Filial piety

竹叶青 (literally "the green of bamboo leaves") is the name of an infused wine as well as a variety of tea. At the foot of Emei Mountain, after an arduous two day hike, I thought about which gifts to take home and one of the first I thought about to buy gifts for was my father-in-law. He likes his wine and tea and 竹叶青 tea was a specialty of the region. I vetted various tea types in a half hour long tasting session and bought a packet specially for him. Meanwhile, I was reading the second novel in a kungfu trilogy, The Return of the Condor heroes, in which the protagonist discovers that those who raised him for part of his youth also were elemental in the death of his father. The phrase 养育之恩 often comes up ("the grace of being raised"), which is the obligation to a child to be repaid to those who raise him, and this competes in his heart for a desire to avenge his father's death （杀父之仇不共戴天 literally "you cannot share a sky with those who killed your father"). It's fair to say that the concept of filial piety (孝顺) infuses the culture here, these being two examples of many. This refers to the obligations to your parents for their raising you. In China these were codified by that man Confucius, 2500 years ago. In western culture we rely on individual enlightenment to the necessity to take care of our parents. In the Orient, parents expect care, money and support while the children are educated from a young age their filial responsibilities. In the West children will often say they didn't choose to be born, and parents would feel awkward with overt support. It's two different systems of social expectation and obligation. Flying back from Chengdu, a China-based American author, Zak, sat next to me for the flight and one of the topics we touched on was filial piety. We both felt increasing bond and responsibility with our homeland based elders. There was the irony of desiring to be abroad but feeling increasingly obliged to serve those at home. For me it manifests in serving my local "parents" and my imminent move back to New Zealand. I drink the tea and watch my father-in-law for his appreciation. It's nice tea. It's beautiful tea. You place the leaves in a cup and pour water on them. They all rise to the top and then progressively drop to the bottom. Some leaves drop a little then float back to the top. It's all a dance of water and leaves. And then you drink.

Heat and health

July and August are the "big heat" of Guangzhou. The temperature camps in the thirties and we start using our air conditioner on a regular basis and cold showers become de rigeur. Compared to many of my colleagues, we start using our A/C fairly late. We're lucky to have an apartment facing the right way with the an air current that can cool for the early and late parts of the summer. I only got used to regular cold showers last year surprisingly - I'm not sure what took me so long to adjust to what is a very natural part of living in a subtropical climate.

The rise of summer brought the end to my gym-going days. My local gym, just to recap, is a cheap, er, simple Chinese-style gym without the bells and whistles of air conditioning and fully working machines. But that just means that in Guangzhou I have two parts of the year: swimming and running. I've spoken about Chinese swimming pools before. For swimming, I'm again thankful for my breaking my knee: I can now swim further than before I arrived in China, currently I can swim 30 lengths and I could do more if, in another Chinese quirk, the pool didn't need to rest between 11:15 and 2:30pm. (Most pools have sections of the day that they're open: 6:00am - 7:30am, 9:15am - 11:15am etc.) Unfortunately for the swimming part of the year, it coincides with the school summer holidays which turns the pools into dumpling soup, which is almost impossible to swim lengths in.

My physical fitness aside though immunity and other imbalances are big issues. I more often than not have mouth ulcers; I get rashes, frequent colds, the occasional random welts etc. This might seem odd: I'm fit; I don't eat badly; sleep reasonably well; don't smoke; drink regularly but very moderately. But a discussion with Chinese in Guangzhou often broaches ideas of another kind of health, which come from Traditional Chinese Medicine. People here talk about "internal heat", "dampness" "hot" and "cold" foods etc. regularly and how they affect their health. This is perplexing to newly arrived teachers. Students avoid potato crisps because they're "hot" even when they're cool. My scheduler couldn't come into work one day because she had watermelon the previous day which was too "cold". Me, well, anyone who's given me a foot rub, massage or taken my pulse (chinese style) has said I have a problem with "dampness" or "damp heat".

There are "cooling" herbal teas available in 7/11 stores as well as dedicated herbal tea stores to help bring down this "heat", and you could cook your own Chinese herbal medicine, but there are a host of other treatments to expel those toxins and restore balance. I'd had "scraping" before after a masseur said it'd be beneficial to reduce the "dampness" and having these symptoms again I thought I'd give "cupping" a try. My loukam (my sister-in-law's husband) accompanied me in the process: You lie face down on a bed while a technician heats the cups and places them on your back. The cooling air in the cups sucks the cups onto the back, drawing your skin in quite considerably and over time the blood rises to the surface. The placing is quite an interesting process, but they have to leave the cups on your back from about ten minutes and that is not exactly comfortable. The process leaves marks on your back, too, the more dampness you have the more it leaves a mark. In the photo you can compare the difference ;-)

There are people who are skeptical about the whole system of Chinese medicine as well as parts, but there are habits which regardless of your convictions on the subject can be useful in different environments. I'm happy to try them out and see what happens.

Who I want to be

It is one of those questions. It's a teaser; obvious, sometimes pretentious; amnesiac, solipsistic and navel-gazing but it comes up more than often: Who am I? What am I here to do? It is the question for your late teens and twenties, that perhaps gets forgotten in your thirteen, before biting back with avengance in one's forties and then slowly suffocated in simplicity there on in, unless you're young at heart, and want to relive the tangle.

A quote I often raise is that of my old boss, Ben, who after I took him out to the "cheap and nasty" Sichuan restaurant out the back of our centre said to me, beer in hand: "Oh, you're thirty. That's cool. You know who are then." Baijiu in my glass, his words swirled in my head. I was about to turn 31 at the time. In amongst some professional turmoil. At the time I thought it was an observation to observe. And with time it is something I've often found to be true. (I could launch into several character discussions on others but I'd like to let myself have my moment of navel-gazing here.)

I think back to my twenties - financially and career-wise quite a wasted period - and reflect on the full range of stuff I got into. Between the ages of 21 and 29, I did vegetarianism, self-employment, nudism, tree-planting, taoism, volunteered at a stroke survivor charity, was on the unemployment benefit, had some great different parties, had my first relationship (out of two in my life), picked things out of rubbish, made a short drama and performed it on stage, sustained a belief that I was going to be in a hostage situation that I was going to be a hero in, dyed my hair green and got drunk for the second time in my life (not in that order). This blog started in 2004 following some of that but some of it wasn't there because it had no context. Some can't really even have been published because it just doesn't fit in any commentary but still amuses me to think back on. I actually did pee into 2L bottles that I kept under my computer desk (it was for making garden fertliser). I think it's these thoughts that I cut a little slack to the shiftless youth that I manage. 

Many of these things were shaping, but I think the one thing hasn't changed is who I wanted to be. One of the great consolations of ageing it's that I'm pretty close to what I've always wanted to be. Responsible, clear on the things that are important to me, healthy, self-aware, forgiving. But life turns and swirls again. It's on reflection that I would even notice these things in the hurly-burly of life. It always pays to carry a mirror.  

Humility

In Chinese philosophy, as well as many of the great philosophies and religions of the world, there has been an emphasis on human virtues placed equal to, and sometimes in the superior position to, truth itself. In the past this annoyed me somewhat: the conduct of a single man matters little to the Great Truth. But definitely older, hopefully wiser, I see things differently. Knowledge has always been different to wisdom. I remember trying to explain the original Pope quote "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." in high school, and not succeeding. I recently had an Internet interaction with a smart friend of mine, decrying the lack of humility people feel, how they're so quick to assert their truth on others. And all the time he was holding a truth so strongly that he'd like it to be held highest without question. I can only return to the wisdom of the greatest religions that might occasionally put the greatest truth subordinate to individual virtue, and seek to be silent and humble in the face of conflicting truths.

Hey, coach!

It's funny to think about bosses and managers. Before my current position, I hadn't had that many, just Reg and Murray. In my current company I've had a whole carnival of managers, Julie, Kathryn, Alan, Eddie, Ben, Linda, Philip, Amy, Don, another Amy, David, another Philip as it goes in this kind of company with a matrix-style structure. There have been some good ones, some god-awful ones, some talented but tarnished, some clueless but kind. Only one or two have really matched the my-way-or-the-highway approach that perhaps we traditionally think of bosses. Almost all the managers have rightly seen themselves as facilitators and organisers. But there's one role that is awfully rare among them all  and that is being a coach. In that list above, I can only think of one who'd get close to it. And I'm nowhere near being included.

The thought of coaching makes me think back on all the staff I've ever managed and never managed to impact meaningfully. I'm sure I trained them well, so that our students would learn, but my team didn't necessarily learn much from me. Often I thought the best thing I could do was model how to do something and model how to think. And sure enough that did change behaviours in my centres but I'm pretty sure that wasn't an internalised change. I can see that more as my old school was shut. Those who moved on, just moved to a new environments with new behaviours.

And then I think about those I wish I'd been able to get through to better: Apple, Brendan, Clive, David, James, Louise, Naf, Sophia, Steven and others. I sometimes metaphorically hit myself in the head with why they couldn't see the need to change. Of course, just as I see that others should change in some way, so do others look at me and think them same. Why is he so resistant? Can't he see what he's doing? He's just bothering himself and others needlessly!

Next week I'll be doing a Coaching course, and it feels like something I've always lacked. The pre-reading is great reading. It is focussed on self-limiting beliefs, and even ideas from quotes from philosophers. Here are some of the nice lines within:

"In 60AD Epictetus noted that men are not worried by things but their ideas of things."

"Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Montaigne claim that illusion and self-deception are an integral part of being human."

"Ellis coined the term "musturbation" to describe behaviour that is absolutist and dogmatic, and revolves around self-repeated "musts", "oughts" and "shoulds".

And my favourite: "As many authors noted, staying rational is a lifelong pursuit"

But as I read the hows and whys of coaching I get the feeling that I too have so many self-limiting beliefs. How can I advise someone when my own sleep is bothered by fretting? I'm remembering a theme in the Exorcist, as you do, that perhaps I cannot exorcise a demon till I've at least hacked through a few of my own. (I've been suffering a mild cold and re-watched the Exorcist yesterday. The key theme that I thought about is how one of the priests, who was wracked with his own guilt, couldn't free the possessed girl because he wasn't "clean" enough. The demon possessed him and he jumped from a window to end the saga.)

So far this latest program of management training seems to be the most useful. The previous session was very thought-provoking and I'm looking forward to more of the same when I head to Shenzhen on Tuesday.

Centre Karma

Yesterday was a good day. One month on from taking the reins at my latest centre (which for the purpose of this piece, I'll call centre A)  and now I feel like I've got a better feel for communicating, controlling and accomplishing. This is the same place that three years ago filled me with dread to go to because things were so negative: Any push had push back; Any difference was contested. It was something from a centre culture and intermingled the legacy of things gone by. Things are so much easier in centre B, which I moved back to manage in September last year. It was my first centre as a teacher in China - generally a happy office, out-there kinda people; systems were never perfect but heart made up the difference. When I returned almost all the people had changed (they weren't strangers because I kept a connection with it) - yet the feeling remained quite similar. Centre A had the same phenomenon: in a centre staff of over 40 people, only 4 had remained but the mood was the same. Even though teachers were placed randomly, centre A seemed to be constantly dealt British teachers. Centre culture is rather interesting: Just like we change all the atoms and cells of our body every seven years (apparently), centres have particular habits, attitudes and beliefs that are transmitted unconsciously. My own take on this is that there are influencers and events that create these. Centre A for example started with a series of different managers coming and going. Even when stable (when I first arrived), you got the feeling that people were waiting for the next person to come in. Whether by karma or just common misfortune, it had another run of four different education managers in the last 10 months, of which I'm the fourth. In that way, the culture can be quite adaptive, for people to get through and keep themselves moving forward despite the environment. But centre culture can be a selfish, conservative thing. It doesn't like change. It can be antagonistic to cooperation and commitment. And then the next question how can you change centre culture. You can't just tell people to change their beliefs and attitudes. Leadership, both by the manager and people who can sway by word or example, is the only way to coax things into the direction that is beneficial to achieving the goals of the whole. Changing topic slightly, I'm usually proud of my ability to retain staff. But I'm secretly happy I'm losing one of the teachers from centre A and in a way I think I've learned from my mistakes. The simple truth is that you don't want to retain everyone; not everyone is good long term for the company. In the past, I've been assertive with expectations but keen not to escalate discipline formally. Formal discipline with written warnings etc. are difficult to do while not affecting motivation, trust and morale. I've had teachers in the past who did things that were not acceptable that I didn't write up because I didn't want it staining the atmosphere and straining the relationship. Maybe I just lacked the confidence to pull it off in an objective yet sympathetic way before. The teacher I'm losing I heard about when they arrived last year. Her manager came to visit me and my broken knee and mentioned her issue, a common archetype among our staff: Decent teacher, likes helping and chatting with students, too casual though, disregards administration and manager feedback, poor organisation, lacks punctuality. It's a dilemma to teaching managers because students like these teachers; the core business is keeping students happy. And they view work in China differently to the managers: "I'm here to teach and have a good time." The key of course is that they have the right consistent expectations from the start, and she had had three different managers. Pretty much from day one with me in the centre, I stated to the whole staff my expectations, then did friendly reminders to her when she slipped (which didn't take long, regrettably). And then we went to an action plan shortly after when nothing changed. Then when she failed that two weeks later, I gave a verbal warning, saying that the next step would be to write it up and explained the discipline procedure. The infractions she was doing were small but the mistake is not following through on what she said she was going to do and do the work that all team members were obliged to do. After one month with me, she said she didn't want to renew her contract. We do have a decent rapport although I'm sure she doesn't like me as a manager - too stressful, I'd presume although she'd never tell me. But she was a stress-point for me too. Management life is too stressful to have people cause needless anxiety and stress and I'm glad she made the decision she did. Incidentally, she did everything in her action plan for a whole week - the first time I'd seen it. I'm happy that I found my confidence in these situations and I've started to be more realistic and direct in situations like this.

Rivertown

Kaiping has been a familiar sounding town name for me. It was one of the many nearby cities I learned the names of once I started telling people I was headed for Guangzhou. Previously many of my NZ-Chinese friends had claimed to hail from Guangzhou but soon as I asked some of them about good places to live they changed their answer to their real hometowns, the smaller satellite cities around Guangzhou: Foshan, Zhongshan, Kaiping etc. Kaiping is around 2 hours out of Guangzhou, with a different culture and recent history. And it's a gem of a little town to visit. Kaiping has only 600,000 people, straddles two rivers and is one of the towns comprising the Siyi region (literally "the four counties"). Their language is similar to Guangzhou Cantonese but it isn't mutually comprehensible (the locals learn Guangzhou cantonese as it's the lingua franca for the Guangdong and some of Guangxi, though). The Siyi region, historically, is famous for a lot of things. For some reason, this stretch of land produced a disproportionate number of people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who search for their fortune abroad. Most commonly it was the gold mines of San Francisco but it's likely that a fair few headed for Otago as well. They left as single men with no dependents and, if they returned, they came back with their fortune to get married and have a family. But they didn't just bring money; they brought back western architectural ideas. They put a lot of that money into making "diaolou" style houses, often called "watchtowers" in English. During this time there was a lot of banditry in the countryside and these imposing taller buildings ostensibly were to protect. But most people can see a little bit of "keeping up with the Jones" about it - if one side of the town had one of these it obliged the other side to follow suit, if they could. People then gave their homes names, put in all sorts of roman domes and Arabian motifs. Whereas Macau and Shanghai have their western colonial period buildings, Kaiping colonized itself with a mishmash of extraordinarily foreign designs and ideas 100 years ago. One building that we could enter was complete with a sitdown toilet and bathtub on every level. And for the visitor that's where things start to get interesting. Any bus ride through the countryside results in glimpses through the trees of old, but very unchinese, buildings. Every building a new idea. Walking around. Perhaps even cycling around. Exploring backstreets has never been so much fun. The visitor-unfriendly side is that people rarely go to Kaiping city itself to see the watchtowers (or go to spas), they'd either drive themselves there or take tours direct from the bigger cities like Guangzhou. After we got there we were appalled that it required a bit of work to figure out transport, which revolved around routine buses. What made up for this was the helpfulness of the people (almost the most helpful I'd seen in China). One guy who worked at the bus station walked us around the streets to different places to solve one of our problems, transportation to a spa. Once we figured out that complicated transportation we gave it a go and it went perfectly with the unexpected help of another fellow: We got off a bus at a town near the spa complex. We'd been told that we needed to catch a motorbike over to the spa but were a little unsure of how to do that. A man from a shop saw us and asked us where we were going. We explained and he whistled over a motorbike, grunted at the driver and he took us there. We took the driver's cellphone number and once we were finished at the spa, gave him a call to pick us up. It went like clockwork, which is always a good feeling when you're travelling.  The watchtowers, the spas and our chief purpose, to attend the wedding banquet of a friend, were all wonderful. The watchtowers will stay in my mind for a while I think. Nowhere else in China did people go in such numbers abroad at that time. Nowhere else in China did they come back in this kind of style. Originally there were 3000 watchtowers in the region, with 1833 still standing. May history prevail.

Fourth Uncle

I can remember my first encounter with Fourth Uncle (Sei kaufu, middle of the photo). It was at my brother-in-law's wedding, which was probably my second trip to Qingyuan. I was still very "new" and tried to be as active and sociable as possible. Also I was introduced left, right and centre to all branches of a fairly large family. In a wedding banquet there are multiple rounds of each meal with guests eating in one, seeing the bride and groom and leaving but as I was staying, and also someone different I'd visit multiple rounds. Anyway, so after my first initial lunch of rice, vegetables, eggs and brandy, I went to rest and sober up a little upstairs. Barely twenty minutes went by when I was called back down because my future wife's "kaufu" (mother's brothers, i.e. maternal uncles) had arrived and wanted to meet me. I went down to be introduced by about seven people, two of whom were kaufu or their nephews. I'd unfortunately already been recognised as having some semblance of holding my drink and had my glass immediately filled with baijiu (稻花香) and told that I should knock it back in politeness. I did and then was asked a multitude of questions in heavily accented mandarin about New Zealand and myself. The most enterprising question asker was Sei Kaufu, the fourth maternal uncle. Always with warmth and with a huge grin (not captured in the photo, regrettably). And it has been that way ever since. He's always the man to smile and welcome and shake my hand. The one to always come out with a question from left field to fill the lack of topics that sometimes occurs, or rehash the old ones to ply a new angle. He's curious, warm and engaging even though a little glum when not talking. He's one of the ones that makes me look forward to family gatherings, as we've had over the last couple of weeks for Chinese New Year. His home is a certain visit most years as he was born on the sixth day of the lunar year, an appropriate time to double as a gathering day as any, when everyone is in town. As my Chinese sojourn reaches closer to an ending, I start thinking that it might be one of the last that I see some of them, like Sei Kaufu. He's not young, probably close to seventy. He's probably too fond of the drink at that age too. I've stayed long enough to crave the closeness to people here as I do with people in my home country. I wish Sei Kaufu longevity, happiness and health.

Limbo

We sat down together in a small classroom together:

"Are you feeling OK?"

"I'm really embarrassed. I don't know where it came from, really," he said.

He'd walked into the office that morning. It hadn't been a bad start to the day. There wasn't any conflict with the wife. There was cooler weather, too, pleasant and refreshing. But arriving on his first day of work, his computer monitor didn't work. Beyond his belief, rage burst from his mouth. His fists struck the desk. He swung the office door back open and still anger coursed out of his mouth.

I missed the eruption – not even hearing it despite being next door. But coincidentally I came into the office just after to see his colleagues doing everything they could to make sure there was a solution: an alternative computer wasn't taking his log-in but they kept trying; another staff member was checking another computer still; and another one was fiddling with his monitor. I went to his computer, bent down and noticed the plug had come out from the powerpoint, plugged it back in and started his computer.

 

Back in the small classroom, he talked about his frustration. Just like me his wife had been applying for immigration but it was still on the immigration service system as "Received" despite having been received 8 months ago.

"I'm just sick of being here," he continued. He'd been in China for almost four years, had adapted well, had got married. I haven't been ever sick of being here but perhaps the bigger problem making him sick was just not being in control of the future, to continue life to the next step. He was frustrated but didn't want to tell his wife as she was tense enough about the big move as it was (she was the one being uprooted) and couldn't tell friends who wouldn't understand. And it was awkward to talk to me because I was his boss, and worse, I'd already got out of the same terrible limbo which he was stuck in.

 

Our two immigration processes have been a huge contrast. Ours was shorter (we applied after them but received approval before him) but was high on torment; his is only getting longer but has complete systemic indifference and apathy – he hadn't heard a word.

 

We submitted our application shortly after coming back from Bali last year but from the start it was a special kind of administrative torture. We'd gone to an office specialised in immigration to get one document only to find upon application it wasn't up to requirement and having to repeat it. Then having formally applied, we had to prove our documents and ourselves again and again. In two of the oddest demands, I had to provide my half-siblings certified birth certificates to confirm that they weren't my children, and my wife had to prove her birth, because her certified birth certificate wasn't enough.

 

We were asked to provide correspondence for our residential address for 2013 which we didn't have: "Correspondence is mandatory evidence," "Without correspondence it is difficult to proceed with your application," our case manager told us. It didn't look that way in the Application Guidebook we had but her reading of it was all that mattered. And this mantra of hers set in motion an ill-advised series of communication. I gave more evidence and then asked in a stream: what more we could give to make up for omission, if it was difficult to proceed could we suspend our application, or if we could withdraw our application would we get the money back to apply at a later time. She said she was considering the application and then ignored all previous questions and replied to only the final: "Withdrawing the application would forfeit the application fee" (a not inconsiderable sum). Considering the application, I thought, we waited intently. When we were in Hong Kong we received a curt e-mail: "Are you withdrawing your application? Please respond by 9 January." 9 January was the next day. Gladly catching the e-mail in a timely fashion, we replied in the negative.

 

Then shortly afterward on a weekend in December we were asked:

"Please go to the consulate to get a statutory to explain why your sponsor cannot get an original proof of non-criminal record for China. Please respond by 28 February." The briefer the sentences the more astonishing it was: We'd given a certified proof of non-criminal record for me, the sponsor, 6 months ago and the case officer had said nothing. She'd never asked us to get the original so why would I go to make a statutory declaration to swear I couldn't get something I'd never tried to get. We were apoplectic and we did the common sense thing – we tried to get my original proof of non-criminal record, going upstairs and downstairs between departments when suddenly I realised: Our case manager knew we couldn't get the document. So she'd decided to ask for a statutory declaration without any explanation. So we went and got a statutory declaration, exactly what she asked for and submitted it that day.

 

Needless to say she was hopeless at communicating. Her first e-mail to us promised "If you have any questions please call… please e-mail…" We called three dozen times without answer. And our e-mailed questions were never answered selectively and incompletely.

 

Yet, after all the administrative death of a hundred papercuts, completely against the run of play, at the beginning of February, while I was running along the side of the Pearl River, my phone rang to hear that we'd been approved. The battle was over.

 

And yet my colleague hasn't got any response, any question, any jab or any obvious scrutiny yet waits. It is hard to know which treatment was better. Neither has been a great process to undergo.Which would you prefer?

 

Of course this whole tale should be happy: WE'VE BEEN APPROVED!! And we're happy. And excited and nervous and confused. And thinking about whether we want to write a formal complaint.

Me and A-Kei

"Where shall we meet?"

"Let's eat Shunde raw fish, haha, and if you're brave, we could drink deer blood."

Who's that making outrageous suggestions? That's A-Kei, probably the person I was always meaning to meet when I came to China. I remember when I arrived my ideal was to make friends where the natural language of conversation was Chinese, that they were friends I could socialise with not as a teacher but as a person. It didn't happen in the first four years but my in-laws and my wife's friends had that role to an extent.

 

My meeting A-Kei was yet another hidden benefit of my broken knee saga. I'd gotten my hands on my first really smartphone just a week before my fateful stumble and being stuck at home got me trying one hundred and one different apps, installing them, trying them and, most often, deleting them if they didn't meet my needs. One app was HelloTalk, a language exchange app, which I used most during my rehabilitation phase.

 

Language exchange, for the uninitiated, is when two people meet each usually a native speaker of the language the other is learning. I'd had e-mail penfriends back at high school for Japanese, and flesh-and-blood language exchange partners in university for Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese. (I even tried to get a Maori exchange partner, but I had nothing to exchange with them and they weren't that proficient. It ended after one attempt.) The app filled this need for me in finding people to exchange with anywhere and also had the technology to send short recordings (no more than a minute) to your partners. So you could have a conversation recording by recording in different parts of China. This also allowed each person to rehearse what they were going to say – a very helpful thing for working on pronunciation or trying new language. In a word, it was the perfect tool for practicing spoken language provided you could find the right person to converse with.

 

A-Kei was probably my third partner and one of the more enduring ones. We exchanged Cantonese and English with my Cantonese better than his English, so it became the interlanguage for explanations if they were needed. There were a couple of nice coincidences: We were around the same age; I liked baijiu (Chinese grain spirits) and so did he and in fact his family had a factory; and also he lived less than 100 metres from our apartment. Soon as I was more mobile with my leg we met in a nearby bar, where I met his wife and best friend. He got promoted in his job a while later and the extra stress and work killed of the energy and desire to speak English but we still meet once every one or two months for drinking and food.

 

And the drinking and foods is what makes him an interesting person to be with. His father is a gourmet and he takes after him with his taste for exotic food and wine. I'm not much of a shrinking violet when it comes to food, as long as I can stomach it I'll eat anything. (This applied before and after I was vegetarian, of course.) Last year we ate Shunde-style raw fish, which was pretty good although soon after I ate it I was inundated by friends' warnings that it was loaded with parasites and I should give them a wide berth.

 

His suggestion last night of deer blood I took seriously even though others thought he was joking and I said I was keen. And as expected he brought in a plastic bottle of red liquid. We drank it mixed with spirits (he mixed it to about 1:4) and the taste was more wine than blood. I can imagine most people reading this will have some disgust reading this. Anyway, it was an interesting experience but one that I probably won't repeat.

 

But this kind of experience is the kind that I'd only be able to have with someone odd but genuine like A-Kei and I'm quite lucky to have met him. (Interesting note: The photo of course is the blood wine shot; the food is actually manuka smoked mussels, also brought by A-Kei!) 

A Chinese wedding

The sauces came out of the kitchen and were put on all the tables. The sesame flatbread strips came out shortly after, and cutely bunched spring onions were plated out later; they were bound with a small ring of capsicum. It was beautiful. All this waited for the suckling pig.

 

I'd arranged my glasses in a diamond formation, perfectly brewed pu-erh tea on the right, cognac in front, red wine on the left and a soy-sauce fragrance baijiu hiding at the back. The conversation to my right was of past years, school days and where people had gone, the geography of their respective lives and the children produced on the way. On the left, talk was a bit barren, punctuating stretches of smartphone amusements: familiar people hadn't arrived yet. Far from us on a poorly chosen wall, marriage photos were projected, each capturing an idealisation of marriage, choreographed, posed and photoshopped into a couple's future.

 

And then the celebrant host grabbed the microphone. The hall was designed for eating, without any acoustic considerations and the garbled voice announced the arrival of the couple, who'd already arrived long before, because all weddings start a long time before the feast began.

 

David, the groom, was a classmate of my wife. I'd seen him a few times at reunions but only really talked with him earlier in the week. Reunions and weddings are never good times for me to get to know people. They're too noisy. And mostly I just try to catch the drift of other conversations than make my own. So it was good that before his wedding I had the chance to chat with him in the quiet of his office. He was a nice guy, just a little younger than me; he'd started his own business since I'd last seen him and was happy with his next step in life.

 

His day started so much earlier at the wedding. He'd driven back to the family home in the rural outskirts of Qingyuan, stayed overnight and had a breakfast of three bowls of noodles. This was the family tradition for a male marrying. It says: You're a man now! (He was almost 35 but in China, marriage is the cultural standard for becoming a full adult.) After some other rituals he has to get his groomsmen together and drive all the way to her family home in Guangzhou to receive the bride. This is more easily said than done. First, the family are symbolically reluctant to welcome the groom into the house and challenge him at every step. So he must give do challenges and give red packets to members of the wife's family along the way, as he gets passed the building door, then up the stairs, the into the family home. Often in the bride's bedroom he'll have to find a hidden pair of shoes. There may be a meal there before everyone can leave in cars back to groom's family home back in Qingyuan (sometimes for modern practical purposes, it might be just to the lucky couple's newly bought home). Once they arrive in Qingyuan, they must do rituals such as serving tea to the ancestors and the older members of the family. The rituals complete it would be time for the banquet… which in David's case was all the way back in Guangzhou. Often the bride and groom welcome everyone into the restaurant, and in this case took a Polaroid photo with them. So you can imagine by the time the host in the banquet called him and his bride onto the stage to the sound of recorded organ music, they had the tiredest eyes and a smile permanently fixed on their faces. The flower petals in their hair, so recently thrown, didn't make them seem any more refreshed.

 

They both made speeches which was nice. I'm a fan of public speaking but the acoustics rendered it into undecipherable airport announcements mwaa-waa-waa (for my level of Cantonese). And then they did on-stage set pieces: vows, the kiss that had to go on for a particular length of time, cutting the massive cake (it's there for cutting purposes; I've never had the chance to eat it), pouring wine into a pyramid of wine glasses, which the father of the groom drinks from in a toast with the whole room. Finally to cap it all off the bride throws a bouquet.

 

Fortunately the lucky couple get a little sit down now as the food arrives, led by an impressively roasted whole pig to each table. The food, I have to say, was the best wedding food I'd had in China. It was all very delicious. One interesting cultural side-note was that every person was given two sets of chopsticks. Apparently this is fairly rare and even some locals were unfamiliar with their purpose. Through the power of wechat (Chinese twitter), I eventually learned that the pair on the right is a public pair for bringing food to your dish and the pair closest to the bowl on the left is to bring the food from the bowl to your mouth. A BBC colleague of mine (BBC as in British-born Chinese) said his family has done that as a habit for as long as he'd known.

 

The bride and groom having rested for about 20 minutes have to get up to do the rounds of the table and drink with everyone, often on multiple times. Being Chinese, the groom is expected to knock back pretty much every drink that comes his way. His groomsmen do rounds as well a bit later to thank people and make sure they're drinking enough. There is of course heroic drinking without the couple, one table almost having a fight where relatives struggled to hold back one completely intoxicated man from another. The bride at some point brings around tea to share with each table as well.

 

And then the banquet is over and the bride and groom bid each guest farewell. (We'd left by then but I know how it works.) This procedure is something that almost happened to me but we through circumstance we sidestepped. One of my in-laws still chides us for not having it done, saying she hasn't drunk my xijiu (wine at a banquet, the drinking of which is synonymous with getting married) and challenging me to drink with her.

I've been to two weddings in one month (attached photos represent two different occasions) and I'll go to another next month. It's something that definitely is part of the beat of my life and the beat of life. Amid the festivities, I was sad to hear a former Chinese colleague's marriage is hanging by a thread. I can only hope things can be happy once more.