Personal: My Chinese Rite of Passage
August 1, 2010
by David Richards (for henrymakow.com)
In England, I felt utterly emasculated. A man gains confidence from his work, and I was stopped from doing that. I went to school until I was 18, sitting in a thousand classrooms with tears of boredom as I completed one clerical task after another. Then I went to university for three years, and even after that tedious ordeal there were no decent jobs available for me to break free from infantile dependence, whether from family or the state.
My dad had also left our family when we were young and in atomized modern Britain that means you have no male role models at all. Without male guidance, I had grown up in an androgynous void, and deep down I knew I had to find my own road to manhood.
So I decided go abroad, but rather than going on a hedonistic gap year in a tropical climate, I instead chose a city in Northern China called Harbin, known for it's brutal winters and unrefined culture. Perhaps the harshness of the city could bring the man out of me.
My early memories there are vague. I felt I had crash-landed on an alien planet. I remember squinting at the sun in the city center. Giant buildings surrounded me and with my eyes yet to distinguish Chinese features I could see a million people with one face, faceless, all speaking a rough and impenetrable language. My head felt light; the air mustn't be right I thought, they always say it's polluted in China.
I saw a large crowd had gathered and decided to push to the front. At the centre was a Russian baby with blond hair and blue eyes, a source of amazement for the locals. I also found myself the centre of attention. My clothes were a source of exoticism and wealth. My ivory skin a prize for marriage huntresses.
This was my strange new home, but I didn't feel too lonely. I had never fitted-in to England anyway. It's a sea of idiocy, one watery mind after another. Not that I have any grandiose ideas about myself. I was a sheep with a few too many brain cells and I had wondered off to strange pastures.
After a small settling in period, work started. I was told to teach ten 90 minutes classes a week, each with 30-40 students. I was given no instructions. The students were generally rich kids who had failed their exams and their parents had decided to send them to a private university. The students are incredibly apathetic and I hear stories of past teachers who had gone mad, smashed a student's phone or thrown a chair. But I managed to develop a rapport with them; we were the same age after all, although I was told to lie and say I'm 25. ( I am 22.)
Generally speaking, the younger foreign teachers were westerners who could not find decent employment and wanted adventure, while the older ones were a fringe and often mad element.
One 50-year old man had spent the previous year a virtual prisoner in Russia after his boss had ripped up his passport and made him work illegally for no money. For some reason he seemed to have taught at all the worst places in the world and was even denied a chance to teach in Kabul. He suffered some sort of breakdown but retained a great self-depreciating wit, once telling me, 'my life is a black comedy-and not a very good one.'
Another man was an English PhD who had an interest in making Japanese anime style dolls, all of which were characters from his childhood, either girls he had liked or imagery friends he and his brother had created. It was bizarre, but removed from home, we were all internally going through a similar process of making peace with our past. Other people were great though and there was a camaraderie that was natural in difficult conditions.
My biggest problem was the food; it's not as rich as in the West and I grew to detest it and weakened. I suffer epilepsy provoked by exhaustion, which is controlled with medication, but I had a misunderstanding with a new variation and suffered an epileptic fit while teaching. Six male students carried me down a flight of stairs, a fallen Anglo-Angel, wounded and bleeding. Perhaps I would die a poetic death in this godless country. But it was not to be, and upon awakening I had to devise new strategies to survive here.
I owed a large sum of money and therefore could not escape the North during the two-month winter break. As others flew off to summer climates I was left behind. With the local area virtually deserted in winter, a long walk in -20 degree weather to a small Korean restaurant was my only source of food.
One day I returned home to disaster. The taps hadn't been working and in my absence one had burst into life flooding my whole apartment, and due to the freezing conditions the water had turned to ice. Even worse, my computer was broken, my only connection to civilization gone. Ostracized from home and suffering such indignations was torture, but I reminded myself I had not died working in the local coal mine, which had exploded a month earlier killing 90 people.
I hoped these difficult situations would act as a rite of passage towards self-sufficiency and the acquisition of a more masculine temperament. Not that it was all struggle though; there were times for enjoyment.
It may sound strange but in a way Chinese people actually have more social freedoms than the West, they can smoke where they like, drive more freely. There was an outlaw element to the city that I found liberating. The population were far from domesticated and the police were never on top of keeping control.
A night out in Britain is less enjoyable and spontaneous than a funeral. Most pubs stop serving alcohol at 11pm and clubs close at 2am, with jackbooted security guards littering the building. My nights in China could unwind naturally at 8am with all types of ominous characters going about their business, but I felt safe as long as I didn't attract trouble. These nights were often revelatory and I met incredible characters and had experiences that will burn in my memory forever.
Very few of the foreign guys had Chinese girlfriends; this was mainly due to the fact that virtually none of the local women could speak English. But many tried to sleep around, I couldn't share their excitement though. We were told in a country of 1.3 billion largely poor people after all, so finding a girl wasn't particularly difficult.
Personally, there are plenty of Asian girls in England, so I wouldn't have seen girls as a motivation to go there. I was also shocked by the naivety of Chinese girls and felt unsettled by their idealistic romanticism. I know of one guy who in spite of his porn-inspired macho facade couldn't have sex with a girl when confronted by her wide-eyed innocence.
After a seemingly eternal winter, the snow began to thaw in May, and trees and flowers came to life. As I reflected on my year, the sticky situations that had once disabled me seem in retrospect hard fought experience. I had come to this hostile land a kid adult but left a man, and I could feel quiet confidence that I had laid a foundation for my future.
Upon returning to England I was temporarily delighted by the clean environment and better food, but the economy had deteriorated even more in my absence. Inflation had kicked in and the job market had further shrunk. I cannot stay here knowing that bridges are being burnt around me.
My hometown is as pleasant and pretty as ever, but I know it is a flowery ghost town, and I will most likely go abroad again soon to reach my potential.
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David Richards is the author of "Pornography-Watched Bruised Drugged Prostitutes"
Bob said (August 2, 2010):
I have a son in China and as a consequence have visited the country for fairly long visits twice. Because he speaks Madarin fluently and has a Chinese girlfriend, I have had some unique contacts with Chinese people in out-of-the-way places. They tend to be very blunt and are relatively hard on each other (maybe because they are so numerous), but I (possibly as a greybeard, an senior citizen) was often treated with exemplary kindness. Here are a few examples.
1. I was treated repeatedly to precious aged rice wine and elaborate meals by a not-wealthy family in a 'village' (of 700,000 people).
2. I was taken into a mountain valley, so remote that I was told not even the Japanese could find it, to pick and gorge myself on oranges from trees that a poor farmer had refrained from harvesting with our visit in view.
3. A park warden carried me into a mountain stream on his back so I could see a waterfall hidden by an outcropping. He communicated with me by wading barefoot on the rocky stream bed (because he had loaned his rubber boots to my son), turning his back to me and slapping his haunches to signal that I should climb aboard. He smiled and smiled.
4. When we went to climb a remote part of the Great Wall, our taxi driver found an expensive water filtration bottle my son had left in his car and, after we had paid him and separated, pursued our bus for a couple of kilometers before climbing aboard at a stop to restore it to my son.
5. I was saved from an attack by a water buffalo who (for some reason) didn't like me by his owner, who placed himself between me and the angry beast.
6. I was given a six-course meal every Friday evening prepared by my son's girlfriend's mother, a person of modest means, who always included fried chicken and baked potatos on the menu just so I would feel at home.
None of these people showed any sign of wanting a reward for their spontaneous favors.
Maybe not all Chinese are so considerate, but I met many good people in my travels. I sometimes felt their hearts were bigger than my own. Even the young people in the military typically would wave at us with big smiles when our paths crossed. When my son accidentally got separated from his passport while returning to the mainland from Macau, the border security people had the civility not to taser or shoot him for running frantically in a secure area and actually reopened the border to readmit him when he explained his plight after getting back just after it had closed.
I recount these personal experiences--and I had many other similar ones--because these are aspects of China that Westerners should know about.