I had begun to feel quite unwell after just a few weeks in China. I developed chronic diarrhoea and a backache. My bowels demanded to be emptied urgently and often, with little warning and would start leaking if not promptly attended to. Both at home and at work I splattered the toilets several times a day and dared not venture far from them. Most of my expat colleagues experienced stomach upsets and some diarrhoea but usually it passed after a short while. Mine persisted in spite of the loperamide I was taking and I was losing weight. As for the back ache, I think my bed was a contributing factor, as I was not accustomed to the hard Chinese slab mattresses.
After three months I made an appointment to see a doctor, or rather Iris made the appointment for me. Iris the Assistant Administrator was the go between for all the expat staff and all of China outside of the university, for all matters medical, accommodation, travel, visas, police checks and all the endless bureaucracy. It was Iris I phoned when the police officer came to my apartment one night not long after I moved in. He demanded to see all my papers: my passport, work visa and foreign expert certificate. I didn’t even know the Mandarin word for passport then.
Iris arranged a driver to take me to the hospital and Mike, one of the Chinese teachers, to be my interpreter and make sure I was looked after. There were no private GP practices. Everyone went to a hospital for any medical matter. I arranged with Lester, the Head of Faculty to take the afternoon off and explained my health issue which necessitated a trip to the hospital.
Lester commiserated. “Three months of diarrhoea, eh. Yes, you need to get it seen to. My word, yes. It must be very draining. No pun intended.”
Hangzhou is a second tier city with a population of only eight million at the time I was living there and there was not a lot of English spoken outside of certain institutions, or much in the way of English signage. However, the hospital had made an effort and provided English translations of the various departments on the campus. On our way to the Stomach and Abdomen clinic we passed the Orthopaedics, Urology, Obstetrics and Gynaecology departments. One of the problems with using a translating dictionary when you have no understanding of English is that you are often faced with a range of roughly equivalent words and might not choose the appropriate word for the context. One of the signs in the gynaecology department read “Cunt Inspections”. Mike had sufficient knowledge of English to appreciate the humour.
As with the education sector, China has a tiered health service with facilities ranging from basic third world to world class top of the range international hospitals with experts who speak English or any other language you may require. The health insurance provider for my university had, unfortunately, contracted a hospital that was at the lower end of the scale to provide medical services for us, the employees. All I can say in its favour is that the service was prompt. I had a consultation with a doctor via my interpreter in a clinic where several other patients followed the conversation with mild interest, read the notes on the doctor’s clipboard, and watched as he palpated my abdomen. He asked me if I had been drinking tap water and I said, No, only bottled water.
The doctor gave me a small, waxed cardboard pottle and said he needed a shit sample. Standard practice would call it a stool sample but in my case it would be more of a smear. I was directed to a lavatory down the hall that was just as dirty as any of the public toilets in the city and there was no toilet paper, as per the public toilets, but I had got into the habit of carrying my own. There, in a stall over a squat toilet I produced the required sample, after which, of course, I washed my hands. There were sinks with running water but no soap or towels or any means of drying my hands. This is a hospital I reminded myself. How can they hope to control infections in these conditions?
I returned to the clinic carrying my little box of shit, uncomfortably conscious of the pungent diarrhoea odour. My sample was immediately examined under a microscope and the doctor declared, “No parasites.” He then discussed my case with Mike, and Mike said the doctor could put a camera up my butt if I like. If I like? Since it was an option I declined. “You could have a video,” Mike suggested. I was not in the mood for toilet humour. “He wants a blood sample too,” Mike added. I was directed back to reception where I had to put my arm across the counter. The blood was taken and also analysed on the spot. No pathological causes for diarrhoea identified. Other causes? Stress? Yeah, maybe.
Culture shock causes stress and another reason for my feeling stressed was that I had lost my glasses on a bus. I always wore my backpack on my front to keep my stuff safe from pickpockets on the bus but I had my glasses in my pocket, thinking they would not be of interest to a thief. They may have fallen from my pocket or were possibly taken by a pickpocket going for a lucky dip. I had brought my first ever pair of glasses with me as a backup but I found that my close vision had deteriorated so much over the years that I still had difficulty reading with my old glasses. Also, fashions in frames had changed so much over the years that my clunky old glasses made me look even more dated. I went to the optician in Liu Xia, the nearest shopping centre and I phoned Iris so she could tell the optician what I needed. Then it was just a matter of trying different lenses and saying which were better, and selecting new frames. I was able to read with the new glasses but they just didn’t feel right. They had a shorter focal length for reading, they were giving me a headache and felt like they were sucking my eyes out of my head.
While we were still at the reception area of the hospital a doctor was demanding payment from a patient. Mike said that the man was not a patient but had called an ambulance to pick up a woman who had been struck by a car as she was crossing a street on a pedestrian crossing. It was a hit and run. She had been treated at A and E and now the man had to pay. He was not the driver of the car and did not know the woman but he had to pay because always someone has to pay. “This is why most people don’t help,” Mike explained. “They don’t want to get involved because they may be held responsible.”
That would explain the shocking CCTV video I saw on You Tube of the toddler struck by a car and left lying on the road. No one came to help and she was run over by a second vehicle, a van, before a woman finally came out of a shop and dragged her body out of the way.
“Yeah, I saw it too,” said Mike. “It was the child of a migrant worker left with her grandparents. It’s really sad but those kinds of things happen here.”
I was summoned back to my doctor’s room. “What about the back ache?” he asked. “Clinical notes also say back ache. Do you want an MRI?” It was all covered by the insurance so yeah, why not. I was taken to a room in the basement and Mike left me there with the technician. The technician gave me some instructions, which he assumed I understood as I sat down and removed my shoes and my belt and got onto the bed of the machine. The MRI is the same anywhere, I think: a great whirring and clanking, claustrophobia inducing beast. Again, no waiting on results. No pathology evident. Wear and degeneration of lumbar spine within normal range for age of patient.
I returned to work a little reassured and as time passed, the diarrhoea finally passed. I still found a lot of the food strange and sometimes suspect but after my recovery I could usually eat whatever was served up, with impunity. I think I became acclimatised to the food and the bacterial fauna of the environment. But I still avoided street food that I suspected was fried in gutter oil. Aflatoxin dumplings. The oil was collected from waste sumps of restaurants and filtered and recycled and recycled. Raymond, an Australian colleague, who arrived at the same time as me, still preferred street food to the meals served up in the staff cafeteria. When he did have lunch in the cafeteria, he refused to use chopsticks and ate everything with a spoon. Ray had learnt to say bīng pijŭ, cold beer, but had picked up virtually no other Mandarin. I’m here to teach English, he said, not to learn Chinese. He’s not going to last here, I thought, and I wondered how long I would last.
I became less stressed as my culture shock diminished and I mastered some survival Mandarin. Another event that caused, and eventually relieved, some anxiety was the retrieval of a consignment of my books from the Hangzhou airport. I had sent some of my books in a small suitcase as unaccompanied luggage, rather than pay an exorbitant fee for overweight luggage on my flight from New Zealand to China. Books are heavy items. I was duly notified when they arrived, which was ten days after my own arrival. I took the one hour taxi journey, which was thankfully relatively inexpensive, through the city traffic out to the airport, again with Mike as my interpreter. The international terminal was a cavernous building full of the clamour of crowds of people echoing off the polished concrete floors and walls.
We filled in a form at a reception area and we were referred to another official and filled in another form. We were shunted from one unhelpful official to another to get a red stamp on the form that would release my suitcase. One of the officials was a baby-faced boy in a uniform with an oversized hat, one of those peaked service caps with the broad flat crown. He looked at the forms and pretended to know where I had to go. We spent so much time going from one office to another and waiting to see various officials that all the offices began to close for the day.
We returned to the airport the next day, still seeking that elusive red stamp that would release my suitcase. This time the trail of red tape led us out of the terminal building, into the stink of the kerosene jet exhaust atmosphere of the airport and into a cargo warehouse, which also housed a maze of offices. Again we were directed from one office to another and finally actually located the suitcase. I could see it on a rack in a large storage room behind the counter where I was standing and waiting. Mike became quite assertive on my behalf but to no avail and then he went off to talk to another official while I stayed hopefully in sight of the suitcase, and the customs official remained at his post at the counter. He had a mole on his cheek, from which a few long, black hairs grew down his otherwise clean shaven face. Neither of us spoke in the absence of our interpreter. Still he stayed standing impassively at the counter, while I waited. Did he think I might vault over the counter and grab my suitcase and run off with it? Then it occurred to me that perhaps he was waiting for a bribe. I considered putting some money on the counter. This might liberate my suitcase but then, on the other hand, it might get me arrested. In any case it would all be caught on the ubiquitous CCTV cameras watching over us.
Mike returned with the explanation that I needed a special licence to import books. I argued that I was not an importer, that the books were my personal belongings. The officials insisted that the books were being imported and if I wasn’t a bona fide importer I would have to engage a company with an import licence to import them for me. It was unlikely that such a company would be willing to do such a one off transaction and if it could be arranged it would be very expensive. There would also be an extra fee for the airport keeping my suitcase in storage. By this stage I was ready to kiss my books goodbye and try to replace them through Chinese publishers, which would be a cheaper option as books were considerably cheaper in China, often because they were illegally copied.
However, as it turned out, I did manage to get my suitcase of books, with Iris’ help. She had an aunt who worked at the airport, who could do the necessary paperwork to procure the required red stamp. Iris said it was Guanxi and I thought at first that was that was her aunt’s name. Gwan She. But no. Guanxi is a word that translates as relationship, the sort of relationship that influences and expedites. That was the way things worked. Knowing the right people.
Guanxi could be a force for good but it could also imply corruption and nepotism. Not all of my students had earned their places at the university on merit. Some were there because of guanxi – because they were well connected, including the son of the vice principal. On the third and final trip to the airport, with Iris, there was a new form with the official red stamp waiting for me, which delivered up the suitcase. I had to open the suitcase so the contents could be inspected and another form stamped. I had forgotten that I had also put a jar of Marmite in the suitcase and I feared it would be confiscated but I was willing to let it go. The customs inspector opened the jar, sniffed the contents, and replaced the lid, with a grimace of disgust. I was finally reunited with my precious books, and the Marmite, and all it cost me, apart from taxi fares, was two boxes of chocolates, one for Iris and one for her aunt.
*
Mike and Iris were very helpful but I didn’t want to make too many demands on their good will and I wanted to be as independent as I could with shopping and ordinary errands. I was picking up a bit of Mandarin and I took my pocket dictionary and phrase book with me everywhere. I used the buses a lot and usually managed to get to where I wanted to go. I sometimes missed my stop, especially when the bus was very crowded so I was careful to get myself close to the door well before my stop. I had to anticipate my stop and allow time to push my way through the tightly packed crowd of standing passengers. The buses were usually so crowded that it would be impossible to fall over but there was one occasion when I did take a fall. I got on a bus with no standing passengers and it took off while I was still walking down the aisle toward a seat. The bus lurched forward so suddenly that I pitched onto the floor and scraped my hand. I got back to my feet and checked for damage. No serious injury but my watch strap was broken and my wrist was bleeding. My jacket had a dirty stain and a blood stain on the sleeve. I took the jacket to a dry cleaner and to make sure he would remove the blood stain I showed him the stain on the sleeve and found the word for blood in my pocket dictionary. The drycleaner dropped the jacket as though it was toxic and waved his hand with the no way gesture. Bu bu. No no. I took my jacket to another drycleaner and said nothing about the stain.
*
Raymond had left at the end of the first semester and I had begun to feel almost complacent and self-congratulatory when I reflected on how I had got over feeling beset by so many challenges in those early days in China. I was actually fulfilling a longstanding dream of living and working in China for a few years and travelling around the country before I reached the age of mandatory retirement of sixty in the PRC. My salary was fairly modest by Western standards but my accommodation, meals, insurances, air fares were all part of the package and the cost of living was quite cheap. So I was able to live comfortably and satisfy my desire to travel and see the country. I also had a side-line as a travel writer, which brought in a bit of extra income. I kept my moonlight writing quiet as my contract with the university excluded any secondary employment. I had also won a prize of a voucher for domestic flights within China to the value of 5,000 RMB for a travel writing competition I had entered.
I was enjoying my work at the university and getting on well with my colleagues and my students. The students were of mostly working class backgrounds, down to earth and appreciative of their opportunity to study at the university. Some had come on scholarships from around the province or further afield, even from overseas, Central Asia and Africa. I particularly liked a girl called Lily in my undergraduate class. Not romantically. Purely platonic and quite paternalistic, actually. Most of the students and some of the staff had adopted English names and flower names seemed to be popular with the girls. Lily had come from a relatively poor family in rural central China on a scholarship she had won for being such an outstanding student at her high school. My students were discussing what they were going to do during spring break and I noticed Lily becoming tearful talking to her friends. When I asked her about her plans she said she had planned to stay and work in the city as a shop assistant but now she wanted to go home to her village, to see her parents and grandparents because her father had become seriously ill. However, she hadn’t bought train tickets in advance and now she couldn’t get a ticket because of the huge demand during Spring Festival holiday when millions of migrant workers in the cities were returning to their homes in the countryside. It’s the one time in the year when they are reunited with their children left in the care of their grandparents.
“You could fly,” I said. Lily had never flown and the prospect of getting on a plane was as far outside the realms of possibility for her as if I had suggested she could flap her arms and fly. I gave her my voucher for Sichuan Airlines and when she understood that she could use it to fly anywhere in China, she hugged me and, still tearful, said, “Teacher David, you are so kind. How did you get this voucher?”
“Guanxi,” I said knowingly. “Guanxi.”