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Mike Shearing On Being Tall In China
by guest blogger Mike Shearing
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dynastic epic set in a remote South American village, the matriarch of the family lives to such an immense age that she eventually shrinks to a size whereby her young grandchildren wrap her in a handkerchief and inter her alive in a sideboard drawer during the course of a game. My 250 Days of Solitude in my particular remote settlement in deepest China has had the opposite dimensional effect, I feel I have grown to such an immense height that I am now on a par with Yao Ming, the American-based 7 foot 3 inch basketball star and national icon. (That is to say Mr Yao is exceptionally tall, not that he is thumb size with an irregular number of perambulatory appendages; as maybe a spider with advanced diabetes might be.) I'm not unusually tall by UK standards - 5 foot 11 or so, depending on whether I'm being measured by my mother or somebody who actually knows what they're doing - but since I've become conscious of the issue in the last few months, I've not met a single person who is taller than me in the whole city. It's reached the point when I find myself out of curiosity surreptitiously pursuing individuals through a market or down a shopping street under the suspicion that they may match me in height, only to find each time when I get alongside that I'm usually looking down on their eyebrows.
This situation seems destined to change within the next few years, however, as - no doubt consequencial of improved diets and health care in the last 20 years or so - a considerable number of the children in my classes are already oustripping their parents and grandparents by the age of 12 or 13. This is no more apparent than when both senior generations turn out in the High Street for Friday evening's English Corner, to witness their Little Emperor (or Empress) queuing up for their 60 seconds of glorious conversation with the foreigner - "what colour do you like?" "what colour don't you like?" and the inevitable "how many people are in your family?" and the equally inevitable answer "3." If the answer isn't 3, it's more often because of an included grandparent or two than a sibling - although one boy did manage to muster a family of 6 by including both grandparents and a pet dog. The one-child policy seems to have been enforced more rigidly in Guizhou than it was in last year's province - no more than about 1 in 15 children turn out to have siblings, and if I can prize the brother or sister's age out of the child in question, the gap between the siblings usually suggests that the 2nd is a "legitimate" product of a broken home: under the rules adults who are widowed or divorced and then remarry are allowed another child without incurring any financial or political disbenefit.
I can't really complain about the one-child policy, as an incidental side effect is that it keeps foreign teachers such as myself in the style to which we have become accustomed. Having only one child's education to maintain makes it possible for an increasing number of families to fork out the 600 Yuan a term that it costs to enrol a child in our school (maybe 3-5% of a typical middle-class family's income in these parts.) With over 1000 on Qihang's books (up 30% on last year) we have going on for 10% of all the city's children enroled with us, and almost all the kids of Tongren's government officials, businessmen, teachers and other professionals. We're the only school in the prefecture licenced to employ a foreigner, and the school director guards this privelege tenaciously - when a rival school was found to have recruited a Mr Benda (from Cameroon, not Futurama) as a teacher, our Mr Zhao wasted no time in shopping them to the appropriate authorities. As it is I think Mr Zhao lives in fear of my one day being bundled into the back of Little Star English School's even littler van and receiving a ransom note the next day made up of characters cut out of the local newspaper. My natural curiosity and unnatural egalitarian instincts lead me to take what Mr Zhao thinks is a slightly unhealthy interest in our smaller, cheaper, rival schools, and I think if he had his way he'd have me engage in banter with the children and teachers from these schools in the manner of the English policeman from Allo Allo, in order to deliberately mislead and distort their pronunciation.
In addition to my delusions of haute grandeur, my relative solitude and the lack of exposure to everday English conversation may be affecting my brain patterns. I'd always had that annoying Harry-Hill-style trait of involuntarily bursting into song several times in the average day as a result of overhearing snatches of conversation which prompted recollection of song lyrics; a chance remark by someone arranging a rendezvous for example would likely as not set me off on Lindisfarne's Meet me On the Corner or Smokie's I'll Meet You at Midnight, depending on the grammatical subject of the statement.Now in the absence of any alternative auditory stimulation in colloquial English to fill the vacuum of my brain ,I find my cerebral iPod regularly throws up and sets me off subconsciously singing one of the three same songs: Even the Bad Times Are Good by the Tremeloes, Bobby Darin's Things, and Macheath and Jenny Diver's Tango-Ballad duet from Brecht & Weill's Threepenny Opera. Why these particular numbers, located very much near the centre of the spectrum of popular song bookended by Fleetwood Mac's Albatross and Coast to Coast's Do the Hucklebuck (which incorporates the majestic lyric "You do a bit that/You do a bit of this/If you don't know how to do it/Ask my little sis"), should warrant such repeated mental generation is as big a mystery as "whatever happened to the guy who played Andy in EastEnders in 1985 who got his character killed off so he could leave the show and further his career?" All part of the same brain-function conundrum that means every time I wash up a saucepan I see Ottery St Mary High Street in my mind's eye Horatio, and clearing a particular area of the board when playing Minesweeper always throws up a sudden mental image of an unremarkable wheeled bin I saw on a street corner of Havana in 2001. (I say unremarkable, but some readers might be interested to know it was an 1100 litre rolling-lid type in green plastic, with an allin key locking mechanism.It was about three-quarters full, of mixed household waste)
Teaching as I do every night of the week, I've not really had the leisure pattern associated with using a DVD player, but having made the decision to stay on here for a 2nd year I decided to invest in a machine and get round to watching some of the 200 or so DVDs the Irishman left in the flat along with a considerable proportion of his superfluous epidermal tissue. But curse him, he took so little care of the discs that a fair proportion of them are so scratched and damaged as to be unwatchable. I was able to make it to the conclusion of Lord of the Rings 3, with the dyspepsically saccharin ending that gratuitously tries to convince us that the unctious Sam "Oh let me breathe in and out for you Mister Frodo," isn't an intimate associate of Dorothy. But the Spiderman2 DVD stuck more often than the eponymous hero did, Garfield skipped as if he was on a hot tin roof, and as for Michael Collins, the whole thing ground to a halt before they'd even hinted at his selection for the Apollo 11 space mission. Thankfully, my predecessor had not been let loose on the school's box sets of David Attenborough's the Life of Birds and The Life of Mammals, so I have at least been able to gaze again on the Greatest Living Englishman without untoward interference.
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