by friends and family. I tried to make sure there was more “Gong xi!” than “Gan bei!” but it was a losing battle. And as the bride stormed around each of the 20 or so tables getting merrier and faster, my biggest challenge was keeping up with her to hold the train of her beautiful red and gold embroidered dress. Babies were picked up and kissed, frail, elderly relatives were leant down to and hugged with their shaky hands clutching glasses to clink with the bride and groom’s. Slowly the differences between East and West were evaporating. Two people in love were being celebrated by the people who loved them most.

As I practised the speech I would give later, I looked out of the window of the room in the Ritz Carlton in Shanghai’s financial district of Lujiazui where the bride and groom would sleep. I could see the Oriental Pearl Tower, built in 1994 as a symbol of the new China. Yet glancing over at the bed with its red sheets left covered with eggs, dates and nuts to symbolise fertility, and the characters for double happiness, it was a good reminder that China is taking its traditions into the future. One day, perhaps John and Wei Jia’s future son-in-law will disappear in smoke as he comes to collect his bride, but now when that happens I’ll be able to assure the bridesmaids – “Don’t worry, the groom will survive. In fact it will be the best day of his life”.

Expat life: I had a farm in Africa…

Posted on by
1
  • The expat ‘holiday lives’ kept under wraps

“Is that you when you were on holiday?” someone asked me last week at work when I let Shanghai out of the bag for a moment and discretely shared a picture of my life in China taken before I returned to London just under a year ago.

“No, that was my life,” I answered as I reflected on the image of me on my precious scooter I had had to leave behind.

In the picture I am happily coasting down the backstreets of Shanghai, taking in the sights of chickens being cooked alive by the roadside. It was an afternoon when washing was being maneuvered up high onto overhead telegraph cables, the gas man was doing his rounds cycling with a gas bottle on each side of his back wheel, a couple in pyjamas were chatting at a kiosk.

It was all so blissfully everyday to me. Not something to just write a postcard about or pack away in my suitcase with my souvenir chopsticks and suntan after two weeks.

It got me wondering how my friends in England can fully know me, without a grasp of the life I lived for four years.

The majority of new friends I’ve made since returning have a cursory understanding. Jo lived in China. She learnt Mandarin, or was it Cantonese?

But how often do ex-expats really let their life stories out of the bag? How often do they sit down and begin their tale, a la Karen Blixen’s, “I had a farm in Africa…”? Rarely, I would say.

Soon after returning to England, I was standing in a bar, in a circle of people comparing stories of eccentric behaviour they had recently witnessed. “A guy I sat behind at the cinema last weekend brought nachos in with him and ate them really loudly. Who does that?”, one girl said half-complaining, half relieved to have been exposed to such crazy shenanigans to bemoan in assemblies like this. Everyone laughed and shook their heads. Those crazy cinema-goers.

But she’d lost me. My mind had drifted back to a performance of Swan Lake I’d been to in Shanghai where the woman next to me was on her mobile phone the whole way through, describing in detail what was happening on stage to a friend at home.

I didn’t share my story. You have to ration your China. When I start a sentence “In China,” people’s eyes tend to glaze over. They’d much rather hear a funny anecdote from Cheltenham.

So when an expat friend visits London from Shanghai, it’s a chance to talk easily about our ‘holiday lives’. In the last month, three visitors have popped by regaling stories of international flights taken with emergency passports, TV shoots in remote parts of southern China, weekends wreck-diving in the Philippines – familiar currency.

With each of them, I have experienced things my friends at home would probably struggle to. But they will no doubt leave China one day and mothball their stories.

The stories will dwell in the Ngong Hills of the mind, only allowed out when in the company of other China expats or when we’re packed off mumbling to old people’s home.

“I had a flat in Shanghai, on the banks of Suzhou Creek,” I will tell a woman changing my bed pan one day as I busy myself applying lipstick to my eyebrows.

Josephine wrote a blog about her expat life for the Daily Telegraph for two years called Chelsea Girl in China.

My Beijing Olympics working for the Chinese media: Eye exercises, lip-synching and squatter loos

Posted on by
Reply

On top of the world: Josephine at Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' stadium in 2008

I remember thinking on my first day at the newspaper office where I was going to be for the Beijing Olympics, that I never imagined I would encounter the risk of peeing on myself at work.

For there in the new China Daily website office with its break-out zones, potted plants and brightly coloured ergonomic furniture, traditional squatter loos had been installed in the Ladies.

We may have been forging ahead with web pages, text alerts, and online broadcasting at our desks, but in the loos we were only a few porcelain steps up the evolutionary ladder from hitching up our skirts and going by the side of the road, or so it felt.

For the Beijing Games in 2008 I was called up from the Shanghai bureau to live and work at the main office of China’s state-run English national newspaper. I was to help edit stories for the China Daily website. It was a dream gig. Every expat living in China was trying to get themselves to the capital for the big event.

In the tradition of Communist work units, my accommodation was in a block of workers’ flats within the office compound. It took a bit of getting used to bumping into my boss in the lift when I was hungover on a Sunday morning. Three subsidised meals a day were served in the canteen.

Continue reading here.

Shanghai state of mind: The battle for total recall

Posted on by
Reply

Shanghai street names are starting to evade my memory

“I can’t remember our address!”, I told my friend in a panic the other day.

 

I had completed a familiar roll call of the Shanghai knowledge in my mind.

 

Everything was present and correct except the address details we used to give taxi drivers for the last apartment block we shared.

 

Like someone with Alzheimer’s in the family I find myself testing my Shanghai memory to check nothing is escaping my recall.

 

My fear is that the day I can’t remember the pin number of my Chinese bank card or my Chinese mobile number, my reality living abroad will have died.

 

If you can’t remember the road junctions of the places you lived, you’ve probably moved onto another juncture in your life, but I’m not ready to forget.

 

Six months after leaving I find myself struggling to remember the names of all my Chinese colleagues and chatting to one in Mandarin last week, the words I used to have at my disposal have been disposed of, mothballed.

 

When my friends tell me of places they’ve been recently I rack my brains. Is Changle Lu near Changde Lu? Did I ever know that at the time?

 

Of course, it worked the other way too. I remember freaking out when I was living  in Shanghai talking about London and couldn’t remember what changes I would need to make to get to Marble Arch on the underground. Bus numbers were familiar friends whose names I had temporarily forgotten.

 

I also felt like a geriatric once when confronted with my first ticket turnstile at the Heathrow underground. Did you take the ticket out before you walked? The difference was I knew I would reclaim my London knowledge one day. My Shanghai knowledge could remain in Lost Property.

 

But just for the record, Zhenning Lu, Dongzhuanbang Lu. Phew.

The cold turkey of a Chinese massage junkie

Posted on by
3

 

Standing in a room in a basement in Shepherd’s Bush this week stripping in front of a stranger, I thought “Hmm, I wouldn’t have done this before I went to China”.

 

It’s not that I have fallen down on my luck or chosen to supplement my income.

 

It was all in the name of finding a good massage.

 

I lamented with an NLE (Never Left England) friend recently that you cannot find a decent, good value massage parlour in London and he stared blankly at me, before his jaw sank and he wore the ‘You’ve changed’ expression that is becoming familiar.

“At one point I looked behind to see that my guy with his elbow in my shoulder blade had a mobile phone in his hand that he was straining to look at”

 

But the fact is that cushy expat lifestyles in China revolve around pampering and massage.

 

I’m not ashamed to say I went for a massage most weeks and once on a particularly stressful day went for a foot massage in my lunch break. I’ve been slathered in oil and cupped. I’ve been covered in seaweed, sanded down and massaged by a blind man. But generally, I was put in a pair of oriental pyjamas so I looked like something from The Mikado, and then pushed and prodded all over for an hour. A full body Chinese massage cost £8.

The 'Mute's Gate' to 'Wind Mansion' needs opening my Traditional Chinese Medicine instinct tells me

One of the few low points came when my friend and I found that our favourite place was full and we dashed to another, untested establishment looking for a hit. The smell of sandalwood and jasmine made us hopeful, the soothing pipe music even more so. But a short while after we lay down side by side and two young guys walked in, we heard them discussing our bodies to each other in Mandarin. At one point I looked behind to see that my guy with his elbow in my shoulder blade had a mobile phone in his hand that he was straining to look at.

 

But over time, I became hooked on massages.

 

And to cope with life back in London after four years in Shanghai I need to find somewhere I can go to re-up.

 

Ideally I’m looking for a Chinese lady who isn’t afraid to use her elbow on my spine and doesn’t shy away from cracking my neck – the one, two, three, jerk move that looks like it might be used to kill a turkey but releases a rush of endorphins.

 

I need someone who can dig her thumbs into the back of my head, will hit me on the head with the bottom of a clenched fist and forcibly separate my vertebrae. And hell, I’ll take an eyebrow stroke and earlobe tickle for good measure if it’s going. Is it really too much to ask?

 

Pretty vacant

Posted on by
Reply

 

“You sound more British. It’s nice,” said my French friend with whom I was flatmates in Shanghai, when I met with her last week.

 

Until then, no-one had pointed out any change that had occurred in me since returning to the UK after four years in Shanghai.

 

To me, I have always had an unmistakably standard southern British accent, which if anything, tended to sound ridiculously plummy around Kiwis, Americans, South Africans and Australians in Shanghai.

 

But then, it is easy to pick up an Australian twang in the Asia Pacific region, and this can make you adopt a cockney sound to boot. I discovered this when I first watched myself presenting on the TV programme, Shanghai Live. I sounded like a cross between Jo Brand and Sid James.

 

When you are used to speaking English to people for whom English is a second or third language, you learn to speak slowly and use fewer Britishisms  too. Once I described someone as “stocky” to a Chilean friend and she burst out laughing, saying how much she loved British terms. My parting gift to her was a list of more words we are fond of in England, including lanky, chavvy, nippy and of course the best of all, dodgy.

 

But if anything, I am struck by little habits that I have not yet shrugged off from Shanghai life (not that I want to).

 

For one, I still look both ways when crossing a one-way street. This is a life-saving reflex you develop early on in China because you never know where a scooterist on a silent electric bike ( a ‘silent assassin’) will be coming from.

 

But the main quirk is that I always open the doors of public loo cubicles (more on Chinese loos here and here) extremely cautiously. I suppose it is natural since I have been conditioned to expect to walk in to a supposedly vacant loo only to find a woman sitting on the loo, or even worse hovering over a squatter.

Walking into Chinese cubicles that are occupied, despite appearing vacant has scarred me for life

I never did get down to the bottom (ahem) of why Chinese ladies so often use loos without locking them. I would often walk in on colleagues having been given the green light of the ‘vacant’ sign, only to wish they had taken the time to save me the sight and the embarrassment. I imagine it comes down to the very flimsy concept of privacy in China.

But the mental damage has clearly been considerable as, even though I’m back in the UK, I cannot  trust a loo that says it’s vacant.

 

What counts for weird these days?

Posted on by
Reply

 

One of the best things about living abroad is the constant element of surprise.

Living in a culture that is not your own, throws up constant questions and wonders.

I suspect it’s one of the main reasons people stay abroad. It certainly was for me.

 

Amanda Riske breaking hearts and hips in Fuxing Park

When you return home, one of the problems is that your definition of “weird” has irrevocably changed.

For a good deal of people back home a shop changing its opening hours or a bus route altering is the height of irregularity.

When you’re an expat it’s not.

 

Spotted in Shanghai, by Amanda Riske

A reader in Saudi Arabia, for example, wrote to say that he recently encountered a situation where a colleague was jailed for two nights in Jedda because he was caught in a tea shop with a girl he was neither married nor related to. Now that’s bizarre, if you’re a westerner.

 “I had Google-translated ‘I like your exercises, can I do them with you?’ into Chinese, but I do not think he can read.”

Luckily, an American expat in Shanghai is keeping a video log of the weird and wonderful things she encounters every morning in her last seven months before leaving.

So far they include doing the ‘twist’ in Fuxing Park, hula hooping on the Bund and doing eye-catching exercises on Panyu Lu.

Amanda Riske, a Maths teacher at the Western International School of Shanghai, has lived in Shanghai for two-and-a-half years. She began running at 5am a few weeks ago in preparation for a half marathon in Xiamen this weekend.

 

Amanda Riske tries out unconventional exercises

She said: “When running that early you see such cool things and a very different side of Shanghai. It really makes me love the city even more.”

She was partly prompted to make videos so that she could share them with expat friends  who have left the city, giving them their daily dose of Shanghai crazy.

Her most popular video shows Amanda and a Shanghai local doing their exercises together in the street- vigorous hip rotations. 

She had seen him doing his morning exercise on her way to work for a year and a half and decided one day to join him. She said: “I had Google-translated ‘I like your exercises, can I do them with you?’ into Chinese, but I do not think he can read. So I just started in on his routine with him and he played it so cool.”

Asked what she is hoping to achieve, she said: “I am hoping to show people some of the beauty in this city, and have some fun doing it all.

“Running early in the morning I have seen such a different character of the people here- sweet, friendly, honest and just peculiar in their daily routines.”

You can watch Amanda’s morning “silliness” in Shanghai here.

 

Life after China

Posted on by
1

Spitting and smoky bars were two of the things I told myself I would not miss when I moved back to the UK from Shanghai just over a month ago.

On the other side: My former Shanghai flatmate and I in London

The lack of right of way given to pedestrians on zebra crossings and the appalling internet speed also figured highly on the list I compiled.

Among the things I knew I would miss were China friends, the convenience of life, late opening times, having an ayi (cleaner), massages, my favourite Chinese food and the fabric market – where you can get tailored dresses, coats and suits made at ridiculously low prices.

“How come Family Mart sells vibrators but not headache tablets?”

It was a fair assessment and explains why I can be found in central London asking Chinese women in nail bars where I can get a massage. More often than not they reply with thick London accents and suspicious expressions that they don’t know, or even worse, that they would “try Soho”.

It seems that wherever we live we are always searching for answers.

When I was asked two years ago if I would like to write a blog for Telegraph Expat, one thing I was sure would not be a problem was finding things to write about. There were dozens of questions to mull over every day, such as “Why don’t scooterists wait until the traffic lights turn green to go?”, “How come Family Mart sells vibrators but not headache tablets?”, “Why is that building going to be pulled down when it’s only been there for five years?” and “Why do people speak so loudly to each other?”.

But it’s easy to forget that there were other questions that were ever-present. “How much longer should I stay?” and “How will it feel when I leave?” are questions that occupy most expats’ thoughts. As another former expat now back in Europe said to me recently, “It’s nice not to be asked how much longer you’re going to be here.”

There is a sense of assurance about being back home. It is where I am supposed to be.

“Who is Brian Cox?”

But, while thinking about what I would and would not miss about Shanghai, I forgot to consider what I’ve missed while I’ve been away for four years. I have had moments in the last month where I have felt as if I’ve just landed from another planet.

I have asked myself, ‘”What’s The One Show?”, “What’s Daybreak?”, “Who is Brian Cox?”, “Why does everyone care so much about that guy who was on Working Lunch?” and “Why is every man, woman and child in ‘skinny’ jeans (not a good look in a country as overweight as ours)?”. I puzzle over when Kirstie Allsopp’s domination of the TV listings began. I thought JLS sounded like a clothing brand until I was told it’s the name of a boy band. And when did self-service check-outs spring up everywhere?

I’ve learnt to keep quiet if I don’t know what people are talking about. Otherwise they think that by speaking louder and more slowly I’ll suddenly be invested with the cultural trivia I “should” know.

I also censor myself when people around me are talking about good places they have been on holiday or “strange” behaviour they have seen in public. Why ruin someone’s story by telling them I once lived three or four hours away from deserted tropical beaches or that people walking backwards in pyjamas in the park were the stuff of my lunchbreaks? The best advice comes from other former expats. The father of a friend, who spent many years in Hong Kong advised sagely, “If it’s a conversation about Madagascar, join in. If it’s about Magaluf, don’t.”

I try not to start sentences, “In Shanghai” or “In China”. I feel sure that it will make it sound like I’m bragging. No-one wants another speech about how great China was after all, I tell myself.

“Only in England”

I have heard it said a lot that counter-culture shock is worse than culture shock. Before you encounter them yourself, the struggles people have adjusting back in their home countries are the fodder of smug expat tittle tattle. I can’t say it’s all that bad, although in a similar way that people have Bad China Days and exclaim “Only in China” or “This is China”, I find myself muttering, “Only in England”. The dysfunctional nature of so much of our infrastructure and the uptight nature of people I can now see as being typically British.

But I also find myself being proud of some British traits as well. The generally stoic, even jolly nature of people dealing with the infrastructure problems, and the eccentric antics of people when they do let go, I witness as an anthropologist might. I also have an appreciation of the simple things that I may have taken for granted before I left, such as a nice meal with my family or a quick chat on the phone with my niece without the need for headphones and a webcam.

I’m pleased to say there is life after China. I only have to think of how much I would be looking forward to returning to the UK for Christmas to know that I made the right choice in coming back.

There are adjustments to get through. You cannot flick a switch and be the person you were when you left. You inevitably have to let some things go. Convenience has been one of them. I have had to come to terms with the fact that I won’t be dashing out to buy nails from a hardware shop at 10pm on a Sunday again any time soon. Likewise, the Telegraph Expat blog I have enjoyed writing so much has also had to come to an end.

Meanwhile, I will persevere in the pursuit of a cheap Chinese massage, deftly skirting the realm of shops with tinted windows and red lights.

And from now on the sound of someone spitting will transport me back to my life in Shanghai as quickly as a smoke-filled room or a smelly drain. But I wouldn’t change that for all the episodes of reality shows, unflattering fashions and one-hit wonders that I’ve missed while I’ve been away.

This appears here on the Telegraph’s Expat site.

Becoming a born-again tourist

Posted on by
Reply

 

The best thing about knowing that you will soon leave a place is that you suddenly start appreciating it even more than before. I’m a born-again tourist. I’m manically chronicling every part of Shanghai life that I ever took for granted, from abuse of zebra crossings and red lights to my route home on nights out, my favourite restaurants and all the colourful street life (not in the Randy Crawford sense) that makes the city so great. Today, I even bought an ‘I loveShanghai’ t-shirt (from Giordano,627 East Nanjing Road). Why not?

I'm a born-again tourist

Last week was a national holiday, and perhaps one of the best staycations I have had. I think it’s fair to say I am having the best tourist experience possible. I already know all the best things to see and do, I’m not freaked out about being in China, I can communicate with people, I have lots of outgoing, fun people to do things with and a choice of either scooter or bicycle to get around the place. It’s also the best season to be here.

Click here to continue reading…

 

(Published first on Telegraph Expat on Monday, October 10, 2011.)