Arrival Narrative
From Urban Press
Leaving New Zealand (15th August 2011)
Got through customs, and sat down in the departure lounge, which unsurprisingly started to fill up with Chinese returnees. Very few white faces. Even the cabin crew and gate staff were mostly Chinese. I began to feel very lonely. The large number of people I wasn't going to be seeing, probably for a year all being well, suddenly hit me. The bloody minded stupidity of going to a country where I didn't speak the language, and where I knew no one, to live in an apartment I'd never seen before and didn't know how to get to, or even if it was actually legit, loomed hugely. Briefly toyed with the feasibility of chucking it all in.
Boarding announcements were made in Chinese first and then in English. The outraged nationalist in me said "I thought this was Air New Zealand…last time I checked English was the first language of New Zealand not Chinese", but it was quickly shouted down by my internal liberal majority. I felt a little guilty for my reactionary inner monologue, and started vaguely to wonder whether the culture shock of actually being in China might bring this unlikable side of David out more often.
The announcement was made for business class and premium economy class to begin boarding. Almost all the Pakeha in the room stood up and made their way through the gate. Very few Chinese passengers joined them. Economic segregation is alive and well in the 21st Century.
Arrival (16th August 2011)
We were about half an hour early into Shanghai Pudong. As we came in over Shanghai the view was obscured by a thick blanket of fog. The pilot tells us its 28° outside (at 7am) with a forecast high of 35°. There's a bunch of stuff I'm worried about before I even leave the plane. I need to find a Chinese sim card for my phone so I can phone my new landlady, as the useless pricks at Vodaphone won't let me use their sim in China unless I pay for a contract. I also have to trust that she's given me good directions, and that the Taxi driver will even know where Xing Guo Lu is. More pressingly though I'm worried that the Chinese customs official will ask me something in Chinese and I won't be able to answer. This makes the 3 or 4 westerners who are pulled out of the customs line in front of me and asked to follow an official into a back room a matter or personal concern. But the official just stamps my passport, after the facial recognition software says I am who I say I am, and I'm soon in the main arrivals area wandering around looking lost. Before I left Mum told me that I might be bothered by taxi hawkers and I'm not really someone who likes to be told what to do if I feel like I aught to be able to figure it out myself, so when people claiming to airport staff started offering me help I wasn't too sure if I should take it. Instead I wandered aimlessly about looking for a phone shop. No luck. I found some pay phones though, but couldn't work out how to use them. My machismo is wearing thin by this point, so, when a young bloke successfully interprets the aura of desperation I'm giving off, I swallow my pride and follow him to an unhelpfully nondescript counter where he tells me I can buy a SIM. I pay the 150 RMB despite feeling vaguely like I might be being overcharged (I wasn't). I phone my Chinese landlady and tell her I'm on my way to the Taxi stand, she tells me to call her again from the Taxi so she can meet me at my new place.
I get a bit lost looking for the Taxi rank, but eventually find a bank of elevators which will, all things being equal, take me down to street level. I get in, not realizing that the elevator is actually going up. The elevator is huge, you could park a car in it, and it reeks a bit of fish for some reason (I've been here two days now and the one thing I can say for sure is that the one thing you can expect in Shanghai is weird smells). Two Chinese girls are arguing about something at the other end of the elevator, but they get out before the ride back down.
The Taxi rank isn't busy at all when I find it, just me and one other family, so I'm in a taxi with all my gear pretty quickly. I end up in the back seat because cars are right hand drive here and I go to the wrong side of the car. I give the driver my address card and off we go. Once we're on the highway I remember I have to call my landlady again and she says she will probably be there before me. I'm a bit worried that the Taxi driver doesn't know where he's going, especially when he has to call someone for directions. At first I think he is talking to me and I get even more concerned as there is no way my Chinese will hold up to that challenge, besides which my map is locked in the boot. Then I see the phone up to his ear. Even so, its a 45 minute car ride from the airport to Xing Guo Lu, which is where I will be living, and this leaves a lot of time for me to worry, crane my neck to try and read street names as we pass them (there are street signs on every intersection here, in english and chinese, every intersection, and the signs are often printed on both sides so pedestrians can read them too), watch the meter like a hawk, and begin to burn through the credit on my new simcard checking google maps to make sure we're actually getting closer.
Eventually we pull onto the right road, and into the right address. I unload my stuff onto the curb and look through the gate at the pealing paint and apparent general disrepair of my new home. It's at this point I realize I'm going to have to carry my bags up two flights of stairs. Thinking my landlady is probably already inside, and sweating up a storm I wrestle my bags up to the third floor landing… it doesn't seem like the right place to me though. I'm not even sure I'm in the right building, but I knock anyway, No answer. In retrospect I think, as I wrestle my luggage down the stairs again…nearly toppling over at least once…it would have been a better idea to phone my landlady from the curb in the first place. I get back out onto the road, and I'm about to do this when she calls me. She's still on her way.
A few minutes later she pulls up with her husband, who she volunteers to help me with my luggage. He is french, but has spent time in New Zealand studying english. They show me around the apartment, which thankfully is much nicer on the inside than it is on the outside, I get the briefest of introductions to one of my roomies before she leaves for work, pay my landlady the first months rent and sign the lease and suddenly I'm alone in my own apartment is Shanghai, dripping with sweat and thirsty as hell.
I take a cold shower (it will be a couple days before I figure out how to turn the hot water on), change my cloths, and decide to try and find something to drink. I find a little corner fruit store, which isn't actually on a corner, but they have coke and what not. I buy a bottle of sprite, and drink about half of it on the way home as the temperature creeps up to the mid thirties. When I get back home I give Steve, my contact at SISU a call. He's leaving the country for two months soon, and I need to sort some stuff out with him before he goes. He tells me he'll be out my way in about an hour and will come and see me after he's run some other errands.
When he arrives we decide the first thing I need to do is register with the local neighborhood committee as the Foreign Affairs people will need my registration when the come to extend my VISA. We go to the Radisson Hotel, which is just around the corner to ask where my local committee is. 5 star hotels in China will just assume you are a guest if your a westerner and will normally go out of their way to help you. It helps that Steve speaks fluent Chinese, but even so they sent us to the wrong committee office, which we struggled to find. Apparently the left side of my street is one committee and the right is another. After much heated discussion though, and one or two phone calls the people at the first committee office we'd been sent to directed Steve to the correct one, which was a half hour walk down Fuxing Lu. We taxied there instead. The board young man behind the desk, made a cursory check of my documents, and then printed me out a registration. Steve and I parted, agreeing to try and meet again at SISU the following day, either before or after my conference registration and I decided to walk home. When I got there the Ayi (house keeper), who comes twice a week, was working, and so I had to get my room and belongings into a fit state for her to clean around.
I met my other flatmate that night, when he got back from work. I wanted to try and stay up to my usual bedtime, but couldn't keep my eyes open much past 9.30pm so eventually stopped trying. Still quite humid, but so tired I didn't care.
