haonowshaokao

It’s been a long, generally hot summer in Beijing, and I’ve been riding around on my bike, hatless, for much of it. As a result I’ve picked up a highly unfashionable tan.
Chinese people usually want their skin to be whiter. When I first arrived here I made the usual mistake of assuming that this showed some aspiration to become a ‘westerner’, but it’s nothing of the sort. If you’ve got dark skin in China it’s usually because you’ve been working out in the fields all day, and are therefore a poor farmer or migrant builder. The rich spend their days in air-conditioned houses, office and shopping centres and therefore don’t get any sun. In England the rich get to go on holiday to exotic locations, while the poor generally work in shops or factories or stay at home – and even if they can get outside it’s hard to get a tan when it’s drizzling.
So it seems that the same class-based skin-colour-prejudice system is in place in both countries, but with different results. So what should a laowai aim for? Carrying an umbrella as a sun screen and applying a sun cream that actually whitens your skin both seem ridiculous, but so does risking skin cancer to make yourself less attractive to the locals. It’s tempting to just give in, start avoiding direct sunlight, and spend sunny days sheltering inside, but then you remember the really stupid side of it all – the casual racism it encourages, the discrimination against working people, the inability to enjoy a nice sunny day – and the hat stays off.

Moving house is supposed to be one of the most stressful experiences in your life. I don’t really agree. This week my lifetime total of house moves reached 27, and I barely noticed, especially as this time I didn’t have to do it by public bus.
I didn’t want to move, but it became necessary. I’m working all day every day so I’ve got no time to look after V during her pregnancy. The solution (a bit of an odd one I’ll admit) has been to get a large two-floor flat on the edge of Beijing (Tongzhou) which we’re going to share with her family. We’ll have the upper floor, they’ll have the lower one.
For the moment this is just going to be a weekend thing, and I’ll have to get a room in the centre as I don’t fancy three hours of commuting on jam-packed subway trains every day. The current house is a bit big (& expensive) for this purpose, so as soon as I can find a room John and his girlfriend are moving in.
Next year I’ll hopefully be a director of studies, not working 9-6, not worrying about the rush hour and able to commute (fairly) painlessly. In the meantime, these arrangements will have to do.

This time last year I must have known that coming back to China was a big life move, even compared to all my previous travels, but I seem to have been too busy with writing my thesis, organizing my journey, saying goodbye to everyone, etc, to think about what was ahead of me.
So here I am, on the 23rd of August 2010, with my “foreign expert” certification, a married man, a headmaster, with my name on the contract of three different flats, and now a baby on the way. What’s happened?
I suppose this is how it always goes. People have always done these things and I’m no different. The years of wandering round Eurasia (what V calls my “single man life”) were the unusual part, though they seemed like unremarkable fun at the time. I’ve not finished traveling – fortunately I’ve picked a career (TEFL training) where I can get a good job almost anywhere in the world. But it’s on hold for a few years anyway.
Now I’m going to be a father it seems like I need to be mature and responsible, but I’m not sure what that really means. Certainly my lifestyle right now includes very little in the way of irresponsibility and instability.
The odd thing is how easy and natural it all seems. I’m not panicking, not in the slightest, not even worrying much. A few years ago this would all have seemed like a very big deal indeed, but a couple of 31 and 30 being married and having a baby is pretty much the natural course of things. Life has simply moved on, and all for the better.