What the Chinese Don't Eat (16 page)

He rolled his eyes. I could see he meant: ‘Everyone knows that.’

Afterwards, I realised what he said was true. I began to notice many western women not even wearing socks in the cold, wet London winter. Another teacher, who is Malaysian Chinese, told me she could tell who comes from less developed countries by the wearing of socks or tights in summer.

But I am Chinese. I have been told how important it is for us to wear socks to show you are from a good, educated background. That is why socks often appear in our Chinese stories. During the 1960s in the north China countryside, where it often reaches minus 20C in winter, a girl worried so much about dirtying her pair of new thick socks through her broken shoes, that she lost two toes to frostbite while walking to her wedding.

In the 1970s in south China, where it reaches more than 35C in summer, a woman going for an interview in a factory
couldn’t afford a pair of new thin socks and had to wear her winter socks despite the sweltering heat. In the 1980s there was a well-known sign that would hang on the doors of some of the first rich houses to be built. ‘Don’t worry about your holey socks, I have some too.’ People were put off visiting friends who had beautifully decorated homes as it would mean taking off their shoes and exposing their threadbare socks. By the 1990s, most city girls had a drawer just for socks, but for rural girls a pair is still a big gift.

On my radio show, just before I moved to England in 1997, I received a phone call from a mother and her teenage daughter. ‘Xinran, I can’t tell you how much my daughter has squandered. She has two pairs of gloves for winter and buys new socks every year!’

‘But I am still growing and why should I wear the faded clothes you gave me and even your cast-offs? Life has changed … can’t you see?’

‘I don’t believe you should waste things.’

‘What have I wasted?’

I had to stop their arguing: ‘Respect for the old is one of our better customs. So we should listen to the mother first, then the daughter.’

‘Please ask my daughter how many school bags she has used since she went to secondary school two years ago and how she could ruin one pair of socks after wearing them twice? Why is thrift laughed at? Why is poor treated as ugly?’ The mother’s voice was very sad.

‘Mum, why do you never try to understand me? I did go through that pair of winter socks quickly, but they had been worn by you for more than 10 years already!’ The daughter then burst into tears.

This year I was asked by some friends in Beijing: ‘Why do
some foreign women not wear socks? Are they poor?’ I couldn’t answer their questions with my limited knowledge of the west. ‘I am sure they are all educated and are not peasants. But why don’t they understand public health, and allow bad smells to be let out?’

‘They don’t care about showing off ugly toes, do they?’

‘It’s terrible how our Chinese girls have started ditching their socks in public too, thinking it’s fashionable.’

‘What have you learned about western culture? You can’t even work out why they don’t wear socks in summer! Poor Xinran.’ Help!

There is no point worrying about feeling down. Life benefits from both happiness and suffering

Before I met Qi-Qing, the CEO of Kery Bio-Pharma in China, I had imagined her as ‘the Chinese uniformed business woman’. Her company engages in bio-pharmaceutical, preventive medicine, medical nutritional products and the research and production of a skincare range using spiral algae. She is a firm believer that a business enterprise should have a strong social responsibility, which is why Kery Bio-Pharma has been working to help relieve poverty in China’s remote regions.

As I sat waiting to speak to her at Kery’s headquarters in Beijing, I pictured her as a typical Chinese career woman. Ten minutes later, when she had still not appeared, I started to believe I had got the right picture of her. But I knew I was wrong the minute I heard her steps. They sounded so gentle and quiet, so unlike the rushed, heavy steps of most successful Chinese businesswomen.

She greeted me in a gentle, rhythmic voice. It reminded me of what a Chinese philosopher once said: ‘A few right, soft words can match a thousand hard, powerful ones.’ So many other female managers only know to use strong words to get their staff to work, thinking they have to replicate the male way.

Then Qi-Qing sat down facing me, with her arms on the table. Her manicured hands opened a notebook and removed the top from her pen, like two flowers opening and waving. Every action was very ladylike.

I was so surprised by her: her beautiful face, its skin clearly carefully cared for because it did not show her age at all; the
way she wore her hair made you dream of how long it could be; a cream silk scarf with flower-stars wrapped around her neck, matching her navy sweater perfectly.

This is not the image of a typical powerful Chinese woman, queen of healthcare, an economic fighter and mad worker, who never has time to think of her family and female needs, with no feel for makeup and style. Instead of wasting time talking about how to be a successful woman, we just had a chat.

Qi-Qing’s only son is studying in England for his MA. Mother and son talk a lot on the phone. He is very depressed by some western textbooks which talk of China as an unknown country. Like most Chinese students who come to the west, he has not only suddenly realised how different the cultures are, but is also shocked by how little westerners know about China, going against everything Chinese students are led to expect from their history books and the Chinese media.

I could see pride in Qi’s eyes when she talked about her son. She told me that she does not worry about him feeling lost and unhappy because she believes that life can benefit from both happiness and suffering. As an example, she said she had built up a strong mind and a warm heart from her unforgettable and unrepeatable childhood experiences in the Cultural Revolution.

I asked her about her ‘Women’s Health Garden’ – a women’s club that she set up just as she became successful when she needed more energy for her business development. Her eyes moved from my face to the window, and after a while they moved back to me and she said in a very sad voice: ‘As you know, as Chinese women of our age, there is so much that we never speak about; we couldn’t before; even now, we still use our natural female conversational skills to be a good woman in other people’s eyes, to be good mothers to our children, and to
be good wives to our husbands, who continue working their old traditional ways.

‘I thought we must do something to help people unleash painful and angry thoughts, otherwise it could be too late. There are too many women who have paid with their lives and their health by keeping silent in the past.’

I asked her one last question. ‘What is your husband’s reaction to what you are doing for women?’

Her answer? ‘Can we not talk about it?’

English schoolchildren have shown me that China has much to learn about the joy of education

I was invited to the 2005 Children Performance in Manchester last Friday. As you know, my knowledge of this country is so little – a grain of sand in a big desert – that I didn’t really understand what was happening there at all, even during the opening ceremony. I thanked people on the stage in front of an audience of hundreds, including local governors and a master of ceremonies, before they performed my play,
Sky Burial
, along with another one called London 1945.

I didn’t know why they had picked
Sky Burial
for the Manchester Arts Education Initiative; I didn’t know so many primary schools had produced so many different shows of
Sky Burial
since last September; I didn’t know how the directors made those young British children work on such a historical story about completely foreign cultures – Chinese and Tibetan.

I was totally sucked into the performance by a group of 13 to 17-year-old students of St Peter’s RC High School. I forgot that it was me who had written the story, after spending eight years doing research, during which I conducted almost 100 interviews in order to excavate and confirm the 30 years that a Chinese woman spent living in northern Tibet. At the end, I stood and bowed again and again to those teenage actors and actresses, on a stage of that size for the first time in their young lives.

The next morning, I attended a rehearsal of another
Sky Burial
, by the Advanced Performing Art Centre, made up of 30 primary and high schools. I met Peter Wilkinson, the director
of all those children’s plays, a man described as ‘shy but mad on children’s creative art work’. We didn’t have time to talk because he was directing the play all morning:

‘Take up the whole of the stage when you are running in the rain,’ he said. The children scattered immediately, their body language saying ‘escape’.

‘Shu-when, you have lost Kejun – the one you love so much, what do you feel now?’ A sad expression appeared on the 13-year-old actress’s face.

‘Now, you are on the way to Tibet where there is high air pressure, you feel very ill.’ All the kids on the stage cried out with difficult breathing sounds.

‘Commander, where are your shoes?’

‘I forgot to wear them,’ the little nine-year-old ‘commander’ replied.

‘How could you lead your trip to Tibet without shoes?’

‘I have two pairs!’ one 12-year-old ‘lama’ raised his hand.

‘What’s your size?’

‘Four!’

‘It is too small, he needs five.’

‘Mine are size five, I can give them to the commander, because I will become a sheep!’

‘Thank you, sheep! Soldiers, you don’t know what’s happening to you when someone is killed next to you; you are so frightened – not just sitting there relaxed and chatting.’

All the soldiers started to scream out loud with fear.

‘Saierbao, your daughter Ni is naughty, she won’t join your family to pray, you are her mum, you have to teach her …’ The little mum guided her daughter to the family prayer with the actions of a real mother.

‘Hey, Crow, you can’t take your head off all the time … you’re alive!’

I laughed and laughed for hours at their exchanges – I never knew it could be such fun to watch children’s rehearsals. Most Chinese people believe that the only way to work with teenagers is by shouting in a military-style voice. Therefore, I always saw angry teachers with poor, shaking kids preparing their beautiful stage shows in China. We thought shouting was good for our children, as part of their education. I wish I could pass this feeling on to Chinese parents and teachers: Believe that our children can give great pleasure when we know how to enjoy things with them.

‘Birds, don’t stop there just for pecking, you should fly, fly free everywhere to cover the sky …’ Wilkinson was still waving his arms, his voice still lively after 10 hours’ directing.

After two days, I learned that the Manchester Arts Education Initiative chose
Sky Burial
because it introduced pupils to two remote cultures. The narrative also allows for an idealistic approach to the China/Tibet conflict to be placed alongside, allowing some understanding of the problems involved without dwelling too much on the horrors.

Thank you, all members of the
Sky Burial
performance team of Manchester for building such a cultural bridge between China and Britain.

Ears, lips, fingers, toes: Chinese men used to check them all in the search for the perfect wife

Possibly you know that most Chinese women had no freedom to choose their husbands before the 1940s. It was the men who did the choosing.

Sometimes, the woman was chosen from a list of surnames, enabling unions for the sake of family power or business.

Potential husbands also enjoyed a ‘Chinese male right’ to physically inspect those girls offered up from the lower classes. This was deemed an eminently practical and sensible way to choose a mate and breed a family. I learned about the ‘right of physical inspection’ from many classical Chinese novels and historical books, but I didn’t know what it entailed and meant until I had a special guest for my radio show call-in, in the 1990s.

He was a medical doctor. I had invited him on to talk about ‘how to get to sleep after a bad day’. After a few calls, an old lady’s voice came on the line: ‘Could you, Doctor, advise my son on how to choose his wife through physical inspection?’

‘Hello,’ I said to her. ‘I can see you love your son and care about his marriage very much, but I am sure he will find the right woman to love through his own taste and beliefs. I don’t think it is necessary to use the old tradition of physical inspection to find a wife.’

I tried to stop her old-fashioned talk – by law, broadcasters were expected to uphold the voice of revolution and liberation. But, in truth, I wanted to use the opportunity to learn more about physical inspection.

‘Listen!’ she cried. ‘You have no idea how little Chinese traditional knowledge you have, all of you. You don’t know how to get a better family with this kind of advice.’

‘Should we cut her line off?’ the programme controller asked me on another line.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It could be good for us to learn from older generations if they don’t speak against the Party. I will take responsibility for it.’

‘Come on, Doctor! You know it as a part of your Chinese medical studies, don’t you?’ the old lady caller continued.

‘Um … yes, I know, but …’ he looked to me for the permission.

Yes, please, I nodded.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Physical inspection was a very important part of Chinese male culture before the 1940s. The ancient Chinese believed the human body was full of information about the personality of an individual and could be used for checking unmarried girls:

‘Lowered eyes, unsmiling: she might hide her true thoughts.

‘Raised eyes, smiling: she could be flirtatious.

‘Nose like a hook: she might be after your family’s money, but it could mean she is frugal.

‘Curled lips: she is very negative and will nag.

‘Soft ears: she is too soft-hearted and overly generous with money.