Where do you call home?

'Where do you call home?' Oh asked me one day.

Married to a Singaporean for nearly 15 years, Oh has lived in Singapore for seven. She purchased an exclusive property along the sought-after East Coast. With a sea view apartment and a part-time lectureship in an art college, she seems like an enviable success symbol among the new Chinese immigrants.

And yet behind the glossy façade, she has for the last six months been struggling to pull herself out of depression.

Well-read, articulate and extremely clever, Oh had quite a career in China. Without having a clue about what film directing was, she used her love of literature and a quick brain to win a coveted place on a directing course run by two film-making power-houses in China. For four years, she was among the twenty lucky ones under the mentorship of top professionals. On graduation, she was hand-picked at the tender age of 22 to join the Shanghai Film Studio. Convinced that her directing would benefit from the first-hand experiences of the ‘real world’, she set up a firm in the mid 1990s to sell computing systems to top Chinese universities, and then spent time at Cambridge and MIT in order to advance a career in computing and business management.

With such a rich experience behind her, what is troubling this high achiever from China?

'I feel I don’t belong. Back in Shanghai, my life was riveting, punctuated by regular theatre visits and late-night debates with my intellectual friends. I had a three-story villa and travelled abroad for holidays and professional development. Yet here I feel desolately isolated, a fish out of water. I have a couple of Chinese friends who are at the top of their careers in education and media, but they are not my role models. I detest the idea of slaving away in order to get where they are and I prefer a position that would stretch my intelligence. I miss Chinese theatre and my trend-setting and high-achieving friends back there. Yet if I am honest, I am not that keen to return, either. I don’t envy my former classmates who are still working in the media industry. Once a passion turns into a way of living, compromise becomes inevitable. And there is too much compromise in film and media circles. On the other hand, if you want to go back for business, corruption is everywhere. Shanghai has changed so much since I left. Nothing is the same any more.'

The nostalgia for her former life is just one aspect of her mental state.

'The only thing that keeps me going,’ Oh revealed, ‘is my love of Chinese language and culture. It is my spiritual heritage and I cannot survive without these things for even one single day. It is painful and ironic, therefore, that although many Singaporean Chinese can speak a little Mandarin, their pronunciation and even vocabulary are different, an acute reminder that I am an exile. Even among the Chinese community, I sound like an alien and yet I hate the idea of disguising my origin and identity by changing the way I speak.’

Her origin is also written on her appearance. Unlike her peers in a similar state of affluence, Oh shows little interest in keeping up appearances or keeping up with the Joneses. Her dowdy attire accentuates her immigrant identity and when she speaks, her loud, albeit musical, tones raise more eyebrows.

Have her husband and in-laws been reaching out to ease her pain and help her settle down?

‘My husband and my daughter visit my in-laws once a week, but I have a gentleman’s agreement to join them only once a month. It is such a chore to act the part. It doesn’t appeal to me. The other day after a big argument with my husband when he was late meeting me at the bus stop, I dropped my daughter at his parents’ door and turned around straightaway. On the bus ride home, I felt bitter and miserable and wondered why I hadn’t taken a taxi instead, as I used to in China. As the sole breadwinner of the family, why have I repeatedly denied myself the comforts and living standards that I was used to and can still afford? What am I saving money for? Why has he chosen to retire early and left me with all the financial obligations to support the family? If the money which is saved for tomorrow and the family is at the cost of my happiness of today, what is the point of my present life? I wish I could be healthy and happy. But at the moment nothing interests me, not even my favourite stand-up comics.’

They know the price of everything

Having friends to stay can be exhausting. Planning an appealing itinerary is just the start, the difficult part is keeping it flexible to ensure that they get the most out of their visit.

Never had I anticipated that it would be so difficult when my friends and their father came to stay during one Spring Festival.

As usual, I did my homework: a mixture of activities to showcase the best of this island country, and, since the father was the CEO of a top property developing company in a second-tier city in China, some fine examples in his line of business, such as cleverly designed communal spaces.

During their stay, they surprised me not just by their insatiable appetite for shopping and their apparently limitless credit, but their dogmatic loyalty to certain exclusive brand names.

The father, who had just turned sixty, would start his day by informing me of the three-digit price tag on his shirt. Following a couple of hours’ stroll in a park on their first morning, my guests became excited when they caught sight of an exclusive Canadian brand name located outside a casino. Slightly unusual among the Chinese, the father showed not the least curiosity in the casino: it soon turned out that he was addicted to the luxury brand. After two hours during which he tried out nearly everything on display, it became a kind of mission for us during the rest of their four-day stay to visit all of the brand’s retail outlets.

I do not in the least mind window-shopping, but what I was not prepared for was that a man of his age and achievements could be so obsessed by a single brand and spend the best part of his overseas holiday looking for it.

Thinking that he could do with broadening his perspective on quality clothing, I took him to a store known for its choice fabrics and comfortable design, but with a much smaller price tag. He walked out after glancing at the display, informing me that since its brand had not yet entered China and its design looked ‘too ethnic’, his business contacts might think that it was merely made in China. It then occurred to me that quality and design were the least of his concerns: what he wished to buy was a product that his business community would regard as a status symbol. To achieve that goal, he had to resort to a product that his colleagues would recognise; and it just so happened that in his home city, that Canadian brand, which was one of the first introduced to China, did the trick.

Before their departure, the father left me with a bottle of Maotai, the most expensive home-made spirit from China, and a whole pack of Triple-Five cigarettes, one of the most expensive Chinese brands. It was no secret that since I am a non-smoker the cigarettes would be wasted on me. But by then I had already learnt that by leaving such expensive gifts behind, he was performing an act of generosity.

The sun is rising from the west

‘Excuse me for saying so but the mainlanders have really made our lives tough.’ These days it seems that none of my Hong Kong Chinese girlfriends can resist raising this subject in our conversations.

A decade or so ago the most common view of their Chinese cousins was that they were all big spenders, splashing money on gold jewellery and luxury brands. I countered it by explaining that for the majority of Chinese, a visit to Hong Kong, or anywhere outside China for that matter, was a financial commitment and a bureaucratic hurdle. Those who made it were no ordinary visitors: besides needing to buy presents for the people to whom they owed, or hoped to owe, a favour, they were saddled with a long shopping list from their extended families and colleagues. Hong Kong was the shopping heaven next door for all goods exotic or ‘high end’, and although the mainlanders were generally looked down on for their uncouth behaviour, they were also the most sought after by retailers of luxury brands and travel agents.

And while the mainlanders were supporting the Hong Kong economy through conspicuous spending on luxury products, more and more Hong Kong Chinese were regularly crossing the border to take advantage of the lower mainland prices in housing, transport, food, clothing and various everyday items. In Shenzhen, there were ‘mistress villages’ where the affluent middle-aged men of Hong Kong kept their second and even third families.

The recent complaints from my friends have been rather different. While the big spenders continue to flow in, the humbler mainlanders are flocking to convenience stores to snap up everyday items, with baby’s milk powder the most popular purchase, especially since the toxic powder scandal. In fact, top quality milk powder is in such high demand that a quota system has been introduced. In recent months, residents from Shenzhen have been crossing the border for their daily supply of vegetables. Suspicious of Chinese food health and safety controls, mainlanders are taking advantage of the relaxed access to Hong Kong and the strong Chinese currency to safeguard their health, and have thus added to the territory’s inflation rate, stretched its resources, and put a strain on the conduct of everyday life.

The story doesn’t end there. Increasingly, mainland women are taking up beds in maternity hospitals because of their better facilities and services, and in so doing they are putting Hong Kong’s health care and financial system under great strain.

In the old days, the most popular programmes on Hong Kong television featured tips on where to get a good bargain in China. The other day when I was waiting for a friend in his office, I found a glossy magazine which was published in China but offering shopping guides to Hong Kong. And when I stayed with my sister, I overheard a conversation: ‘You shouldn’t have asked my dad why he’s buying batteries in Hong Kong. If he wants to, let him’. The old perception in mainland China that the grass is greener in Hong Kong is persisting, especially after the scandals surrounding the quality of some of its products.’

The narrow lane

His mother was a leading newsreader, his father a rising government official. In a couple of months, he would graduate from an ‘aristocrats’ school’ – so named because of its expensive fees and exclusiveness – and begin a new chapter of his life on a university campus. He had everything his less fortunate peers coveted.

Yet on the eve of the university entrance examination, his body was found in the school grounds.

His mother had been warned. Two hours before he was seen to throw himself from the fifth floor, he told her on the phone ‘I am not feeling great today’. Had she known that these would be his last words to her, the beloved son whom she fondly introduced to all her colleagues after his birth, she would have dropped everything to be with him.

Theories abound as to why he had chosen to end his fortunate life, especially at that moment.

Some observed that his privileged family background must have brought unbearable pressure on him to perform well at all times. Some maintained that since his parents were both public figures and preoccupied with building their own careers, he might have missed out on the healthy and regular dose of gentle counselling which is so crucial in the rocky journey of a teenager. Some argued that it was sheer peer pressure before the most divisive event of his life: the higher education entrance examination. Most believed that he was pushed to his death by the current education system, a system that deems getting a university place as the ultimate goal of one’s compulsory education, a system that glorifies only those who ‘get there’ and spells ‘shame on you’ to those who do not.

He was not the only victim of this examination. Such tragedies happen regularly, especially at those ‘key schools’ where only the top students are accepted. Although such tragic events are not always reported, complaints about the system are growing, and increasingly, parents are sending their adolescent children to study overseas, where the educational diet is perceived to be more wholesome and balanced. However, the majority of Chinese parents are not lucky enough to have this option. They must put their children through a system they do not necessarily agree with: each couple must constantly push their only child to score well at examinations, and as an insurance policy, stretch their own wits, influence and money to get the best education for their child in case its scores do not meet the near-absolute entry requirements of the ‘key schools’.

China’s education system is in dire need of reform. This is a view which is universal and has been expressed for a very long time. Until this happens, there will be more victims like the elite student who took his own life because he was terrified of ‘failure’.

The bright future of China

‘Those of us who were born in the eighties are the unluckiest!’ declared my niece one day.

To anyone who could remember some of the upheavals of the past, not least the cultural revolution and the political and economic reforms that began in the late 1970s, the remark showed a shocking lack of perspective. Her own mother, who was born in 1961, was deprived of a formal education and then in the early 1990s was among the first to lose their jobs when the state decided to reduce its financial burden and sell off a large number of industries.

Yet I could still understand what my niece meant.

Her generation entered university in the decade after 1999, when China began a rapid expansion of its higher education sector. Competition in the graduate job market grew ever more frenzied. My niece graduated in 2009, along with six million others and at the moment of a steep economic downturn that has had continuing repercussions around the world.

Unable to find satisfying full time employment, she opted for an internship in a regional media group, to discover not only that the job was unpaid but that all the expenses she incurred as a sports journalist were to be covered from her own pocket. Despite her hard work, she was also obliged to surrender every single penny of the ‘red envelope’ which is given to a journalist by the organiser of a press release. Worst of all, without a degree in journalism or media studies, even though she graduated from one of the top universities, my niece had poor prospects of a permanent job in this multi-media group, however able she proved to be. She was even told that she was lucky not to have been forced to pay the ‘management fee’ – a payment extracted from interns by many other media companies in China.

Her desperate financial situation improved just slightly after she took up an internship at a local sports channel and was allowed to keep some of the contents of the red envelope. But there was no immediate improvement in her prospects of gaining permanent employment.

‘Old people, old policy: new people, new policy’ is a phrase on the lips of many an old media colleague of mine. The old policy provides job security and benefits for those who had gained permanent employment in the state-owned media before 1998. Regardless of their skills, the state-owned media companies are obliged to keep them in employment. And those in high positions are guaranteed a good pension, handsome medical insurance and other perks. The new policy, if it can be called such, merely exploits those like my niece, who are young and vulnerable.

Feeling permanently insecure at work, and faced with steep inflation and a continuous rise in house prices, it is no wonder that those born in the nineteen-eighties – who should be the bright future of China – complain that they were born in the wrong era.

Sexual liberation?

‘From now on, JIAO Richu will be known as YANG Richu,’ our teacher announced to the class one gloomy and chilly day. Like 9/11 or the Great Tsunami of 2004, events which make everybody remember where they were when they first heard about them, I remember that it was 1974, and I was in Year One. It felt as if we had just been hit by an earthquake. A divorce or re-marriage was unheard of until then, and stayed out of our vocabulary throughout my education and well into the late nineteen-eighties.

In the early ninety-nineties when a high school friend broke up with his sweetheart, I was asked to help ease her pain, and for years, he wore a guilty look whenever he saw me. In those days, if you dared to go out with anyone, it was expected that you would eventually marry them.

Some fifteen years later in a bar in Beijing, a high school friend asked me if I had been in touch with a certain classmate. He wanted to tell her the long-kept secret that he was in love with her, as were many of his classmates – a fact that he had only just learnt at a reunion party.

‘Have you tried asking Tan?’ Tan was a classmate who went out with the best friend of this girl and they got married soon after university. Surely Tan would know the whereabouts of his wife’s best friend.

‘How dare anyone ask such a private question?’ another school friend jumped on me. He didn’t say another word, but he was evidently mindful of the divorce rate, which since the nineteen-nineties had positively surged.

In fact, what is surging is not just the divorce rate but also the number of those among the younger generation who are choosing to co-habit. When my sisters and I were going out in the nineteen-nineties, my mum would stay up until we got home, even though we were then well into our twenties and my eldest sister was a single mother in her thirties. It was expected that a girl should keep her celibacy until the day she was married.

These days, however, it seems the last concern of anyone who knows my niece that she is living with a man whom she has just met on an internet dating site.

There was a time when divorce and co-habitation were considered as social evils or forms of ‘spiritual pollution’ that were imported in the films and music of the West. But these days, they seem to be accepted as an ordinary fact of life.

One salary, three jobs

‘Still the same: one salary, three jobs. How do you think I’m feeling?’ my friend retorted when I asked her how she was. She is always on the go and barely has time for chit-chat.

As a journalist who has won many awards, she thrives on challenges and has been juggling her career and her family for the last twenty years. But even for a veteran workaholic like her, this is simply too much. ‘I have no problem with the increase of complaints that comes with more commitments. The trouble is, nobody seems to care that I’m burdened with three full-time jobs, something I don’t deserve and haven’t asked for.’

Indeed, each of the three jobs which have been heaped on to her shoulders demands her exclusive attention. She is a senior social journalist, whose job means that she should be on the street every day in order to investigate and report on stories. She is the head of English programmes on the radio station. And she is the producer of a weekly sixty-minute live discussion forum that involves senior government officials responding to the pent-up frustrations of the callers, who see it as their last resort for getting heard.

‘Why do you allow yourself to be so blatantly exploited?’ her editor asked in exasperation when my friend returned to the office after being made the head of English programmes. Until the very last minute of a meeting of top managers, the appointment had been kept secret even from her. It was typical of the broadcasting station that nobody was ever consulted, and the appointment was announced at the end of the meeting as if it were a mere afterthought.

Although a competent journalist, my friend speaks hardly any English. Yet when she shared with some close colleagues her anxieties about the immense challenges she was facing, it was suggested to her that she was taking the linguistic and editorial aspects of the job far too seriously. ‘Let the English editors sort out the linguistic aspects. All that’s required of you is firm journalistic control. Make sure everything runs smoothly without any major hitches. You should be aware that this is how all but one of your predecessors worked.’

So on top of all her other duties, my friend has been landed with the unpaid responsibility of managing a multi-national production team without herself being able to speak English fluently.

The other day my sister observed that the cause of so many safety disasters such as that of the toxic milk powder lies in the fact that a position which requires technical expertise is usually given to a layperson.

Maybe I shouldn’t have left China

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have left China,’ Gao wondered aloud to me one day, with a sense of loss in his eyes. The recession has left him unemployed for more than seven months.

Charming and athletic, Gao was once considered in China to be among the lucky few. It was no secret that without qualifications or obvious talents, he was parachuted into a state media corporation because of his father’s position. His inherited good fortune seemed to be completed in the early 1990s when he got a passport to study English in Sydney. This was a ticket to heaven, a privilege that for almost the next ten years was reserved either to those fortunate enough to be awarded government grants or those, like him, with overseas connections. It was also understood that the people who seized this chance would never return to their native land.

After nearly twenty years living abroad, Gao was made redundant in his adopted country. Middle-aged and with two sons in private schools, he decided to try his luck back in China. A senior international tax consultant, he was confident of getting a handsome offer in his native country.

Yet despite the many interviews, the offers never materialised. And now he was broke.

Meanwhile, his younger brother, who has enjoyed none of his overseas training or experience, seems to have everything he could dream of. He is a CEO of one of the largest state-owned international trading companies and his property portfolio is such that his family of three have difficulties in deciding which one of them is their main residence.

Even though his father retired years ago, he is spending his time between a city apartment and a country house.

Only Gao, once the crowning glory of his family and the envy of his peers, hasn’t a clue where his future lies.

His experience epitomises the dramatic reversal of fortune that has occurred in the last two decades between those who have acquired overseas experience and their once envious peers who stayed behind. Indeed, while the former might be envied for their fluent English or international qualifications, it is for the most part the latter who are calling the shots in today’s China. And with the Chinese economy continuing to lead the field, more and more of the latter are enjoying the sort of lifestyle that is punctuated by frequent overseas holidays.

The other day, I heard from my fellow overseas Chinese that those back in our native land have a saying about us: ‘They may speak mightily but they spend humbly’. We are now, indeed, the poor relations. Our overseas passports might still be coveted, but our wallets certainly aren’t.

Loss of control

A deputy controller of one of the most popular broadcasting stations, his star was on the rise.

The shock caused by his recent suicide was vivid on the face of everyone. Many could not help but ask if I knew ‘that good natured, humble and honest looking fellow’.

The exact details were anybody’s guess, but it seems that his mistress of six years was pregnant and wanted to become his wife. Blackmailed by her, he had a quiet word about his dilemma with the Director General. Since he was already the father of a child with his wife, the undesired pregnancy not only posed a threat to his career but had much larger implications. If it became known by the authorities, not only would every member of the station’s staff lose their annual family planning bonus, but the promotion of the DG, who was nominally also the chairman of the family planning committee, would be blocked, leaving a permanent blot on his CV. In other words, everybody in this multi-channel media group, with a workforce of several hundred, would suffer: on family planning issues, the employees of an organisation are all in the same boat. To get round the regulations, and also to get a ‘certificate of authorised birth’, the only options for the deputy controller were to submit his resignation or, in order to keep his job, get a divorce, surrender the custody of his first child and enable his second child to be born under legal conditions. Apparently a devoted home maker, his wife of many years was outraged by such a proposal. She made a scene at the station and ridiculed the DG for breaking up a marriage while the station was promoting family values. She threatened to report the matter to a higher authority for the violation of basic law.

The next thing his colleagues heard was that the deputy controller had jumped from the twenty-third floor luxury apartment he shared with his family.

Growing up in a country where over fifty students are normally packed into a classroom, and as many as ten young women were until recently forced to live together for a good part of their university education and share facilities with ninety others on a single floor, I have long been sympathetic to family planning policy. Over the years, I have argued that it has been of benefit in a country where many still believe that a woman has an almost religious duty to give birth to a son. The policy was never watertight, indeed I know of many who used legal loopholes to have more than one child.

Yet in giving outsiders a political and financial stake in the intimate lives of individuals, the policy seems almost barbaric. This tragedy has made me think twice.

I met you in my dream

‘I met you in my dream last night. Can you guess where we met?’ Having recognised my voice, my niece was shouting excitedly on the phone.

‘The zoo?’ I asked. It was one of her favourite haunts, and thanks to her frequent visits she was chosen as the best zebra painter in her class.

‘No. It was Disneyland!’ she said, in high spirits.

‘Was it good?’

‘Yes. We had great fun there,’ she laughed.

To mark her third birthday two years ago, her parents took her to the Disneyland which is across the border in Hong Kong. I was told that she was so exhilarated by that experience that on returning home, she complained that until she was back in the Mickey Mouse Hotel, which is designed to accommodate the family visitors from mainland China, she would not be able to go to sleep.

Unlike any previous generations in my family, my niece can dream about an overseas trip and have all her material needs satisfied. The other day she even suggested that it would be ideal if the family could spend at least one day in a nice place away from home: by nice she meant nothing less than a four-star hotel.

Her generation is spoilt by choice. Or is it?

For the third year now since she was admitted to pre-school, she was spending her entire summer holidays at school rather than at home. Her schedule was packed: Chinese, English, singing, dancing, arts and crafts, chess, painting and more recently, piano. Is she happy? Yes, she is. Nearly everybody in her school stays there throughout the two long holidays of every year. It is their way of life – to be packed off from home all year round so that their parents can get on with their careers. No working parents can afford to switch to part-time work in order to bring up their only child. And what is more, since her parents are so busy during the week and cannot get home till seven or eight o’clock at night, the only leisure time my niece has with her parents is at weekends. But even then her father is on call, and in order to be with him all day she learnt early on to keep her fingers crossed.

Spending nearly all of her time at school, and without the freedom to go downstairs alone for fear of being kidnapped, my niece seems to me to be like a prisoner.

I feel like a fraud

'I feel like a fraud. I’ve been teaching for six years now but since the teachers’ qualification examination is scheduled for the summer holidays, I’ve always dodged it. I’ve preferred to take an overseas tour with my family,’ my friend said when I asked her about her holiday plans. ‘So this summer, I’m going to get it over with. It will be hilarious, though, to have one teacher invigilating over a large group of his colleagues who are trying to get through by cheating. The system is just ridiculous.’

After graduating with a master’s degree in a top theatre academy in Beijing, my friend has been teaching stage directing in a school of arts. The school is run by a former actor who was a popular leading man in his younger days. Her keen frustration, though, does not derive only from a ‘ridiculous system’ that requires all teachers to acquire a qualification by passing an exam – the cause of the widespread cheating – but from another corrupt practice she is bound by.

This involves submitting articles regularly, regardless of their scholarly value, to an academic journal in order to fill up the space that her school has bought in it. This way, the school has a more visible ‘research’ profile, and those who play the game will eventually fill up their quota of ‘research publications’ that are required when they come to apply for a more senior post. In my friend’s case, the post is that of Associate Professor.

There is surely nothing wrong with that if in both processes proper standards are being upheld: but abuses abound and they are being widely, if covertly, ridiculed.

In the old days professional seniority was often linked to length of service, and thus the older one was, the higher one’s status. However, in modern China many who are young or who have only just acquired their doctorates are immediately awarded senior titles. One is tempted to believe that if their publications were judged with any academic rigour, very few of them would rise so meteorically.

How kind should one be?

‘Xiao Du cried her heart out after I scolded her the other night at this very restaurant,’ my friend said, with frustration in her voice.

‘What had she done to deserve that?’ I asked. A pious Christian, my friend is anything but unforgiving. She has been mentoring Xiao Du ever since they met.

‘She was smart enough to get a master’s degree from Glasgow University without any difficulty. Yet she is naïve enough to hand over her mobile to a total stranger in the street!’

‘How come?’ It sounded pretty incredible.

‘She was on a trip to Nanhai city one morning and, as usual, arrived in good time. As she was walking to her destination, a car door was flung open right in front of her and a few stout men got out to ask for her help. They claimed to have come from a north eastern city and had lost their mobiles the night before. They wanted to borrow her mobile to contact their office.’

The ‘sensible’ way to protect oneself would have been to walk quickly away, pretending to be deaf or minding one’s own business.

‘What enraged me was that she not only gave them her mobile but got into their car to assist them! How foolish she was! She could have been stripped naked and held for ransom! Furthermore, in exchange for a promise to return her mobile later that evening, she walked away with a deposit from the strangers and attended to her business.’

‘Did she get her mobile back?’

‘Of course not! Both her family and I got calls from someone using it and asking how he could contact her. Imagine what was on our minds! We thought it was a scam and that her mobile had been snatched from her pocket. We feared she had been kidnapped.’

‘Didn’t she get in touch with her family?’

‘She did, but only to say “there’s been an incident” which she could not explain until she returned home. She didn’t have a clue that this would only add to our worries.’

‘Was she hurt or anything?’

‘No, but the point is, with so many scams and kidnaps happening every day, she should not have been so naïve as to trust total strangers. She’s had a lucky escape this time because those men turned out to be respectable, but that won’t always be the case. She shouldn’t forget that she’s back in China, you know.’

Fire alarm

‘Have you heard of the fire at the office?’ my friend asked soon after we were seated in a bar.

‘No. When did it happen?’ I was concerned.

‘Just recently,’ my friend answered matter-of-factly. ‘The culprit was the cable connecting the neon lights on a billboard. Because it is on the twentieth floor, the black marks left behind on the board are still visible even from afar. But the fire has never been reported. Officially it simply never happened’.

‘Why so?’ I was curious.

‘Immediately after it was spotted, Ms B assembled a top team to come up with a press release in case any of our media rivals might want to report the incident. But the press release was never allowed to leave her hands. The billboard was installed on the building that houses the government media regulator. Once the regulator found out the truth, a total blackout on the incident was imposed. Among our journalist friends who know what happened, we are a laughing stock. They said we seemed to believe that if we covered our own eyes, nobody else would be able to see’.

Despite my many visits to the broadcasting building I had never noticed the scorch marks. Perhaps I was not looking. Yet over the years, one of the common subjects of conversation with my colleagues would be the integrity of working as a journalist in China. Interference from ‘above’ came in many forms: regular text messages to ban the coverage of certain events or incidents; the downgrading of a major story to make it sound less political or significant than it really was; and, in an incident still fresh in my memory, the termination of a scheduled programme half way through its transmission at the mere mention of some harmless religious rituals.

This constant interference has not deterred every talented journalist from doing his and her job within the many visible (and invisible) restrictions that are imposed on them. Indeed, some of my close friends are as brave and hardworking as ever, despite the frustrations that the conscientious must endure. Yet I also know of some talented broadcasters who have vowed that they will never work in the newsroom as long as the system continues.

An English name for a Chinese person

‘Why do so many Chinese take English first names? Why don’t they stick with their Chinese ones? Some of the names they take sound so odd to me.’ A friend is always asking this question. He is referring to the fact that most of his Chinese acquaintances in Britain have an English name.

‘Well, it really depends on whom you ask,’ is an immediate answer.

In my case it was because our American professor could not handle seventy-two Chinese names in a single class, and so in his second or third session with us he asked if he could give each of us an English one. If any of the students had a view on this, I don’t remember them voicing it. This was the mid nineteen-eighties, and his idea seemed exotic to a bunch of twenty-somethings in the final year of their English degree.

The professor told us that since he was far away from home, he was going to give us the names of his extended family and friends so that he could feel more comfortable. He proceeded by reading out, in a funny way, our Chinese pinyin names, and then English ones that bore a vague resemblance to the way he thought ours sounded. And again, I don’t remember there being many objections to his choices, except from a few of us who did not want to share names with some popular fictional figure we had become acquainted with over the years.

Though never made explicit, it was understood that the names would be used predominantly for that particular module. Nor do I remember anyone who bothered to combine their Chinese surnames with the new English ones. In other words, someone was known simply as, say, John on his assignment for that particular module. Furthermore, some of us even went by two English names, one for each of the two American professors who were teaching us at the time. We had had other native English-speaking teachers and we were not sure why it was only the Americans who had a difficulty with our Chinese names.

Over the years, most of those who work in an international company in China have tended to adopt English names for the sake of easy identification by their international team, but some, especially those who have studied abroad, will soon change theirs once they become aware of other choices.

As for me, my English name became better known among my Chinese colleagues once I started to use it as a professional pseudonym. From the 1990s, the use of an English name was starting to gain popularity, but in adopting a professional pseudonym, I was also following a long tradition in China, which is to have as many names as one wants but to keep the Chinese name in one’s official papers.

Times have changed but one thing remains: as non-native English speakers, we are not sufficiently aware of the connotations of certain English names. So when a person comes to choose one either for herself or for a relative, a particular name is preferred to others for reasons that are often wholly whimsical.

Dazed and disoriented

‘Do you know that what I’m doing is downright illegal?’ my friend asked in exasperation when we met for tea. ‘I’m not a trained or qualified tour guide and neither is the broadcasting station registered or licensed to operate as a travel agency. If the tourism regulator takes this matter seriously we can easily get caught. And yet when I raised my concern, I was asked either to treat this as a business opportunity or get lost’.

Nicknamed Mr Radio for his love of the media, my friend had successfully worked on news, entertainment, sports and music programmes over the years, yet at what should have been the peak of his career, found himself the victim of an unsuccessful business deal that his employer had made. He was offered a ‘golden opportunity’ to host a tourism programme at weekends provided that he ran a travel agency during the week. Not wanting to change his profession entirely, he found himself for the past two years being forced to operate a dubious business on behalf of his broadcasting station. It was Catch 22: either he worked illegally on behalf of his employer or he lost his proper job.

‘You know how ironic it is. It’s a typical scenario in which one state organisation takes advantage of the slack way in which another state organisation enforces its regulations, ’ my friend continued, in evident discomfort.

‘I’m very confused as to who I am. One minute I’m this charming presenter, broadcasting live from the top floor of the radio station about how lovely certain beauty spots are. The next I’m on the ground floor and wearing the face of a businessman to take cash from my devoted audience in return for giving them a guided tour. My life is topsy-turvy and the whole business is a fraud. A sightseer once asked me if I was the same person as the one who had been on air just a couple of hours before. “You sounded just like him,” she observed, not being able to reconcile my different roles either’.

Indeed, those who are more used to the old ways are bound to be disoriented by the new realities of China.

Dad was in the paper

‘Dad was in the paper,’ my sister said one day.

‘Really? What for?’ I was amazed. My dad has been retired for years, and dividing his time between following the news and practising calligraphy, neither of these things newsworthy in themselves.

‘Well, you know the number of newspapers we have at home. Besides those I bring home every night, he buys two other broadsheet papers. He makes clippings, photocopies them and distributes them to his fellow pensioners who gather downstairs every day to play poker or chess. According to the paper, he has been doing it for a long while, and all out of his own meagre pension.’

‘Had no one known about it at home?’

‘No, he’s kept it rather quiet and I only found out about it from the paper. Apparently someone in the neighbourhood provided the information.’

‘Ha,’ I was amused, ‘that is so typical of dad.’

A hardcore communist and loyal follower of Lei Feng, an army officer who devoted his whole life to the service of others, it was not enough for him to share his ‘fortune’ – access to an unusually large collection of newspapers – but to do it very discreetly. It is a rule he has adhered to all his life. In the late nineteen-eighties, he was the officer in charge of the allocation of company flats. For years his eldest daughter and her family had been struggling to find a place to live, and he was expected, and fully entitled, to keep for her the government-subsidised flat we were then living in. Yet without consulting his family, he surrendered it in order that ‘two newly-wedded couples in the company could solve their dire housing problem’. Putting communal needs first is his principle.

As children, we were made the dedicated volunteer cleaners of our apartment blocks, and on many of my home visits, I would find his lone figure sweeping the staircase.

‘The wall of the communal area is filthy and scratched. It looks bleak and uncared for. Why don’t you have it painted?’ I asked on one occasion. It was something he had helped to do not too many years ago.

‘It’s physically beyond me now,’ he replied. He is seventy-five.

‘But surely, you can have it painted professionally, and it shouldn’t cost much if every household contributed.’ Although not an affluent neighbourhood, the collective wealth is growing and I had seen private cars downstairs.

‘No, I can’t. If I did that, I would be regarded as a nuisance to those who did not want to contribute,’ my dad said, no doubt mindful of the waning influence of his idol Lei Feng.

Cash cards

On a recent visit to my sister in China, she surprised me by producing an envelope full of cash cards.

The concept of the cash card was not new to me. It was introduced during the 1990s when companies would hand them out to their staff, or those in positions of power, in the form of 'coupons'. Since they were disguised as consumables in the companies’ accounts and never registered officially, the amounts accumulated by their receivers would never show up in their personal income. The practice was ubiquitous: the loss of government tax revenue was such that there was a time when it was banned. To no one’s real surprise, however, it made a quick comeback. The reasons? The cash card – with a validity of only six to twelve months – was a convenient and huge source of revenue for major department stores, most of which were then state-run. More crucially, those who benefited tended to be public sector workers: in return for their services they were receiving coupons either from businesses or individuals who needed help. In effect, public money was being transformed into undetectable private income – ‘grey’ income which formed a large part of these workers’ personal wealth.

What astonished me when I saw the envelope in my sister’s hand was not only that the plain coupons of the old days had evolved into something with the sophisticated look of a credit card, suggesting that its use has been thriving, but the amount that the cards were worth. Having been away from home for over a decade, I asked what now seems a rather stupid question: ‘How come your company did not simply put the money into your salary so that it could be spent whenever and wherever it was needed?’

Delivered in a low voice (even though we were on our own at home), the answer sounded faintly familiar: they were presented as 'festive greetings' – in plain words, a sort of 'bonus' on special occasions which was not accounted for. In this instance, the cash cards were purchased in the name of 'stationery'. Since the amount of stationery which is consumed in a company is unlikely to be tracked down, its real cost becomes an easy target for manipulation, resulting in a much lower payment of tax for all concerned.

Given that no eyebrows were raised when the cards were presented to the cashier, their popularity is obvious.

The irony here is that the company my sister works for is a newspaper which is famous, both at home and abroad, for its candid exposure of financial corruption and other social problems. The dazzling new wealth of China is well known, but not all of it is honestly created, and there are tensions between the old communism and the new capitalism that force even ordinarily respectable people into dubious practices.

Box office success

‘The box office success of your last film depended entirely on “assembled viewing”. Can you tell us whether the sequel you are releasing today will resort to the same trick?’ shouted a young journalist at the press conference.

Treated by a thunderous look from the star director sitting on the stage, this impetuous question was a breath of fresh air to her senior colleagues and was followed by resounding applause. The next day, her question was widely used as the title of the press release in the many newspapers that carried it.

The practice of handing out free cinema tickets to students and public sector workers and making them watch certain films during office hours has a long history in China. Called ‘assembled viewing’, its cost is usually covered by the unions, and those who are allocated a ticket are warned that they must have an exceptionally good excuse for not showing up at the film. In the early nineteen-nineties, a new series of films which were generously subsidised by the government and which aimed to promote patriotism by depicting the ‘great achievements’ of the Communist Party, became huge box office successes thanks to the practice of assembled viewing. It is no secret that this is the only way to get people in the street to endure long hours of propaganda.

While it is well-known that box office figures in China are unreliable, I heard something that even an experienced and cynical journalist found incredible: in order to attract their paid audiences to the latest propaganda movie, some cinemas gave it the title of the latest film in the Harry Potter series. By this means the box office revenue of the propaganda movie would ‘steal’ that of Harry Potter.

‘Is this really true?’ a recently retired colleague asked in slack-jawed amazement.

‘Yes, it is’, my senior journalist friend confirmed. This blatant swindle was another trick to boost the box office revenue of propaganda films.

In order to continue to do her job, my friend always tries to look on the bright side of life, and her great consolation was that the fresh-faced journalist who dared to upset the star director by putting a question that was on everybody’s mind was her intern. She is not sure if such courage was a symptom of the intern’s relative lack of experience or derived from her elite family background: she was none other than the granddaughter of the former chief regulator of films. But she gave hope to my friend in the apparently endless drive to get at the truth.

An ideal husband

‘So how is Paul?’ I asked my friend at lunch. Paul is an artist whose business portfolio ranges from graphic and interior design to landscape architecture, ladies’ boutiques and, more recently, bars. Married with two daughters, he is regarded as an ideal family man thanks to his clean-cut image and commercial success.

‘Oh, doing business as usual, I would say,’ my friend responded with a glint of wickedness in his eyes. Amused by my puzzled expression, he continued: ‘It’s just that I’ve learnt something out of the blue about him. I shouldn’t tell, though.’

‘My lips are sealed.’

‘Well, whenever I visit Beijing,’ my friend readily offered, ‘I make a point of accompanying my business partner Raymond to the gay pubs. One day, we bumped into Paul and his boyfriend: it turned out that they had been together for a long time.’

‘Hmm,’ that was the only response I could make. Over the course of our long lunch, it emerged that Paul was the third high-profile friend of ours to have come out of the closet, albeit, in his case, in a city thousands of miles away from his family. I am not sure, though, whether it is mere coincidence that they are all freelances-turned-entrepreneurs who are working in some area of media or design, exceedingly well-off, and giving off a slightly hippie aroma to their numerous clients and followers. As my friend proudly claimed, they form ‘the bricks and mortar of Chinese society’, with overarching power – financial, ideological and aesthetic – thanks to their creative business influence.

Discussion about lifestyles has been a favourite topic of conversation in China. As early as the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, there was widespread gossip that my friend was the boyfriend of his business partner Raymond, and that his marriage was largely to disguise his ‘unusual’ sexual orientation. Celibacy, among men or women, warranted speculations about their private lives.

However, I found in my recent conversations that what is new is perhaps that if someone is perceived as ‘different’ it will no longer make them a social outcast, at least not in the cities. Indeed, it has not only lost a lot of its power to shock but can even add to one’s social capital.

‘In the Japanese television programme I told you about, I was categorised as “bi-sexual”,’ the father of two said. ‘I like it – it gives me an interesting edge, making me stand out and appear less dull.’

A different species

It was one o’clock. We had arranged to meet for lunch a whole hour earlier, yet he was still making calls to arrange a last minute request from a film production company for an interview on a film on one of his radio channels.

Between phone calls, he filled me in: ‘I am devoting more and more time to going through film scripts these days. This indie film to be premiered tonight will do well, I am sure, just like all of my other film projects.’ He then gave me a list of titles. A mixture of mega-productions starring some of the region’s top entertainers and those that aimed to appeal to lovers of ‘art house’ movies, they have all succeeded in expanding not just his personal wealth but a business portfolio that ranges from radio and music production through events promotion to advertising and entertainment agencies, and, in recent years, film making. A-list international stars are among his clients.

The business empire that he has built up within a mere twenty years started with his passion for Western pop music, something barely known in the China of the late nineteen-eighties. He wrote to a radio station offering his collection of cassettes and vinyl to a ten-minute Western music programme, and was soon given his own show. When a hunger for all things exotic and especially Western started to grip the country, his reputation as the sexiest voice on air spread like wildfire. By the early nineteen-nineties, he had garnered such popular power that he quitted his day job as a translator in the state security department and set up a production company. We were then hit by one surprise after another as he coaxed a series of state media organisations into exclusive deals.

‘You know, what I have achieved with my radio production company is totally improbable. ’ He was referring to the ten-year deals it had made with several radio stations on programme and advertising provision, which, in being exclusive to those stations, were against broadcasting regulations.

Yes I know.

While it was a keen desire to engage the audience that launched his media career, he has never shrunk from utilising everything within his reach – charm, personal contacts, business acumen, legal loopholes – in order to build his business empire. One colleague also suggested bullying.

‘I was featured in two separate programmes by Japanese television. The first was to mark fifteen years of Chinese economic reforms by investigating the ‘new species’ like myself that it bred. Three years ago the second one marked thirty years of reform. Remember how tiny my father’s flat was? In the first programme, the cameraman followed me into my home to make me look taller in the tiny, cramped space. In the second, they showed the difference that fifteen years had made by coming to my villa.’

He does seem to be a new and very different species.

Yet on second thoughts, he is not that different, especially in China. He is a mere illustration of what the nation has bred over the short span of thirty years.

Tax evasion of the charitable

‘So when are you going to sell your apartment to me?’ Fey asked her high school friend Simon in a café. It was well known among friends that ten years ago, Simon sold his apartment to an elderly couple at a price well below the market rate. In addition, he had allowed the couple to pay him in instalments with zero interest over the span of twenty years. It was an act of charity, and owing to surging inflation and strong growth in the housing market, Simon was not getting the value of his investment.

A computing engineer by trade, Simon is the sort of person who will do anything to have a good conversation, including bringing out his best wine and tea. He seems generous and carefree. It came as a surprise, therefore, when Simon asked for a receipt for the lunch we had just had at an exclusive restaurant, with two bottles of fine wine brought from his proud collection at home. ‘My brother-in-law can reclaim it,’ he said, as if that was the most natural thing on earth.

But perhaps I should not have been surprised.

A few years ago I was asked for help by a friend of many years’ standing.

‘Fire away,’ I said. Over the years, my family and I have been on the receiving end of her kindness and generosity. Her help comes in many forms, including giving red packets of ‘lucky money’ to my parents at festive seasons, gifts which are not supposed to be turned down. And while she was studying in Sunderland, she was not only an active volunteer for her local church but donated money regularly, even though she was living on an extremely tight budget.

‘You don’t have to say yes, and whatever your decision I will fully understand it,’ my friend reassured. ‘It’s just that I wonder if some of my income could appear under your name so that my tax rate could be downgraded considerably. My accountant has done some research and found that since you do not reside in China and that the income from another country is not taxable in your adopted country, you would not be liable to pay tax for it in either.’

More recently she advised ‘you should try your best to get all your money back from the government pension scheme you used to subscribe to. Otherwise the money will disappear into the dark hole of state bureaucracy. It is better to keep the money in your own pocket than lose it to a system that is corrupt.’

I have a sense that both friends belong to a growing Chinese middle class who are becoming more charitable on the one hand, yet on the other more shrewdly aware that their money might be wastefully swallowed up by the public purse. Some of them would even use legal loopholes to claw some money back from it.