What does a sex editor do?

One commonly searched term that brings people to my blog (second only to ‘dating Chinese men) is ‘sex editor’.  ‘What does a sex editor do?’ is an often repeated question fed into search engines. 

Having now completed 3 monthly columns for In the Red magazine I’m still none the wiser really.  My first column (about vibrators) was declared ‘too tame’.  Can’t you liven it up with more stories about personal experience? I was asked. 

My second about prostitution in China has just appeared, and I’m not that happy with it.  It is surprisingly hard to include personal experience, and relevance to China, whilst still keeping it within decency rules (yet not ‘too tame’). 

For the third article I was told that it didn’t have to have a China/Guangzhou relevance ‘but you can’t criticize China at all obviously’ (clearly he’s read my blog; I don’t criticize China, I just point out differences).

This does make it easier for me though.   Now I see myself more as sex-and-the-city’s Carrie (but without the self-obsession or the addiction for designer clothes).   

So I wrote my third column about one night stands.

The trouble is all this writing about sex (I’m also working on something for a Canadian publication of ‘erotic literature’) is putting me off the real thing. 

I wonder if this would work for food.  Maybe if I started writing about chocolate I wouldn’t be craving it all the time.

In favour of solo travel

Having spent so much time feeling as if I were merely a guest on other people’s holiday, first my parents and then my dominant first boyfriend, it is a relief to get to a place in life where I feel happy to travel on my own.  It’s a rare skill: the ability to be alone but not lonely.  Friends often say ‘oh I couldn’t travel on my own; I’d just feel so sad’ but it’s better this way than some of the nightmare holidays I can remember with other people.  Being dragged around museum after museum by my father or going to the Caribbean and having to seek out ‘British bars’ with English beer and football with my ex, all spring vividly to mind as examples. 

For my first ever solo trip, planned and organized entirely by myself, I travelled to India.  I’d planned to go for a month and in the end I was away for a year and a half on a mammoth trip that involved six months in India, a couple of months in Thailand and some time in Australia.

It was mostly just blind stubbornness on my part.  When I’d mentioned the trip whilst it was in the planning stage, people mostly laughed. ‘You can’t even walk to the end of the road by yourself; how do you imagine you will survive a month in India?’ was a typical comment.   In the end I stopped telling anyone about my plans and simply headed off to the airport in the middle of the night, ready to start my big adventure all alone. 

Once I got there I found that I actually enjoyed the freedom of being able to do whatever I wanted to do without having to consider anyone else.  It was a bit annoying having to take all my bags into the toilet cubical with me at airports, since there was nobody to watch them whilst I went, and annoying to find I’d lost my seat when I got back, but that was compensated by being able to do exactly what I wanted to do. 

The excitement I felt then never left me and I still get the same feeling now when I take off for somewhere new. I vividly remember walking around India as a newly single woman with the sun beating down and being eaten alive by mosquitoes, men caterwauling at me, and it didn’t matter because for the first  time I was doing something I wanted to do and if I got bored with it I could just move on somewhere else.  I wasn’t expected to traipse around museums reading every single display with precision or sit in an English pub in the middle of St Lucia bored for two weeks, or measure the success of a holiday on who had the darkest tan.

When I finally returned to England, a year and a half older and a lifetime wiser, my boyfriend had moved in with someone else and they had a baby.  What is it with men?  You leave them and disappear off without a word for eighteen months, and when you go back they’ve met someone else.

Synchronicity

This is often a sad time of year, when people I’ve become friends with over the year (or more) are moving on and I find myself wondering if I’m ever going to see them again in my lifetime.

Then, around mid summer, I start to worry that it’s going to be just me left, on my own, in this big overcrowded city, with nobody to talk to. Then new people arrive for me to play with and the ones who have left just become people on my Facebook page and life carries on.

Then I find myself wondering how it can be that people who were once so close I now rarely talk to. It happens; you leave it and leave it and then you realize it’s been such a long time and you don’t know what to say to them anymore.

This year is a little different, because it’s me doing the leaving.
Except I can’t even do this right. It’s too hard for me to go cold turkey and just leave China at the end of the Semester without a backward glance, and so I finish the semester, take a two week holiday in the Philippines, come back and work two weeks in a summer camp, spend another week or so in the city ‘tidying up loose ends’ (I’ve only had the last six months to do all this stuff after all) before moving on to my final destination, which turns out to be Thailand.

Almost certainly. Although I’ve signed nothing and so can still change my mind if I want or if something I like the look of better comes along. So actually nothing’s certain at all.

I end relationships the same way. I am seemingly not capable of saying ‘I don’t want to see you anymore’ (too afraid that afterwards I might realize that I’ve made a mistake) and so I just gradually spend less time with them until I’m ready to make the transition into calling them my ‘ex’ (or hopefully they get the message and do it for me).

This is kind of what I’m doing here.

I arrived in China for the first time whilst the Olympics were on in Beijing. I am leaving 4 years later, and the Olympics, ironically, have moved on to my home city. It does feel as if there’s some synchronicity about it.

In those 4 years I have lived in three different cities in China and visited 16 out of the 32 provinces and semi-autonomous regions listed in my Rough Guide; exactly half.

Synchronicity.

Giving Face

The kindergarten took us all to dinner tonight. I don’t often go to these little meals, although normally they involve the whole school, from kindergarten up to High school, plus all the various tiers of management. They always last forever and the food is pretty standard Cantonese stuff. Best to avoid if at all possible and I have invented a whole army of excuses for this purpose..

However this time it was just the kindergarten, and we got to choose the venue. We selected the Punjabi restaurant, which I suspect wasn’t what they had in mind. However, the fact that it is just 88 RMB for all you can eat and drink sealed the deal as far as the management were concerned, and off we went.

I effectively got told beforehand that I had to go: ‘you will come won’t you, so that the kindergarten head can give face?’ I was asked.

That’s such an odd expression and it’s so Chinese: give face. The basic meaning is the need to preserve reputation, honour and respect. There are several translations of to ‘give face’ but I think what was meant here was Gei-mian-zi: which means the giving of face to others through showing respect. If I don’t go it implies (to the Chinese) that I don’t respect her or her job.

I’m not a big fan of ‘all you can eat’ buffets, mainly because I always eat too much. Portion control has never been one of my strong points. But then that’s common of any dinner provided by a Chinese host; there is always too much food so that they can ‘give face’ by knowing that they provided more than enough for everyone to eat.

My mother was the same. My mother would consider it a personal insult if you could still walk after one of her meals. Although maybe it’s a class thing; my mother likes to tell me how I’ve become middle class these days (she cites as evidence the fact that I prefer mayonnaise to ketchup) and middle classes don’t like to eat so much, apparently. Whatever it is, I just hate that feeling where you’ve eaten so much that you just need to lie down.

‘Just one more mouthful for all the starving children in Africa’ I would be told as I tried to force down one of her mammoth dinners as a child. An American friend tells me that she had to eat for ‘the starving children of China’ so it balances out. How does our eating too much help them? I never saw the logic then and I still don’t.

But nevertheless it bothers me leaving food. I’ve travelled in many places where people are hungry (and the interior of China is one of those places) and leaving food uneaten when people in the world are starving makes me feel guilty.

So tonight I feel guilty. And bloated. And tired.

Alcoholics, perverts and fantasists: China expat life

The ex-pat population in China is a curious mix. I tend to be a bit of a misfit myself, and I quite like it this way; many of the people I meet in life I have no desire to fit in with and so I do enjoy the range of more unusual people. China certainly has its share of oddballs and people who view the world ‘differently’. Which is generally, I think, a good thing.

However…

There are many reasons why people come and live in another country, particularly in a country like China. This unfortunately means that if you have a problem with alcohol (or other substances) and so can’t hold down a job in your own country, or if you are a bit of a pervert with a penchant for young girls (or boys) or if you are just a weird fantasist, who wants to invent a whole different life for yourself, then living overseas where nobody knows you, where the cost of living is low and where jobs are easily come by and there are no police checks, might seem appealing.

A previous boss used to say that everyone here was running away from something and that was why they were here. I wanted to ask him what he was running from, but I never did. This was a man who had vodka in his afternoon tea and then infected the whole office with his bad mood, so I’m guessing he had more demons than most to escape from. I’m not sure that I agree that everyone here is escaping something, but, frustratingly, in many cases, he did have a point.

My introduction to the country was a four week summer school: sixteen people aged from twenty up to their mid-fifties, from an assortment of English-speaking countries and a variety of backgrounds, working hard and living together for a month. It was a stressful introduction to China.

One of the guys on the course had just one topic of conversation: his alcoholism. Whatever the conversation his sentences always started with the words ‘when I was an alcoholic …’ He said that he hadn’t had a drink for two years, yet he liked to talk about the days when he did. He spent the first few days wandering around the apartment in his underwear, telling everyone stories about his past drunken antics.

On the third morning he didn’t turn up for class, and nobody did anything about it because in truth we were quite relieved not to have to deal with him. However by lunchtime we started to worry and a couple of guys went to check that he was ok. They found him passed out drunk, with three (empty) bottles of vodka by his bed. Clearly his alcoholism was not as far in the past as he liked to pretend.

As I grew more accustomed to China I met a lot more people like him. I suppose it’s relatively easy to hold down a job in a Chinese school with a drink problem; many people do. I once went for an interview for a teaching job at a training school where the other candidate was drunk. And I still didn’t get the job (to be fair neither did he but it summed up China for me; I think they would rather have had the drunken old man than the weird hippy with a ring through her nose. In China, appearance counts for everything).

More worrying than the alcohol-addicted expats are the perverts. In a country where there are no police checks and so anyone can come and be a teacher, gaining access to children and teenagers, it obviously has to attract this element. All you need to come teach in China is a passport from an English-speaking country and a degree certificate (and if you don’t have degree certificate you can always pick one up in Thailand on the Koh San Road on the way here).

In another school where I worked a male teacher in his thirties had a favourite game to play with his students (girls aged 12-16). He would place candy in his pocket and if a student got a question right then they got to stick their hands in the pocket of his pants to retrieve a sweet. In the end he carried it too far, and started a relationship with one of the 16-year-old girls. He lost his job, finally, although he stayed in China and wouldn’t have found it too hard to get another one. The school didn’t want the scandal involved if the parents found out what had been going on, and so preferred just to remove him quietly with some tale about him ‘having to go back to Canada’. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common occurrence in China.

So after the alcoholic and the pervert comes the fantasist. I think my favourite story in this category is the woman who bought two PhD’s on the internet and then went around telling everyone how she should earn more money than them because she was ‘a professor’. She organized a party for her students and had flyers printed bearing the heading ‘There’s a party, and your (sic) invited’. When her mistake was pointed out she didn’t know what was wrong with it. ‘I thought you had a PhD in English’ someone asked her. ‘Well no my PhD is in teaching English’ she answered.

I’m not sure how I rate in the alcoholic/pervert/fantasist equation. I drank heavily in my twenties and early thirties, and then I realized what I was doing to myself and how much I was missing out on whilst drunk. Now I seldom drink. I have no sexual interest in young boys (or girls), although I do have a weakness for bad boys on motorbikes, does that count? As for the whole fantasist thing, I often remember what I want to remember from the past, and I ignore the less pleasant memories. But I like to believe that on the whole I’m just an eccentric who enjoys travelling and who just never fitted in in the real world.

A mainlander in Hong Kong

What a mainlander does when they get set free in Hong Kong for a weekend:

Well this one takes the opportunity to stock up on hair colours and skin creams and the other things that girls like to buy, and which are largely unavailable in China.  Shoes above a size 39. Bras above a B cup.  That sort of thing.

I didn’t take pictures this trip because it was too rainy. I uploaded this old one though, because I can. See, no proxy required and the photo just appears in no time at all.

 

Q.)  So Hong Kong then, what’s it got that mainland China hasn’t?

• Red Bull with bubbles in, as nature intended.
• Cold drinks cabinets actually plugged in and working (China: why bother putting drinks in a fridge if you’re not going to switch the fridge on?).
• Toilet paper in the bathrooms.  And disinfectant.  There is an unfamiliar smell when I go to my first toilet this side of the border and then I realize it’s been cleaned with bleach, not just a dirty mop that moves everything around.
• Salads.  (Can’t eat salad in China.  Uncooked vegetables are ‘bad for your healthy’).
• Easy access to Facebook/wordpress/you tube et al.  No proxy required
• People on the metro displaying some basic manners.  Waiting for people to get off the train before pushing on, that kind of thing.  Someone actually apologized when they bumped into me.
• Starbucks strawberry soy drink (every time I try to get one in GZ they’ve ‘just sold out’.  WELL STOP ADVERTISING IT THEN).

Trouble is it’s over too quickly and I have to go back to the mainland.  Here is a picture of HK harbour, for no other reason than because I can do it from here.

My next big adventure

So they finally told us our finishing date for this semester, which is surprising in itself because normally they don’t confirm the date until a week or so before hand, just for added inconvenience.  The kids will finish around 27-28^th of June and we will finish on the 29^th.  It’s just eight weeks away.  We have our list of deadlines for the endlessly pointless paperwork that needs to be done for the end of the semester and so we’re officially on a countdown.

First you think the semester will go on forever and then suddenly it all becomes real and I start to realize that I will become unemployed very shortly.  Eight weeks to go and I still haven’t decided what to do next.   I have ideas, but I can’t make a decision.  Indecision makes me restless and stops me sleeping.

 

This picture is here for no other reason than because I’m in HK I can do it. This is GZ, taken not long after I first got here. I like the photo, but do not think that the whole of Guangzhou looks like this. It doesn’t.

My new destination, wherever it is, should involve sunshine; it’s time to start ironing my thong ready for the beach.  It should involve unblocked internet, because all the access problems here are irritating me in the extreme now, and it should involve less pollution and a more healthy life than the one I am living here.   I’m sick of being sick.

I have three ideas in mind and I swing between them, afraid to make the wrong decision.

 

mouse-in-a-cup

I have started the slow labourious task of packing up my apartment ready to move on. During four years in China I have accumulated a lot of stuff. Even though I’ve moved house frequently and so had periodic throw-outs, there is still a lot of things to go through. When you consider that I arrived in China with just 25 kilos, you do wonder where all this stuff came from.

The apartment itself isn’t too bad. The main complaint that I have with it is that it is situated out in suburbia, beyond the metro route. Obviously it is convenient for work but when you want to get into the city you have to cram yourself on the one crowded little bus. Since we are surrounded by schools and universities everyone is travelling at the same times, and it get pretty chaotic. But the apartment itself is ok.

What I like best about it is that it is a single-person apartment. I’ve actually discovered, after the last few years of (mostly) shared accommodation that I prefer to live alone. There’s nothing I enjoy more than the knowledge that whenever I’m ready I can come in, close the door and communicate with nobody.

My first introduction to Guangzhou was sharing an apartment with another teacher at my school (she turned out to be totally crazy, but that’s another story for when I’ve safely left Guangzhou). After that I moved into a series of flat shares, with varying rates of success.

Around this time last year I found myself on a friend’s sofa, after getting thrown out onto the streets. This happened because the flat share where I had been living came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that my roommate had been too stoned to bother paying the rent (that too is another story, best saved for when I’m safely out of the country).

After a few days on my friend’s sofa she was obviously keen to see the back of me and so she suddenly remembered that she had an apartment that came with her job, but had chosen not to live there. ‘You could live there’ she declared.

When I saw the apartment it was obvious why she had decided not to live there. There was no bathroom, but someone had rigged up a shower in the kitchen. There was also a squat toilet in the kitchen. Luckily I’m not much of a fan of cooking, so didn’t plan to use the kitchen for its intended purpose anyway, and I was kind of desperate for somewhere to live for a short time.

The combined kitchen and bathroom at mouse-in-cup apartment

I named it mouse-in-a-cup apartment. This was because when I first went over there I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye and it turned out to be a baby mouse, which had got stuck in a cup and couldn’t get out. The mouse theme continued. The first day I tried to use the washing machine there was a ball of fluff in the bottom of it. I reached in to pull it out, and it turned out to be the decaying carcass of a mouse. I think that my screams could be heard the length of Guangzhou.

a roommate

Cockroaches liked to visit the apartment too. I once killed a massive cockroach but left the disposal of the body to deal with another time, merely sweeping it into a corner. When I went back the next day it was gone. So I then started worrying about whichever creature had taken away the cockroach in the night.

I stayed there for three months in the end, but I was away travelling for a lot of that time and so it wasn’t so bad. What I did discover, however, was how much I preferred to have my own four walls and my own little bit of space, even when what is in that space is not so great.

So when I came back to Guangzhou I asked the recruiter to find me a job with its own un-shared apartment and this one is what he came up with. And it hasn’t been so bad.

Sometimes I like to go to Ikea and get my photo taken in the little pretend rooms. Don’t judge me.

 

Guangzhou and the single girl

By far the most searched item that brings people to my blog is ‘dating Chinese guys’ or some variant of that. I’m not sure quite who is so interested in that topic (although they seem to live in Russia or Eastern Europe for some reason). I fear these people may be bitterly disappointed, since I have very limited experience in the field and, in truth, little interest either.

My experience of dating Chinese men, limited though it may be, has not been too positive. From the one who talked marriage on the first date and then went into a sulk when he found I was older than him, to the one who wanted to study at a European university and needed citizenship to receive cheaper fees (see it’s not just girls who are out there looking for a visa), through to the one who drove me to some secluded dirt-track at the back of a factory and said ‘let’s go for a walk’, they have not been the best bunch.

Comparatively few Chinese men even approach me (and the same is true for most Western women I speak to). I put it down to them being too intimidated, but it means that unless you are the sort of woman who is happy to take control a lot, then you are unlikely to get far with a Chinese man. I find it tiring. I don’t like to always be the one who decides where to go and what time to meet. And I have never asked a man out in my life, and don’t intend to start now. If he’s too intimidated, or too stupid, to get the message then I’d sooner manage without.

I have had to lower the bar considerably in Guangzhou. Accepting lower standards leaves me irritated with China. Most men here smoke (I’m not puritanical but I don’t like the smell of it). Most Chinese men are shorter than me. They are normally looking to ‘settle down’ (or that’s what they tell me anyway; Vincent the walk-the-dirt-track man might have been an exception here ). If I’d wanted to settle down I’d have done it by now.

They are not the most adventurous bunch. The lack of adventure extends to both inside and outside of the bedroom. They are not adventurous of thought, of action, of dress and certainly not sexually.

Many western women I meet complain of a city where the western men are occupied with Chinese girlfriends and what is available to them is comparatively dull. Which is how I’ve ended up recycling an old boyfriend. I have broken my own rule of ‘never go back’; that is what Guangzhou has driven me to.

food and shopping

In the old days, when they let me teach teenagers, I often used a conversation topic along the lines of ‘think of five good things about Guangzhou. What would you advise someone coming here to do?’ The answers were pretty much always the same. ‘They should sample the delicious food’ and ‘they should go shopping’.

Ok, let’s take those one at a time. ‘The delicious food’; people in other parts of China say that the Cantonese eat anything and everything and there could well be some truth in that. From chicken feet (considered a delicacy) or dog meat (thankfully served in special ‘dog meat restaurants’ so hopefully with little chance of ordering it accidently) all served up with plenty of tasteless white rice. Canteen lunches are pretty much always the same: white rice, cabbage (or some kind of slimy green vegetable part of the cabbage family) and bones from some kind of animal containing little or no meat.

And don’t even get me started on the MSG that’s loaded onto everything. In the local area the food is mostly of the ‘swimming in oil’ variety (and the oil is often of dubious hygiene, but that’s another story) and the restaurants haven’t got the inclination to deal with the ‘pickiness’ of foreigners (why would you want no MSG? why would you want less oil?)

Yet everywhere I go I am told how healthy the Chinese diet is: ‘the reason we are not fat is because of the delicious, healthy Guangdong food’. And worse: ‘You Americans’, I get told pretty much daily, ‘you eat McDonalds and that’s why you’re so unhealthy. You should eat as we do’. Firstly I’m not American (but America is the only foreign country most of them know, so therefore I must be), secondly I’d never even eaten in a McDonalds before I came to China (I had this weird principle about avoiding conglomerates. Don’t worry about it. I’d never been in a Starbucks before I came here either and now I’m never out of the place. China has forced me to abandon all my principles). And thirdly: white rice, animal fats and reconstituted oils do not a healthy diet make.

So if you don’t come here for the delicious food you come here for the great shopping apparently. Certainly there are lots of places to shop. And shopping is something the Chinese like to do, seemingly.

The shopping areas are always crowded with bargain-hunters. I don’t know but maybe that is because everything is so badly made that it needs replacing every week. The bargain jeans that you buy for 10rmb are not such a bargain if they only last one wash cycle.
And don’t even get me started on the supermarkets. My advice to Vanguard supermarket would be: less people clogging up the aisle making ‘helpful suggestions’ when you’re trying to find what you want. Why not put them on the checkout instead, so that you can actually pay and get out of there?

The place is always busy. All the different departments have their own little checkout. I had thought that the point of a supermarket was that you could get everything under one roof, meaning just one queue to join. If you have to pay separately for everything, then why bother? If you want to buy shampoo then you have to queue somewhere different to pay for that. If you want to buy household goods then you have to get a receipt and take it back downstairs, queue at the checkout to pay then go back upstairs and hand over the receipt in order to finally get your goods. No wonder the place is always so crowded; you could quite easily spend the whole day just getting your weekly shop.

I’ve slowly got used to the whole Asian system of shopping, where you can’t look at anything because there is always an assistant right at your elbow, following you around the shop showing you everything. I don’t know why they haven’t realized yet that if they gave you the chance to look you might buy more. But no, they stand right next to you, right in your body space so that often you can’t even see around them, and they thrust goods at you randomly. If you are unable (or unwilling) to tell them what you are looking for they merely pick things off the shelves around you and show them to you.

The relief I felt last time I was in London and had chance to collect my thoughts and look around was immense (although London often has the reverse problem where arrogant shop assistants ignore you if you do want help and carry on with their conversations, but that too is another story. I understand; I wouldn’t smile for minimum wage in England either).

The smaller shops are not any better. It always amazes me that as a yellow-haired foreigner I can be so visible in the streets, meaning that everyone I walk past stops and stares at me, and yet when I go into a shop I suddenly become invisible and everyone else gets served before me.

I have, however, stayed in Guangzhou for some time now and I am in danger of becoming a bit like the person who stays in a bad marriage and everyone says ‘if it’s so bad then why don’t you just leave?’ So with that in mind, here is my list of five good things to do in Guangzhou. This is more what I had in mind when I set this question for my students.

1. Guangzhou Opera House. It’s an impressive building to look around, although they say it’s falling to pieces already.
2. Cruise down the Pearl River. Actually a lot of my students did come up with this suggestion when pushed. It’s ok. I’ve cruised better rivers but if you’re here anyway it’s ok.
3. Go to the top of the TV tower. There are supposed to be phenomenal views of Guangzhou on a clear day. The problem is we don’t get so many clear days. And 150rmb is a lot of money to climb a tower and look at pollution. I should say I haven’t actually done this and now I’m leaving in ten weeks it seems unlikely that I’ll bother. Its ok, I think I’ll live with the loss.
4. Sample the international food available in the downtown area. As much as my students bang on about the ‘delicious local food’ actually there are a number of good restaurants serving Turkish/Mexican/Italian and no end of excellent food here. But prices aren’t cheap, or not by Chinese standards anyway. Unlike the canteen white rice and cabbage, which comes in at just 2rmb, or 20 pence.
5. Baiyun airport. Guangzhou is a transport hub not just for China and Hong Kong but for travelling all over Asia. Being in Guangzhou gives great opportunities to travel to lots of other places. And meanwhile it’s a city with a lot of the amenities of any large metropolis. All kinds of Western goods are available here, though no girl’s shoes beyond a size 39, and believe me I’ve looked. It may not be the most ‘authentic’ Chinese experience, but it’s a much easier place to live long-term because of that.

(once again the VPN refused to let me upload any pictures. It’s been behaving badly for a few weeks now and I often get locked out of my blog and out of Facebook and gmail, which is frustrating in the extreme. Just another reason why it’s time to move on from China).