Getting older may not bring wisdom, but I've found that it does bring more need to think things through.
I've changed countries and spaces and homes and places all through my life, but I'm finding that this time, having left China after so long on January 27th, I've brought along a lot of excess baggage. Not, you understand, over the 20k allowance which was all I was able, materially, to bring with me after having made China my home, but inside my head.
So the final move was sudden. So what? Sudden moves are nothing new. It followed a pretty traumatic time. Well, once again, that's nothing new either. I couldn't let people know I was going, or say goodbyes, or do the drunken farewell? Yeah, well, been there and done that too.
So what the hell is going on this time?
Last night there was a news item on the telly. It concerned some "poor" girls who were living in the flat from hell behind a couple of Chinese restaurants here in Australia. The point of contention was that the the back area of the restaurants - and hence the entrance to the girls' flat - was a mess. Rubbish, stray cats, food scraps and food preparation of animals destined for the table were shown with much grimacing, use of words like "disgusting" and anecdotes of horrified relatives, inability to have friends over, and eventually their having to move.
Now, what is it that's made the words "pussies!" and the snarling "big deal, wimps." go coursing through my head, followed by a surge of anger?
Dirt, flies, rats, emaciated cats, stinks...they were all an integral part of my life for the last four years.
Squatting in centimetres of urine with my nose on a level with a waste basket has also been part of my life. An open waste basket chock full of used toilet paper and unwrapped, used sanitary napkins .
I guess not a day went by during that time when I didn't walk through streets gleaming with fresh snot and phlegm, or have gobs of spit aimed at my shoes - sometimes even landing on them.
Having to watch men urinate against buildings, in the open, in alleys became a daily sight and ignoring smiling parents and grandparents who held out kids up to the age of eight to shit all over pavements and paths and even inside shops, was something which often reduced me to tears.
But, hey! I was living in China. I chose to go there. I chose to stay there. I took the decision to accept all of those things each time I extended my contract. The stench of dirt and rot and human waste was also some thing I chose to accept. Not long after I arrived a friend told me that the day one no longer noticed that stench was the day one had been in China too long - and that day never came.
So why do those memories now make me so angryand resentful? What is it about me that makes me want to write about this most unwholesome side of life in China: - a side that most people are far too delicate to mention? And why, when I made so many good friends and was ready to put my life on the line for some of my students, should my brain just run widdershens playing all those nasty things over and over and ignoring all else?
Why is it that now all the negative things are all that crowd into my mind when I think of my former home - the home in which, up until January 27th, 2010, I fought desperately to stay?
What aspect of my personality, which now shows itself as just as nasty as the things of which I write, impels me not just to talk about this, but to dwell on it night after night, day after day?
I have inklings, of course. Is this a reaction to being publicly humiliated? to being shown that I, and all people not Chinese, were of absolutely no importance? Is this a way of rejecting four years of misogyny so deep that Chinese men are able to claim, in all sincerity, it does not exist? Is it some sort of cowardly way, now that I am out of the country, or re-asserting myself, my culture, my race, my civilization?
Is it a normal reaction to having been put in a position of powerlessness so absolute that I doubted my own existence?
The more I try to unpack this curious phenomenon; to rationalise it, normalise it, to find reasons, the more I come to dislike myself and the more the doubts creep in.
But number one amongst these doubts - the thing that is really worrying me and sitting in my head each day since I have been away - is something I am so scared of acknowledging that I have ignored it up until now. Its this:-
Does all this negativity, this compulsion to tell it how it is, in all its distasteful glory, actually point to something much simpler? The thing that worries me now is whether I am about to find out that, after my perceived openness, my fairness, my inability to see race as a dividing factor, I am about to find out that I have been a fraud all my life. Deep down, under all the outward layers, does a piece of me that is forever England, a piece which takes its cue from generations of Imperialism and conquest still survive? Are those first years of life as part of the Colonialism Supremacist culture still lurking in wait in my subconscious?
Am I, dear gods and little fishes, learning racism?
Showing posts with label dirty old men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dirty old men. Show all posts
Thursday, 25 February 2010
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Dirty Old Men
When I was a kid my mother told me never to put any money in my mouth because Dirty Old Men had been handling it. I had no particular idea in my mind of who or what these Dirty Old Men who went around handling money all day looked like or actually did.
Neither, it seemed did my father who, one day, finally asked the question.
"Oh George," she laughed in a-we're-all-grown-ups-here kind of way. " You know what I mean. You brought one here once."
She went back to reading her letter. My father, who was not in the habit of dragging ancient money-handling parties in off the street, looked astounded.
"What the hell....?"
"Oh, George, you know you did."
Two sentences beginning with "George". My mother was flustered. When she began to get terribly busy plumping up cushions and aligning newspapers I also knew that she considered my father was being disingenuous and forcing her to look daft. As if the fact that he had brought one home one evening wasn't burned across his consciousness until his dying day! He must, though objectively he couldn't be held responsible, subjectively have been beating himself up about introducing the snail-trail of nastiness into the Innocent garden of the Family Home ever since! And she was being made to look as though SHE was making a big deal out of it.
My father then said "Pet, I..."
So phew, that was all right then. "Pet" meant amused (I didn't learn the word "patronising" until a long time afterwards).
"George!" Whoops. Three strikes and you're out, George. Now she's angry. "That.. that.. man!" Oh yeah! The slight stutter. She is furious. He knows EXACTLY who she means!
"What man?"
"The man with the...the...doo-dah"
It was pretty much downhill from there - my father genuinely having no idea what on earth she was talking about, and my mother genuinely feeling he was being deliberately obtuse until at last, goaded, she would hiss:
"Of course you know.The one with the new thing - oh what WAS the bloody thing called? You know perfectly well, its a...a.."
Light would begin to dawn and my father would hazard "infra-red, night sighted telescopic lens for Military armaments?"
"Yes! she would crow, vindicated "That doo-dah!"
Because of all the convolutions of ever having to sit through conversations like these when querying some of my mother's more bizarre statements I, though puzzled, had learned not to enquire.
In the final instance my mother's explanation that some mild mannered business man doubled as a Dirty Old Man could be stated thus: Because when she went into the guest lav. straight after him the hand-towel was unused. This meant he hadn't washed his hands. Which in turn explained why he was a dirty old man:Because there he'd just been, fiddling with his willie and the child had just been about to put that coin straight in her mouth!
They'd go wandering off down umpteen different paths before they were finished
( "What do you mean, fiddling, exactly?"
"Well, touching it. Fishing it of his trousers and waving it about."
"Do you mean urinating?"
"Of course I mean urinating! What else on earth could I possibly mean? "
"Waving it about?"
She'd be a little sheepish now, realising that might have been a slight guilding of the lily.
"Well..." grudgingly. Then, with a twitching of the lips "You knew what I meant."
"But why should touching his penis in a strictly legitimate and necessary way make him a dirty old man?"
"Oh George!" my mother was one of the last of the breed of women who could, when the occasion presented itself, flounce. She would flounce now "you know perfectly well what I mean."and drift out of the room.
All things considered my idea of exactly what a Dirty Old Man was, or looked like, remained odd for quite some time after that, until I found out for myself.
This was the sort of thing that happened to me again and again in my childhood. Not having other siblings and moving continually meant these strange gaps and inane nonsense convo's got me into a lot of....(I wanted to say "pickles" because talking about her brings back those speech patterns. But we don't say "pickle" anymore in that sense and I'm damned if I can think of another word that carries the same meaning exactly. Saying "trouble" sounds like very un-British hyperbole. After all, I'm here, aren't I?)
Well, let's just say it led me into an interesting life. And lets further state, just for the record, that I am at last beginning to acknowledge the fact that my home-life wasn't, strictly-speaking, exactly The Norm. Nor were either of my parents.
But what I am starting to do is to connect the dots. Is this the kind of wisdom they talk about age supposedly bringing? If so, does this in turn mean I am getting old: not externally - that's a bloody given - but internally?
Does there actually come a time in all our lives when we start to see the pattern? The wonderfully intricate, crazily executed, inexorably entwined with those of other people, pattern of our lives? Is that what age gives in return for all the embarrassment and sadness - the realisation that all the bits that seemed so random and inexplicable now fit seamlessly together?
Or - and for all the aforementioned reasons, I am definitely not sure about this at all - or, bloody hell, is all that stuff supposed to come in your mid-twenties and am I actually a late bloomer?
But at least I never put money in my mouth.
Neither, it seemed did my father who, one day, finally asked the question.
"Oh George," she laughed in a-we're-all-grown-ups-here kind of way. " You know what I mean. You brought one here once."
She went back to reading her letter. My father, who was not in the habit of dragging ancient money-handling parties in off the street, looked astounded.
"What the hell....?"
"Oh, George, you know you did."
Two sentences beginning with "George". My mother was flustered. When she began to get terribly busy plumping up cushions and aligning newspapers I also knew that she considered my father was being disingenuous and forcing her to look daft. As if the fact that he had brought one home one evening wasn't burned across his consciousness until his dying day! He must, though objectively he couldn't be held responsible, subjectively have been beating himself up about introducing the snail-trail of nastiness into the Innocent garden of the Family Home ever since! And she was being made to look as though SHE was making a big deal out of it.
My father then said "Pet, I..."
So phew, that was all right then. "Pet" meant amused (I didn't learn the word "patronising" until a long time afterwards).
"George!" Whoops. Three strikes and you're out, George. Now she's angry. "That.. that.. man!" Oh yeah! The slight stutter. She is furious. He knows EXACTLY who she means!
"What man?"
"The man with the...the...doo-dah"
It was pretty much downhill from there - my father genuinely having no idea what on earth she was talking about, and my mother genuinely feeling he was being deliberately obtuse until at last, goaded, she would hiss:
"Of course you know.The one with the new thing - oh what WAS the bloody thing called? You know perfectly well, its a...a.."
Light would begin to dawn and my father would hazard "infra-red, night sighted telescopic lens for Military armaments?"
"Yes! she would crow, vindicated "That doo-dah!"
Because of all the convolutions of ever having to sit through conversations like these when querying some of my mother's more bizarre statements I, though puzzled, had learned not to enquire.
In the final instance my mother's explanation that some mild mannered business man doubled as a Dirty Old Man could be stated thus: Because when she went into the guest lav. straight after him the hand-towel was unused. This meant he hadn't washed his hands. Which in turn explained why he was a dirty old man:Because there he'd just been, fiddling with his willie and the child had just been about to put that coin straight in her mouth!
They'd go wandering off down umpteen different paths before they were finished
( "What do you mean, fiddling, exactly?"
"Well, touching it. Fishing it of his trousers and waving it about."
"Do you mean urinating?"
"Of course I mean urinating! What else on earth could I possibly mean? "
"Waving it about?"
She'd be a little sheepish now, realising that might have been a slight guilding of the lily.
"Well..." grudgingly. Then, with a twitching of the lips "You knew what I meant."
"But why should touching his penis in a strictly legitimate and necessary way make him a dirty old man?"
"Oh George!" my mother was one of the last of the breed of women who could, when the occasion presented itself, flounce. She would flounce now "you know perfectly well what I mean."and drift out of the room.
All things considered my idea of exactly what a Dirty Old Man was, or looked like, remained odd for quite some time after that, until I found out for myself.
This was the sort of thing that happened to me again and again in my childhood. Not having other siblings and moving continually meant these strange gaps and inane nonsense convo's got me into a lot of....(I wanted to say "pickles" because talking about her brings back those speech patterns. But we don't say "pickle" anymore in that sense and I'm damned if I can think of another word that carries the same meaning exactly. Saying "trouble" sounds like very un-British hyperbole. After all, I'm here, aren't I?)
Well, let's just say it led me into an interesting life. And lets further state, just for the record, that I am at last beginning to acknowledge the fact that my home-life wasn't, strictly-speaking, exactly The Norm. Nor were either of my parents.
But what I am starting to do is to connect the dots. Is this the kind of wisdom they talk about age supposedly bringing? If so, does this in turn mean I am getting old: not externally - that's a bloody given - but internally?
Does there actually come a time in all our lives when we start to see the pattern? The wonderfully intricate, crazily executed, inexorably entwined with those of other people, pattern of our lives? Is that what age gives in return for all the embarrassment and sadness - the realisation that all the bits that seemed so random and inexplicable now fit seamlessly together?
Or - and for all the aforementioned reasons, I am definitely not sure about this at all - or, bloody hell, is all that stuff supposed to come in your mid-twenties and am I actually a late bloomer?
But at least I never put money in my mouth.
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