Coming Back

Have been doing a lot of thinking lately - after all, we DO have 2 New Years celebrations under our belts here in China. Double the chance to feel the remorse.

So that's why I'm doing this again, guys, remorse plain and simple. But equal parts love, affection and and a sincere need to let all the people who have touched my life know just how much I think of them and how grateful I am to have had the chance to have met them - whether for an afternoon or for an eon. And also, if you had not already realised this, that I am almost pathologically unable to keep up a correspondence. (Hang in there: - the point, I promise you, is going to come along any time now.)

Now I also chucked a tantie this afternoon which, I further promise, is still well on the way towards coming to the point. Chucking a tanty, (spelled it both ways as I've no idea which is correct) for those with furrowed brow, means throwing one's toys out of the cot; having a dummy-spit; making an exhibition of oneself; having a fit; or anything else approximating the act of having hysterics. (I can just hear Chazza in Oz saying to herself "Being a Drama Queen, you mean.")

Well yeah, so under various names, I was indulging in the odd spot of tears, jumbled mumbling about throwing myself underneath the 707 bus (I HATE one of the drivers), and littering snotty, wet tissues. On the river bank, yet.

So I rang my Firstborn. Who, having been brought up wisely and sagaciously, said to me wisely and sagaciously that I was a bit of a tool. Well, not in so many words; and not until he had listened to my woes and metaphorically blown my nose for me and wiped my face. But he did make me realise that instead of bawling on river banks I should be talking to the people I love, or at least hold in affection. Or regard. Whatever:- the people I don't want to lose touch with. Ever.

But hey, you guys all know me. I write one day out of the blue and then not again for 3 years. Or I start writing regularly and, just when we're in the middle of something, I disappear. I've probably started the slide down into one of my Troughs of Despond. And I tell myself that no-one wants to hear the maudlin ramblings of a self-pitying boor. And then I get right down in there and wallow around in the bottom of the trough for a while and know for certain that the conversations I come up with down there will be despised by all.

So by the time I'm back on top again I feel ashamed that I've dropped out of touch with so many of you. Then I cunningly put it off until I'm really going to be Miss Ray of Sunshine and dazzle everyone with the sheer wit and brilliance of my golden tongue....and then whoops! It starts all over again. So by the time I'm really leveled out again so much time has gone by - new babies have been born, facchrissake. People have had birthdays and got married and graduated and moved to other countries...and we've lost all sight of what's happening in each other's lives.

Right, now: - almost - but not quite - at the point here:- See the thing is that, though I stop writing TO people (or ringing them; or Skyping them; or texting them; or returning their calls; or Windows Messaging them....sigh...yeah, I know) I never stop writing, as nearly everyone of you will know. Oh, its crap. But at least it proves - even to me - that a) I'm still alive and b) I'm still (moderately) sentient.

And Now...The bit you've all been waiting for....(bugger! If I could figure out how to do a drum-roll soundtrack I'd slot it in right ...HERE>>>) THE POINT>(fife and piccolo?)

Rather than continue to take up disc space in My Notebook I'm going to continue to do all that stuff here. And I'm going to inflict it on you! Yep, now in the comfort of your very own Cyber-cafe, Starbucks or room, I'm going to keep in touch.

And the great thing is that you can touch me back: because if you want to interject with a timely update on Aunty Nora's heelspur you can do it. And if you just want to say "Hi" or start to talk about stuff we can. Yeah, I know, you'll say that FaceBook and QQ and Forums(and hey, what about that slick new invention email?) and all that stuff clog the airwaves (actually, does this medium make use of airwaves? ), this is just going to be us and not someone I went to school for one term with in the Third Grade. Or who sits in one of the little offices down the corridor at work. This is just going to be us...my interesting mates and me.

BUT WAIT....There's more.....BONUS POINT>>>>> Have you ever wished you could maintain a correspondence without all the pesky bother of actually corresponding? You can, with # MHOTS. Ever wondered what that strange woman with the pink hair is up to, but just don't have the time to actually ask her? Well, wonder no more with #MHOTS. With #MHOTS I will actually (if I can figure out how to do it, that is) actually.... alert YOU when I have a Thought!!!!

The beauty of the new, improved #MHOTS system is that all my news, doleful drivel and communicative antennae will be beamed your way whenever I post.....AND YOU DON"T HAVE TO EVEN READ IT ! Yes, that's right, folks. This is a no obligation deal.!!! YOU call the SHOTS!!!

(Bloody 'ell, that's too tiring.) So yeah. What all that's about is that I've now made two resolutions to revive this Blog but in the hope that it'll provide the space for a running conversation. Also, even if you never read it, each time I post you'll know I'm thinking of you and, if ever the urge takes you, you can scan a few lines if you have any desire to share the minutiae of my life - or if you get a sudden phone call to say I'm coming to visit and you want to quickly bone up on where I'm living and what I've been doing so we can skip the "So. What have YOU been doing with yourself?"s and get right into things.

But, more importantly, I really do want you to use this space to talk back to me because, even when the black dog is chowing down on my frontal lobe (or wherever Bi-polarism is located) I'll still come here to write.

So don't say "She never writes" again. This'll be where I'll write.

# MHOTS is not a registered trademark and any relationship between the title of this blog and anything Mao Zedung said is not to be wondered at.

PS And yes, am going to Edit the "About You" stuff. Sound like a wanker.

Hey there TFD-ians - We're Over Here.

GG and I were chatting last night about her leaving TFD, and about all the good 'uns who have already left. While its all very well to take one's bat and ball and go home, in some ways its like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face: - one sheds the problem-people, but, at the same time, one also loses the good people.

When I first joined TFD there was a good crowd and though, we are all from different places in life, we all managed to entertain, enlighten, amuse or get up one another's noses in a much less stressfull way than the way things are now. Most of those people are now gone or only pop in on the odd occasion and hey, we miss you.

So we were wondering if we could set up a space of our own somewhere where we could all still chat and muse and ask for help. However, knowing first hand how long and how expensive it is to set up a web-site, we thought perhaps those who wanted could continue to keep in touch here for the time being?

O.K., so: the biggest draw-back here is that at the moment, this being my space, its only set up to publish posts from me. Its interactive, so people can make comments and converse once that's done, but it means that no-one else can make the original post. I think there is a way around this, but first we need to see if anyone is interested?

I also remembered - after I had been cut off for some strange reason - but did not get to mention to GG, that there is still that Book site I once (rather cheekily) advertised on TFD. It has only just started and, at the moment, only Nigel and I have done book crits. and put them up. But that, too, is an interactive site. Anyone can post or comment. So anyone who is into books might be interested in that, too? I would love to hear what people think about the books I have mentioned. Also, we would love to start a Reading Club as well so that all of us could discuss the same book. So that's another possibility.

I'm sure that people have their own favourite site and fora so it would be great if they
could share those here for us. As you'll see, I have put up a couple next to this box, but only a couple are interactive.

So this is only a feeler which I promised GG I'd put up today. We would love to hear what the rest of you think? cheers.

New Punishments for the Unemployed

I was wondering when it would happen: politicians in Australia are currently conducting their squabbles and playground alliances with ever-increasing desperation as public confidence slides into a steady decline. Knowing The Voters main concerns are Public Health and Education, these two areas have lately been approached with the same lack of understanding or competence which seems embedded in our current crop of Pollies so now they are thinking of dragging in yet another well-mauled bone of contention...Dole Bludgers.



The Education and Health debates are turning out to be rather more complicated than expected and objection to the most time-wasting and ludicrous changes has been met with more organised and determined opposition than Government, it seems, was prepared for.



This is rather unfortunate for Prime Minister Rudd who subsequently has inadvertently allowed more than a mere glimpse at the steel fist hidden beneath his warm and fuzzy mittens.



Never dreaming that his bluff would be called our smiling, family-friendly leader assured the nation that recent proposed changes would not be carried out unless 100% co-operation was received from all the States and Territories. His hurt bewilderment when one State dug in its heels therefore in a bid to halt the proposed scheme, soon turned to petulance and then foot-stamping obduracy as he was sullenly forced into revealing that his previous We're-all-in-this-together statement was actually a big, fat, porkie. Damn! With his latest admission that - sucks! boo! - He's the Boss and what he says Goes! the whole nation is questioning his Nice-guy image.



Fortunately, when the Nation is divided there is always that fat smelly red herring ever-ready to be pulled from any Aussie leader's bag of tricks:- The Unemployed.



The trouble with proposed changed to Health and Education is that there are a lot of very cluey, dedicated people called Experts, who can be wheeled out to talk sense. People with degrees and accreditation as well as experience are unfortunately thick on the ground and can reveal the glaring faults of which the pollies - who all tend to be ex-lawyers rather than Doctors or Teachers - were unaware.



But picking on the DB's (Dole Bludgers - Aussie-speak for those who are unfortunate enough to find themselves living below the poverty line) is a safe move. The starved and huddled masses are a mob of uneducated yobbos whom everybody loves to hate. They have no-one to represent them. They are not protected by a Union. They have zero credibility and it is doubtful any of them would even understand the word, due to it being polysyllabic. Best of all, its always Open Season on the DBs.

Now the rationale given out in simple English on the Media was that Western Australia is booming, there are lots of jobs in Industry and Mining there, and so all the under 30s can go and get jobs there instead of the Dole.

Now the beauty of this statement is that it contains enough sub-texts to please everybody.

Those who are still concerned about the Yellow Peril sweeping down to our shores by the boatload see it as a way of plugging the gaps those dreaded Chinks, Towel-heads, Illegals (substitute whichever Peril suits the speaker) would be jumping into before they used their wages to draft in thousands of friends and relatives.

The Send 'em into the Army and Make Men out of Them brigade might grumble a bit but would concede that sweating it out in the mines is almost as good as bloodshed and a uniform to make people into Real Men. (Usually the noun "people" translates as "men" for these types so the problem of whether unemployed women also need to be transformed into Real Men does not arise.)

Those who belong to the rabid anti-female Dad's Groups can use this as an assorted kit-bag of weaponry: this is a deliberate plot hatched by the Feminist groups who run the country to further disadvantage men; it will provide a way for the Courts to garniture wages for child-support to undeserving mums; more females will use men to deliberately get pregnant so they don't have to go down the mines.

But the real beauty of this proposal lies in the fact that every single person who has a say on the matter is a taxpayer:- and the feelings of our honest taxpayers who resents their hard-earned money being used to support those living like kings on their taxes have been aired on every chat show, talk-back and forum in the country.

The corollary to this, of course, is that the unemployed themselves, not being taxpayers, have no right to an opinion. Or, if they succeed in being heard can be easily shot down in flames with accusations of self-interest, partisanship, or not-so-hidden agendas.

Its difficult to comment on what is the most inane aspect of this latest scheme:-

Is it the fact that The Coalition sees The Unemployed under 30 as being, collectively:-
a) knuckle draggers - probably with copious tats., multiple piercings and perforated septums,
b) predominantly male
c) either single or willing/able to abandon their families
d) unskilled
e) unemployed because they relish living life on $250pw out of which to pay rent, school fees, feed and clothe themselves and dependants ?

Or is it the fact that, for the last few years, as Centrelink keeps on advising more and more men to go to WA to reap untold riches, no-one has yet addressed the problem of where and how to accommodate them? Or how to force employees to take on permanent workers?

Returning workers who have been taken in by the hype have returned in droves with tales of being forced to live in shared accommodation with card-carrying ferals; having to buy tents at inflated prices in which to live in WA's sweltering heat; camp sites which run rorts that would make a Pollie blush; contracts signed but inability to find somewhere to live; inflated prices on everything from rents to food; and reluctance to give contracts which enable workers to more than two days a week.

After the initial news release on this morning's news a spokesperson has now hastened to reassure a largely tax-paying and indifferent public that the Send 'em To The Mines strategy is not yet carved in stone and that further consideration and comments will take place.

Let's hope so. On the face of it, this is one of the most short-sighted, risible plans - on so many levels - that has yet been floated.

But then, what do I know about it? I'm currently unemployed.

Gettin' Good and Mad

Most of my friends know the bones of my life story - sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest and subsequently expelled from my boarding school at 16, raped at age 17, married to an alcoholic batterer who also raped and sodomised me as his "right"... and being bi-polar. Running away with my two kids across three continents finally to arrive in Australia with nothing but each other. Boo-hoo, poor me material.

They also know how I used those experiences and was accepted with open arms by Queensland Dept. of Mental Health; ran myself ragged giving talks while on the Dole and studying; liaised between patients and staff at a local psychiatric ward; ran support groups; did suicide interventions; made docos; communicated with politician Julia Gillard etc. As long as I was a volunteer.



When it came to paid work I wasn't qualified.

I took all that with me when I went to China and found that in a country of huge dichotomies, high suicide rates (never published), depression, high rates of mental illnesses, abysmal education standards, women-as-less-than-other (strongly and officially denied), I was certainly qualified. It all came together.

I've got awards I was given, yellowing on my windowsill in incomprehensible Chinese. But, most importantly, I've got the words of my students: "Cireena, you taught me how to be a woman", "Teacher, you gave me a meaning in my life", "My teacher, You showed me what it meant to be a man", "Until I took your classes I had never realised that I had choices", "You taught me about truth and honesty" , "I learned to love life through you".



I know perfectly well that I'm not alone in getting these kinds of responses:- its what teaching is all about. But to me it proves that what I was doing was working.

Then, once again, I come to Australia and I'm not bloody qualified.



My whole reason for going to University as a "Mature" student was to gain qualifications and credibility that would make my life experiences useful. It was certainly not because of scholastic/corporate/personal ambition. I went to Uni through six of the most difficult years of my personal life because I want to help where I know I can. An ethos that has been devalued by every beauty queen who breathlessly announces she wants to "make a difference" to the poor little kiddies of the world or whatever.

Discovering Seventeenth Century writer Margaret Cavendish was all part of that because it showed me how long women have been living my life and fighting against it. Indeed, how my life, in comparison, looks like a Sunday School picnic. Through Margaret and on behalf of millions of women down through the ages and across the worlds, I hoped to gain a Voice.


But I'm stymied. Time is running on and I'm still just a whisper in the wilderness.



I love knowledge. I submerge myself in learning. So going on to get higher qualifications is not something that daunts me. But knowing that I need those further qualifications before I can even THINK of being taken seriously, however, is starting to get me good and mad. Because the pathway to those qualifications, it appears, takes me directly away from the life experiences that I want to keep building on.



Until I have those magical, door-opening, strings of letters I do not figure in The Great Scheme of Things. To get those strings of letters I have to retire from The Great Scheme of Things.



Each year spent in scrabbling for those letters takes me further and further along my life journey. Women who have turned a certain chronological milestone on that journey are unemployable.



Where the hell is the magical trapdoor that drops me out of this labyrinth of 21st century bureaucratic bull shit and says "You want to do something worthwhile? O.K. Go through door Door Number 2."?



Since the turn of this shiny new century I have returned to University, got myself a couple of degrees, learned new skills, become a teacher, travelled to The Middle Kingdom, gained valuable insights, won awards, turned some peoples lives around, gained insights, had valuable experiences, gathered up knowledge, and considered I was finding myself a place in the world that would make sense of my life.



Instead I have been catapulted me back to where I was 10 years ago: - unemployed, broke and disregarded.



I reckon that's enough to get anyone mad.

Debriefing China

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?

What The Hell Am I Doing Back Here?

For the last month I have been back-packing from Kuala Lumpur up through Malaysia and Thailand and into Bangkok.



It has been a time of sunshine, laughter, crazy adventures and clean toilets. And it was terribly difficult to come back.



No matter where I went in Malaysia and Thailand -from meanest village to bustling city or town, through bus stations and make-shift eateries - one thing was constant: the toilets were clean, airy, hygienic and odour-free. If you've never been out of a First world country you might be thinking "Well, duh!". But if you live in, or have been to, China you will probably be thinking "Oh, heaven!"



Because the one thing that all foreigners, whether loving China or disliking it, will agree with, is that the lavatories here are, frankly, disgusting. And I use the word not in a hyperbolic sense, but in every aspect of its actual meaning: they engender disgust. I have an almost cast-iron constitution and have spent my life in some of the most primitive corners of the world. But China is the only country in the world where, having entered a public toilet I raced outside and violently, wrenchingly, and at great length vomited.



I have witnessed a visiting Academic - a tough cookie and well-respected for her pragmatic, no-nonsense stand upon important issues - crouching, sobbing with humiliation in a Chinese lavatory. I have known a fellow-teacher who became agoraphobic: she was so worried about having to use a toilet outside her own apartment that she refused to venture from it. I have met backpackers who took the next plane out of the country after visiting a Chinese public lavatory and I myself have rung in sick when my tummy has had the slightest grumble, because the knowledge that I might have to use one of the toilets in the University teaching bloc is not to be borne.



Before I came here I read forums which moaned about Chinese toilets but did not go into graphic detail. In my innocence I imagined their only gripe was the absence of toilet paper: easily overcome by every resident in China carrying round small packets of tissues in their pocket or bag. The first habit one picks up. I then thought that the concern was centred solely around the issue of "squattie potties" as they are dubbed by expatriates. I was blase about that. China is not the only country to favour this form of lav. and my experience with squats was pretty extensive.



So I was actually as unprepared as any other foreigner for the reality of Chinese toilets. As long as one lives here it is impossible to equate the the sight of some dainty, doll-like creature click-clacking her way along a corridor with the knowledge of her destination. How can she bear it?



While not actually vomiting, I once stood in a line at a public toilet at a busy and modern shopping mall, absolutely desperate for relief, but dry-heaving with my hand-creamed hands in front of my nose, trying vainly to block out the sickening stench. Yet from smart urban office-staff, to elderly shoppers, everyone else stood there nattering unconcernedly, and, while I picked my way, gagging, into the cubicle, they sailed in with no obvious distaste for the inch-deep human waste that covered the cubicle floors, the discarded, unwrapped sanitary napkins around which blue-bottles and flies hovered hungrily nor the overflowing, open baskets of used toilet paper steaming in the summer temperatures.



When I have gone on holidays to Australia or England and delighted in the perfumed, Muzaked wastes of the sterile, hushed, ladies lavs. I have come back telling myself it is elitist to compare these to the insanitary conditions of a third-world country. But this time, this time I just got mad.



If villages that were no more than clearings in a jungle, or busy coach stations with hundreds of bladders a minute being continuously relieved could boast pristine, sanitary lavs, with plentiful water not just for flushing but for washing ones bits afterwards, why on earth was I returning to such conditions? I would look at Malaysian and Thai women, so dainty and feminine, and know that they were dainty and feminine in all aspects.



Using water to douche oneself is so much more civilized than the Western habit of sopping up excess with bits of paper, that I actually felt disgusted at a conversation overheard in a Malaysian Tea plantation: A busload of Aussie tourist had just pulled up and a gaggle of women invaded the amenities. I had, as usual, lingered a little in thoughtful delight at the spotless floors, the shining fixtures and the luxury of being able truly to "freshen up" in my cubicle before coming to wash my hands with plentiful hot water and a sweet-smelling soap that perfumed the entire area. No need ever for the sanitised wipes I always carried at home in China - where a single cold tap is considered all that's necessary for washing.



Yet I heard the group of women who had beaten their companions to it greeting the new arrivals with "Another bloody Asian toilet!" "Oh no! " the others groaned. ""Yeah, gotta crouch down like a bloody plantation worker...and there's no toilet paper!" "What! These people are the living end!" replied one of the new arrivals. "Ah don't worry love, I came prepared" someone grimly announced and started tearing sheets from a huge roll which she doled out to everyone else.



I slunk away trying to disassociate myself from these women and hoped that the nearby staff - all of whom spoke excellent English - did not group me in with these "dirty foreigners" who preferred using pieces of paper to utilising the douches attached to each lav. I also prayed that the next country they visited was China.



The longer I stayed in Malaysia and Thailand the more the thought of returning to Chinese loo's was getting me down. I was also dreading walking down streets where fellow-pedestrians hawked enormous globules of spit around so that walking down any street becomes a hazard - not from pick-pockets or rapists, but from the possibly of of slipping in one of these enormous oysters as I once did in a busy, indoor market. The sound of a tiny Chinese girl, with fluffy pink scirts, and diamante jewellery fetching one of these up from, apparently, the depths of her being to let fly (sometimes on ones shoes)still has the power to amaze me.



Then, I started to think, there was the fact that everywhere one went people did not just stare...they turned around to do so; they held up their kids for an uninterrupted gawk; they got out their cell-phones and recorded one for posterity; the stood right next to one and did a slow, unsmiling inventory from the toes of one's shoes to the topmost hair on one's crown.



Which of course led me to dread returning to the daily battle to catch a bus: fighting and clawing with tens of other determined passengers, being elbowed out of the way, having ones feet trodden on and, sometimes, going down in the crowd unnoticed while people scramble blindly past.



Or the way one was dismissed with shooing motions like an uppity farmyard chook if someone didn't want to answer, or let one into their cab, or didn't know the answer to a question or just couldn't be bothered talking. AAArgh.



Even when I had actually run out of money I stayed on in Bangkok, lazing by the hostel pool, walking through the pavements crowds, taking free bus rides and dreading, absolutely dreading, having to leave the sunshine and the smiles, the cleanliness and the flowers, and come on home.



I've now been back a week and in have just come back from downtown. I stood back and let the fight go on without me to get a bus and so, despite having arrived at the bus stop in good time, had to stand, with someones bottom fitting snugly into the curve of my own and my boobs squashed up against a strangers back. Until, of course, the bus broke down and we were all abandoned without a word of apology or alternative arrangements, on the side of the highway.



But then a passing business man stopped and gave me a lift. Oh, all right: he stopped to give the three pretty young students ahead of me a lift and, as they slid, giggling, into the back seat I insinuated myself firmly into the front. No-one minded. And no-one said "Put on your seat belt, or I'll get a huge fine". Neither did anyone even flinch as he overtook a truck on the wrong side, or sailed down the bicycle lane, or stopped on a busy corner to let us off. As I hurried down a nearby lane a woman coming towards me beamed all over her face and said "Hello!"



Then I walked across the square, where teenagers linked arms with their grandparents, and a little boy accosted me and asked me what my name was. His mother didn't rush him off indignantly reminding him of stranger danger but sat, smiling proudly from a far bench, as her little one talked to the foreigner.

When I finally arrived at the place from which I was to conduct a class, no-one muttered darkly about me being dozy or unorganised when they reminded me it was the wrong day. They all giggled and laughed and asked me how my holiday had been, and told me how good I looked, and admired my new handbag and asked me how much I had paid for it and how much had been asked and congratulated me for getting a bargain.

In the coffee lounge no-one minded that I took a comfortable chair from the other side of the room and plonked it down in front of the plate-glass window which I gazed through, entranced, as though it were a giant t.v. screen. A young father and his tiny daughter thought it was a good idea and did exactly the same thing. When I had finished my coffee I knew I was free to sit there from then until the place closed, and even have a little snooze if I felt like it, without feeling the need to buy more bloating cups of anything in order to establish my right to do so.

I reflected on my weeks new classes, packed with old students who had signed on for another semester with me, and how they had welcomed me, and asked questions, and the incredible difference in them from the first classes I had ever had with them. They had lost their paralysing shyness, they had learned to joke and even dispute with me; their English was so improved from those first, faltering sentences of just a semester ago that it was difficult to believe they were the same people.

We discussed topics they wouldn't even have understood when I first met them; they argued with each other; they gave answers that did not match my thoughts on things; they didn't giggle and turn red when I made them all change places and sit with people of different gender.

So, sitting there in that coffee shop, watching old men hawk onto the pavement and same-sex couples go by hand in hand who would laugh at the idea of that looking gay, I suddenly knew why I had come back.

Bugger the toilets: I have a map in my head now of all the five star hotels downtown where I can go if I'm caught short, and I'll continue to ring in sick if I have a tummy-rumble. Bugger the hawking and spitting - my students think its revolting every bit as much as I do. Now I know what ha kept me coming back and signing on.

China is like nowhere else on earth: its anarchic and traditional at the same time. Its a place where one has enormous freedoms and none at all. Its a place at a frantic, hectic speed where whole busloads full of passengers calmly go to sleep on a twenty minute bus ride. It's unthinkably large population are worldly-wise and naive, cunning and trusting, excessively polite and (to our way of thinking only) incredibly rude. China is the epitome of Yin and Yang.

The older generation are slowly instigating change, but the youngsters are lapping it up. They can admit to themselves and, often, to me, that there are some things that need to change while their elders, still caught in a different system's mores, are sometimes more slow to acknowledge it. There's so much they need to learn and so much they can teach me.

I think I keep coming back to China because it's exciting being part of a new culture that is being forged. And hey, somewhere in the future, maybe that will include doing something about the toilets!