What the Chinese Don't Eat (10 page)

‘OK,’ I said finally. ‘I have to go.’ I had to get home for my son, who was being looked after by a 17-year-old nanny. ‘What about you?’

‘We have to stay,’ someone said. ‘That’s the deal.’

‘What deal?’

‘Don’t ask too many questions, OK? We had a deal before tonight’s football match: if we lost, then no one could go home to sleep. We all have to stay here at the office to prepare for the next game.’

I didn’t say a word.

Over the next few days, almost every one of these men’s wives or girlfriends called my office.

‘Is Xinran there?’ they said. ‘Is it true that my husband was at the office that night after the football match? He said you are
an eyewitness – are you? Who else was there? What did they do? Why didn’t anyone pick up the phone?’

If only women had a game that gave them such licence to shirk their domestic duties.

If it says ‘made in China’ on the label, most Chinese just don’t want to know

In city markets across China you will hear the following: ‘Look at this beautiful silk shirt, made in America.’ ‘Look at these, real leather shoes made in Japan.’ ‘Over here – the very best chocolate, made in England!’ On a publisher’s tour of China in April, my western friends asked me what it was that people were shouting. I never knew what to say. Equally, I found it hard to answer my teenage son PanPan’s question last year in a Shanghai department store. A saleswoman showed us a frying pan which she claimed had been made in Italy and ‘designed by the Great British Museum’.

‘You mean the British Museum is making frying pans?’ PanPan asked her. She was standing behind a demonstration table wearing a western wedding dress with a veil.

‘Yes, young man,’ she said, smiling, proud of her grasp of the international market. ‘You would know that if you read Italian.’

PanPan turned to me. ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘when did they move the British Museum to Italy? Have they really gone into the frying-pan business?’

I told him to be quiet, but I sympathised – I had heard similar things many times myself. I once tried to buy Chinese-made underwear in China, but again and again was told that the best kinds came from America.

Many of my Chinese friends have been disappointed with the gifts I have brought them from the UK – toy telephone boxes, little London taxis, all stamped underneath, ‘made in
China’. While western shops are full of Chinese-made products, China is increasingly obsessed with all things western – shops, fast food, hotels, even art, literature and architecture.

‘Where can we go for an authentic Chinese shopping experience?’ someone asked me on the publisher’s trip.

‘Xi’an,’ I suggested, ‘or Jinzhou [a 1,000-year-old town in Hubei province] or Zhouzhuang [a small village in Jiangsu province].’

My Chinese friends asked me why anyone would want to go there, where the shops were full of old Chinese junk: why not the big, westernised shopping centres of Shanghai and Beijing?

But I think visitors to China really do want to see these places, the real China. Xi’an was the first Chinese city to open itself up to the ancient world, not under the ‘open door’ policy of the 1980s, but during the Tang dynasty, when Xi’an was the first stop on the Silk Road. For more than 2,000 years and over 11 dynasties, Xi’an was China’s capital, playing a vital role in bridging the gap between east and west. Xian’s famous terracotta warriors of the Qin dynasty, an army belonging to one of the first emperors of China, are regarded by many as the eighth wonder of the world.

When I told a friend, a successful Shanghai businesswoman, how much my western friends had enjoyed visiting the grand mosque in Xi’an, she found it hard to believe. ‘What did they get out of that old place? Shanghai’s restored Yu-Garden is far more interesting. Trees full of birdsong? They can get that in our Plants Park. Spirituality? We have much more education and culture in Shanghai.’

Another friend, a journalist, pointed at the label on her Chinese Tang dress, which said, ‘made in China’. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘This was made in China, but the label is in English.’ Any Chinese woman who was unable to read English would assume
it had been made in the west. ‘Shouldn’t the label be in Chinese, too?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it strange? Some women even want to give birth while on holiday so that their children are born foreigners.’ She looked sad. ‘You know, almost everything good that is “made in China” has been taken from us since 1840 [the start of the opium wars], and now we are only interested in rubbish made in the west.’

I didn’t want to share in her pessimism. ‘But we have a better life than we did 20 years ago, don’t we?’

‘Yes. But how much of our culture and traditions do we have left? I am afraid it is too late for some things, and that we have paid too high a price in abandoning all things “made in China”.’

‘It’s just change, isn’t it? Why do you feel so sad?’ I asked.

Later, I spoke to another friend, a well-known writer, and told her about this conversation. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘At least our hearts are made in China.’

Chinese girls adopted by westerners highlight a vast cultural divide that must be bridged

Since writing about adopted Chinese girls in this column last year, I have become a builder. I am building a mothers’ bridge for adoptive parents all over the world, after receiving hundreds of emails and letters from people who have adopted Chinese orphans, more than 99% of whom are girls.

I also got a response from educated, middle-class women in China (few ordinary Chinese women have access to British newspapers). They found it hard to understand how western people could be so open-minded. In China, we never question other people’s family set-ups, we only observe. We definitely do not discuss divorce and adoption; these are very private matters.

So my Chinese friends are shocked. Why would they let everybody know their children are adopted, they ask? How can they admit to everyone that they can’t have children of their own? I thought westerners cared more about privacy than we did? What will happen when these girls grow up and go to China?

I was saddened by this mutual misunderstanding. How could these girls’ Chinese birth mothers fully understand that their babies were loved and cared for by western adoptive families? How would an adoptive mother react if her daughter were to someday meet her Chinese birth mother? Would these mothers be proud of their western adopted daughters, if the girls came back to see them?

In fact, many western adoptive families struggle with these cultural differences, too. I have a British friend who adopted a
Chinese daughter (she also has two biological sons). She tried as far as she could to give her daughter a Chinese upbringing: a ‘Chinese’ bedroom, painted a Chinese red with paper cuttings of Chinese characters on the wall (one of them meant for a wedding), and Chinese toys, most of them really for adults (binding shoes, a back-scratcher, a teapot, a traditional round fan, a Qi dress or cheong-sam, a statue of Buddha, a foot massage bench, even an old lady’s hat). Once, the five-year-old said to me, ‘I don’t want to be Chinese because I get different toys from my friends.’

Some families have asked where they can find ‘typical’ Chinese products and clothes for their adopted daughters. But what do they mean by ‘typical’? I don’t think it’s something you can buy from the shops, not even in China. Children grow like plants – while the shape and form of the branch and its leaves may be very far from the roots, there is still a connection, through which they get support and nourishment.

Psychologically, the most important thing for adopted Chinese children is to allow them to move freely between the two cultures, so that they can develop and make their own choices. For adoptive parents, one way of feeling a greater connection with Chinese culture is by helping other poor children there. This is the purpose of the charity I am setting up, Mothers’ Bridge (
www.motherbridge.org
), which aims to support adoptive parents and children. In spite of our different feelings about privacy and family, I believe we all, in China and the west, have a capacity for love. I also want to be able to help adopted children find an answer to that question: ‘Why didn’t my Chinese mother want me?’

I’ll end with this poem by an anonymous author, sent to me by an adoptive mother:

Once there were two women who never knew each other.
One you do not remember, the other you call Mother.
Two different lives shaped to make you one.
One became your guiding star; the other became your sun.
The first one gave you life, and the second taught you to live it.
The first gave you a need for love. The second was there to give it.
One gave you a nationality. The other gave you a name.
One gave you a talent. The other gave you aim.
One gave you emotions. The other calmed your fears.
One saw your first sweet smile. The other dried your tears.
One sought for you a home that she could not provide.
The other prayed for a child and her hope was not denied.
And now you ask me, through your tears,
The age-old question unanswered through the years.
Heredity or environment, which are you a product of?
Neither, my darling. Neither. Just two different kinds of Love.

A couple of unforgettable chickens reinforced my faith in human kindness

My son PanPan, who has just turned 16, has travelled from London to the Chinese countryside to teach children, on work experience. I’ve been very worried but after speaking to him on the phone I feel more reassured. His voice was very grown-up. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. It’s not as bad as you said. It’s very hot, 39°C. I’ve been thinking of the two chicken stories you told me.’

Once, PanPan had asked me what the most unforgettable meals of my life had been. I told him there were two chickens that had stayed in my mind. The first, I ate in 1992. I was visiting a village near Hefei, the capital of An-Hui province, on a press trip to ‘greet the forgotten peasants’.

I was sent to stay with a family for the night, a couple with three children. Their daily meal was bartered with two chicken eggs. Every day, they would exchange the eggs for a little rice, flour, oil and some vegetables. Obviously, they were in no position to feed a guest. I knew I’d rather go hungry than eat what little food they had.

Their house had mud walls and a grass roof. The mother said nothing to me by way of greeting, just, ‘Here is your bed, you’ll have to sleep with the girls.’ Her daughters looked like frightened rabbits, crowded on to a wooden plank – their bed.

They were about seven, five and two and a half, and they were excited about my visit. They opened my handbag and took everything out. They asked lots of questions: what was face cream, what was a handkerchief for, what do you put in a wash bag?

Their mother shouted out to us from the yard: ‘Time for dinner.’ I followed the girls through the dark house to the kitchen, which was next to a tiny chicken coop. The girls cheered and I caught my breath: there was a cooked chicken on the little broken table.

‘Don’t just stand there – come and eat,’ said the mother. She was still very frosty. ‘Why have you killed your chicken,’ I asked. ‘Please don’t say it was because of me.’

‘Of course it’s because of you! You’ve come a long way, and you are our guest. Just eat: we’ve nothing else to feed you.’ She was cold and unsmiling, but I was, and still am, moved by her kindness.

Four years later, I returned to see the family. They had become rich under China’s open-door policy, and I was given 20 chickens and 100 eggs to thank me for my visit. But I still think that chicken I ate in their yard was an unrepeatable experience. I don’t know if there is anyone anywhere else who would give half her worldly goods to a dinner guest.

My second memorable chicken experience was the first meal I ate outside China, in London in 1997. My friend and I were hungry after a 12-hour flight. We went to a little restaurant near Great Portland Street tube station. We noticed that everyone was eating chicken, so we decided to do the same. But our English wasn’t good enough to order. A very tall, very smiley waiter came to ask what we wanted: we pointed to other people’s plates. He shook his head and waved his hands, saying: ‘No, no.’

‘Yes, you have, you can,’ I said. ‘We want to chicken.’ My English was very basic.

‘Look, look!’ My friend, who speaks barely any English, pointed to the table next to us.

‘OK, OK,’ he said, trying to keep it simple. ‘Tell. Me. Which. Part. Of. Chicken. Do. You. Want?’

I translated for my friend. She must have been starving because suddenly she stood up and pointed at her arms, saying ‘Here!’

‘No, no, we don’t serve here, or here, or here!’ The waiter patted his arms, head and both feet.

‘OK. Here.’ My poor friend had lost all self-consciousness: she was patting her bottom and shouting.

‘No, no. We cannot give you only here.’ The waiter patted his bottom too, and raised his voice. ‘We have to serve you here and here, together.’ His right hand moved from his bottom to his lower leg. By now, everybody in the restaurant had stopped eating to watch us.

Finally another man, who was shorter and seemed to be the boss, came and put a whole chicken on our table and said something we couldn’t understand. But we had to eat before we started worrying about the cost or what it was he’d said. In the end, they only charged us for the legs and the wings, not the whole chicken.

I had told PanPan that these two chickens had inspired me to try to bridge the divide between the poor and the rich in China, between the west and China. They made me see that you can find kindness when you least expect it, no matter where you are.

A shocking tale in a New Zealand bookshop is a lesson that hate is an emotion best forgotten

New Zealand was the first of 22 countries I visited between 2002 and 2003 to promote my book
The Good Women of China
. As well as a busy schedule and a lot of media interviews, I was asked to give a talk at a women’s bookshop in Auckland.

During the two and a half hours that I was there, talking and signing books, my attention constantly wandered from the white faces surrounding me to the face of a grey-haired Asian woman in her 70s. Her eyes looked as if they were full of loss and sadness. She stood apart from the crowd, not approaching me with a question or asking to have her book signed.