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.