Frank’s dying of cancer. He sits on his sofa most days and WeChats me screenshots from tiktok, where he follows tour groups as they travel around China. His wife won’t let him travel because of his health and because they have to save money for his medical treatment. Physically sofa-bound he’s psychically journeying. Last week he took me down empty mountain roads in Tibet. A recent screenshot was from a temple in Yunnan. I sourced videos from my friends via instagram, and we took him diving in Fiji, to the South of France and down the Hackney Road (the view from my window). “Nice ducks,” he said, commenting on a video my friend sent from Oxford.
I met him when I first moved to China. He lives in Dalian, a hardscrabble industrial town in North-East China, just over the bay from North Korea. Even though it is on the sea, it still suffers from heavy air pollution. I had moved there on a whim to learn Mandarin. Frank lived in the same complex as the owner of the language school I attended and they had an arrangement where students could live in his sons room while he was at university. I became Frank’s surrogate child. We ate all our meals together and we spent the evenings playing badminton. Shortly after my first summer there I wrote an article about it for a food blog that has now disappeared from the internet:
It was summer in Dalian, and often there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Me and Frank would play badminton under the immense sun, and when the shuttlecock would sail over the net and I'd look up and lose it. The sun would loom ominously but, instead of blinding me, I could look directly at it. The shuttlecock would be washed out, and I'd only find it when I'd hear the fluttering as it would drop nearby. Even on clear days the sky would be off-white, thick like a milkshake, the pollution smearing the edges of the sun such that it appeared three or four times it's usual size.
Frank's muscles were stiff as a board, and instead of sitting he'd squat on his haunches, which when I emulated him caused my knees to buckle and my thighs to burn like I'd just run a marathon. I once saw him spend over two hours in that position, chatting to his friends from around the way. He walked everywhere, and the only suppleness in his body was not fat but rather his skin sagging from old age. When we played badminton under the smudged ochre sun, Frank would only ever pause to cough, or spit huge globules of phlegm on the floor. The same exercise that had gifted him his iron core had smelted his lungs.
There was a two year gap between my first trip to Dalian and my second. In the intervening time I completed a year of intensive mandarin study at Fudan university in Shanghai, on a scholarship provided by the British Council. That first summer I hadn’t been able to have a conversation with Frank; we spoke in gestures, disconnected vocabulary and floating grammar. When I returned I could speak good enough mandarin that we could have proper conversations. He took me to a bizarre area of the city called East Port where a developer had built a mock Venice. Light jazz played from hidden speakers dotted around the canals. “Nothing has really changed since your last visit,” he told me, despite the fact this entire area of the city hadn’t existed two years prior. We then walked to a subway line that had not been completed when I was last there. Rode back to the city centre and went to a shopping centre near my language school, that had just opened one of China’s largest boxing gyms. We stood outside and watched people sparring. “Nope, life is just the same” said Frank, matter of factly.
***
This week I found out that I won’t be going back to China this year. The academic job I was supposed to have at Fudan, as a visiting scholar, is now suspended until next year. I have a feeling (second wave, politics) that I might arrive at next year and find that it has been delayed again until such a time as I give up pursuing it. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not feeling optimistic.
2020 has not been a vintage year for China’s relations with the West. There has been the pandemic, Huawei, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, the trade war, corporate espionage, wolf-warrior diplomacy, tiktok, the expulsion of journalists, the closure of consulates. The word of the day is decoupling. I wonder if there wasn’t another vision of the world in which the pandemic might be have been understood as a global problem that required a global solution; that we would have strengthened institutions like the WHO (instead of having the USA pull out of it) and created an international framework that could have had more purchase in the fight against border-agnostic issues like climate change.
Maybe I’m naive, but I do think that systemic shocks on the scale of this pandemic do have the potential for radical change. It has been a shame therefore that the international system is dominated by nationalist strongmen (Trump, Xi, Putin, Bolsonaro etc). Instead of the pandemic bringing the world together, it allowed these politicians to double down on their nationalist projects. Covid has been the perfect excuse to lurch ever more isolationist. Instead of a global solution we have reached for a virus-proof fence (and failed, clearly).
I’m neither American nor Chinese. To be caught between these two worlds has always been interesting. I lived in NYC for a time and there is a lot more overlap in my friendship circles between NYC and Shanghai than in London. I knew a few people who spread their lives 50-50 between those two cities and I stayed in New York with my god-sister from Shanghai. Decoupling is more than just a geo-political buzzword. When I was in NYC I knew a really fun crew of Chinese creatives in various industries; one had opened a bao restaurant with his brother, one was a photographer, another a neon-light artist, and I knew some stylists and designers. Most have left NYC in the last year and headed back to China, and for many that’s a permanent move.
Amongst the foreigners I knew in Shanghai, a majority of them have left in the last few years also. Changes to the visa rules precipitated an early cull. The party scene in Shanghai keeps getting raided by the police, censorship is tighter, VPNS are weaker, and the permits that people used to buy to open businesses (because it’s extremely hard to do so as a foreigner without a Chinese partner) are now much more strictly checked, meaning quite a few people with quirky start-up ideas have seen them evaporate in red-tape. It’s less fun, is the general consensus. Then the virus saw all foreigners, regardless of visa-class or permanent residency status, blocked from entering the country. This meant those who left at the start of the virus ended up stuck abroad, and left entire apartments, friends, lovers and lives in China. It was a reminder of something that is felt more ambiently as a foreigner in China; that the existence of a place you can go back to elsewhere means you can never truly set roots down there.
I’m not a political scientist so I’m not too interested in how the world should be. Anthropologists tend to be more interested in the way the world is, and how people live in these conditions. There is of course a room for activist anthropology––just because you devote your attention to the world as-is doesn’t mean you can’t have an eye open to the world as could-be.
But with the world as it is, I see the geopolitics filter through my friends. I see it in the ones who have chosen to return. I see the world becoming less mixed. And I feel that with great sadness. I prefer polyphony. I want Chinese friends in New York and New Yorkers in Shanghai. I believe in a million personal bridges amounting to something, even in a world of physical borders and firewalls. Diversity will save us. Ask an ecologist: monocultures die.
I’m also feeling this keenly as my mandarin escapes me. I reach for the dictionary more when I read. I garble sentences I used to speak easily. I said I’d leave a seat for some oat milk in my friends coffee, when I meant to say space.
I don’t know if I’ll be in shanghai next year. I always wanted to come back to London eventually and it’s been nice to be close to family and friends. To build a life back. I feel roots setting. I’d always dreamed of living between; spending time in both worlds. I wonder if that will ever be possible again. I know how confused those two things are, and they are unresolved within me. The desire to set roots and also to be between worlds. I had hoped that my life would resolve this organically, but now it feels like the choice is being made for me.
When Frank told me nothing had changed, I didn’t understand. I came from a big city that is dynamic, but the pace of change in London is nothing on Dalian. I could point to a thousand things that had objectively changed since my last visit. The vegetable patch his wife tended had been moved ten metres to the left so the government could install higher speed internet in his compound. The anti-corruption campaign had meant that the huge banquet hall I passed en-route to school everyday was now decadently empty. In good years luxury cars were parked so deep outside it that they would end up spilling over and parking in a lane of the busy intersection out front. Now you could hear the foot-taps of bored hostesses on the marble floors reverberate around the high ceilings. But eventually I came to understand what Frank meant. The external world around Frank had always been changing. Change was the constant condition of his life. He was no different. Same old Frank.
The world around Frank is still changing, maybe faster than ever. If I was in China maybe I’d have taken him somewhere or I could have at least gone and seen him. He’d be there on the sofa, his iron core lifting heavily as he finds it harder to breath. He’d tell me nothing has changed. I’d try and tell him about all the things that had. Until then, Frank’s on his digital travels, sending me postcards from the ether. This week he’s on the beach in Sanya.