(False) Praise

Recent numbers show that there are currently around 600,000 foreigners living in the whole of China, whilst in Wuhan the number is around 30,000. Whilst outwardly this may seem like a large number, when you consider that there are over 10,000,000 people living in Wuhan that means that for every 300 Chinese people there is one foreigner (and it feels like less). This figure should be further qualified by remembering that ‘foreigner’ merely means non-Chinese. The term ‘Foreigners’ then does not necessarily connote a naturally cohesive group, the nationalities in Wuhan alone consist of British, American, Canadian, Australian, Czech, Russian, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Congolese, Somalian, Ghanaian.. (I could go on).

This is not to say that there aren’t areas around the city with high concentrations of foreigners, nor that finding a group of foreign friends isn’t both easy and for many inevitable. What I am trying to highlight is how it looks from the other side; for Chinese people who don’t work at training schools or popular foreign bars, seeing any foreign people is a fairly rare occurrence. The result of all this is that for most foreigners, being stared at, and indeed pointed at becomes something of an everyday reality. While this can be frustrating, much of the time and (particularly) on nights out it is the opposite. For many foreign teachers, walking into their school for the first time is accompanied by hushed whispers and wide eyes – I can only assume this is something akin to how celebrities feel. The children quickly treat you like a pop star every time you walk into class, mobbing you at every opportunity. Nights out can be even more ridiculous, getting invited to tables (by both men and women) and plied with alcohol is more common than not, in fact on several occasions myself and some of my foreign friends have been given a free bottle of whiskey by the establishment in return for sitting in a centrally-located table and being visible.

The other side of it has less to do with being a foreigner though, and more to do with Chinese manners. Speak one word of Chinese and you will soon be hailed as a linguistic superstar, by the mere fact of not being horribly deformed you will be told frequently how handsome you are whilst the mastery of basic tasks elicit widespread praise of your all-conquering genius. It is clear of course that this a way of people showing their politeness and for thoroughly unspectacular looking people like myself, when someone tells you how handsome you are it’s a fair bet that it isn’t entirely genuine. Yet the problem with being here for a year (or more) is that after a while some of it starts to seep in. All of a sudden you begin to feel that the way you seamlessly move from teaching the alphabet to numbers in your kindergarten class IS a sign of your vast intellect, that maybe a steadily receding hairline and shapeless body IS the hallmark of rugged handsomeness and that because you know the Chinese for how to order a bowl of noodles Fortune 500 companies will be queuing up to hire you and make use of your peerless Chinese skills.

It is only upon returning home that you look around and realise that people are much taller than you remembered, that gyms must have taken off in a big way since you were last at home and hey, why is no-one commenting on your piercing foresight for managing to arrange a taxi to pick you up from the airport?

At that point the occasional stares in the street feel like less of an inconvenience and the lure of being a cherished rarity grows. A second year in China all of a sudden begins to look like a far more attractive prospect…