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Published: March 7th 2009
I have been wanting to write one of this philosophical blogs for a while and now seems a very pertinent time indeed. When we came back at Christmas everyone said to us how wonderful it sounded having someone who does everything for you around the house, all the cleaning, shopping, cooking etc. And it was.....to start with. I have discussed this extensively with my good friend Suzanne, and tried to gain understanding from some of my Chinese colleagues at school, but there is a point at which you just have to accept you can take no more! It is a difficult thing having someone else in your home, deciding when the washing is done, and which colours can mix with which (basically translated means, everything in together!) and what you eat for tea. We have been trying to educate her into some of our Western ways to see if it improves the situation.
Not long after Christmas I decided enough was enough with the food thing. I knew we were eating unhealthily and could feel it on my waistband more to the point. We are a bit limited due to that fact that the kids are fussy eaters, like all kids, so the ayi soon realised she had to make simple foods with no sauce on or they wouldn't eat it. She got quite offended when we didn't eat her food so we tried to guide her. When we returned from our Christmas break (to find she had put the air conditioners on cold instead of hot) I started asking her to cook some Western dishes. Ian showed her bangers and mash......sadly the bangers are very expensive and the mashed potato she could not get the hang of. I tried to get her to taste it as I don't really believe you can cook something properly without tasting it but she flat out refused. I don't eat it, she claimed, only rice......my Chinese translation there! Ian taught her spag bol, which was probably the one success, but every time it tasted different. I tried to show her spaghetti meatballs with tomato sauce. While she was away at Chinese New Year (another 2 week paid holiday) we asked her to stock up our freezer with meatballs and dumplings. When I went to cook them I noticed they were most definitely not how I make them.....they stayed together about from anything else, where mine usually collapse into a heap! And then this week, I was late home and found the family recovering from a tea of raw meatballs....she hadn't cooked them properly! Luckily Ian had noticed and noone seemed to have eaten enough before he noticed but it was a close one.
Now, of course, guiding someone who doesn't speak a word of English when my Chinese is extremely poor is no mean feat. In China, oil is used like it is going out of fashion. She looked at me in total shock when I explained you only need a little oil to cook with....eyes wide in horror! And then I start realising why my waistline was getting smaller. Oil, oil and more oil. Oh, and add some starch and a ton of salt. How these people live so long is beyond me. But then they do a lot of physical activity. The portion sizes were also becoming large by the minute. When we ate 'Chinese style'.......the food was served in the middle of the table and we helped ourselves, traditional style. But when she cooked our Western dishes, she served them up on our plates (as we had shown her) and just piled the food on. At one point, Sophie, Ian and I were served the same amount of food. As you can imagine, the person who was most annoyed was Ian!! Apparently, I found out that it ayis don't want you to go hungry. It is shameful if the family you work for does not have enough to eat. So, she piled it on. I managed to get my portions down by getting Ian to explain I was trying to lose weight. Of course, to this she replied that she was jealous of my curves as Chinese people have none. Sophie just left her food and the ayi started to realise. But then she would change the recipes we gave her week by week and put so much sugar in the tomato sauce for the meatballs that even Sophie wouldn't eat them. Apparently, we had run out of tomato ketchup, so she used sugar instead (the logic?!!).
As you have probably started to realise, mainly because I am writing in the past tense here, that yesterday we told our ayi she would not be coming back. Eeek, how hard was that?! Well, it all came to a bit of a head this week as for a start, Ian was finishing at our school and we couldn't really justify the expense. Then on Tuesday we came to bed feeling even colder than normal in our ice box bedroom......onyl to find that the window had been left wide open!(more on that in a moment). And then we had the raw meatball incident. Added to which, William was off school poorly last week and stayed with the ayi. We came home to find she had totally ignored our request of giving him a cheese sandwich for lunch, had walked him to the shops and bought him 2 donuts with sugar and cream all over and then not given him anything else until an apple at 4pm when Sophie came home. The poor thing burst into tears when we sat down to tea as he realised his hunger was due to the fact that lunch had been totally forgotten!
We all came home together yesterday to find that the email we had sent to the ayi agency explaining (most) of this had been wrongly conveyed to the ayi and she didn't realise she was going straight away. There ensued a whole load of Shanghainese shouting down the phone and passing the phone back and forth between Ian and the ayi, trying to get the agency to translate and make her understand the uncomfortable situation. We did give her some severance pay as clearly we feel terrible that she has lost her job, but wasn't exaclty a happy bunny. We all gave a big sigh of relief when she finally left though, and now we are on the lookout for a part time ayi who willjust come and clean and iron a couple of times per week. We found that our ayi had taken to watching our TV and reading her magazine, as she couldn't be bothered to keep herself busy, so clearly this will be sufficient!
And so, onto a couple of little tit bits of interesting "Only in China" things we have been thinking we need to share. As you know, the winter out here has been a tough one for us to adjust to, not least because of the fact that central heating has not reached Shanghai yet. Apparently, it used to be illegal so none of the older places have it installed. If you go to Beijing, it's a different story as it's colder there and everyone has it! Some of the newer places here have it installed, but they cost quite a fortune to rent out! Add to this lack of central heating the fact that the Chinese like to open the windows all the time and it gets pretty unbearable. What we have found is that the air conditioners are on full blast in our classrooms at school, but once you walk out the door into the corridors, you are hit by the freezing cold of the windows flung open. all us Westerners have been trying out best to close them and ask for them not be opened, but it is traditional Chinese and the ayis at school don't understand. These poor women who are clean, carry furniture up 4 flights of stairs, deliver piles of books, and many more amazing jobs are all migrants from other parts of China, and probably never had windows themselves, so I was told yesterday. And even if they did, it is so traditional to open them wide that they don't understand why we close them. But here comes the irony. The windows are opened to let the fresh air in, but the pollution of Shanghai can hardly be called fresh air, surely?!
And so we find ourselves getting dressed in the morning wondering if there is any point thinking too hard about which clothes you are wearing as you will probably keep your coat on all day and they won't be seen! The Chinese do this, both teachers and students alike, the coat is part of the outfit. It is a constant battle to get the students to take their coats off in class.
I have attached a photo on here which I just couldn't walk by without taking. This sums up China in many ways for me.....the man on the top of a normal wooden ladder, working on the overhead electricity line, with a man at the bottom holding it for him. Not a problem usually, but this is in the middle of an extremely busy and dangerous crossroads. They had been doing some work here for a while now, and have just been filling in the hole they dug to work on the cables. One thing that constantly amazes me here is the lack of lorries. In UK, we are used to the sight of the Asda/Texco lorry on its way to stock up the supermarket. I have been desperately racking my brains to think if I have seen any lorry stocking up our supermarket but I just haven't and I don't know why. The smaller shops, I do know, have deliveries from little vans. And the restaurants have deliveries on mopeds!! I really want to get some pics, but we are usually dashing somewhere at the time and don't have time to stop. There is no sight of a Comet van either.........the most amazing thing about transport and delivery is that most of this is done on bicycle! I promise to find some pictures of this as seeing really is believing in this case. These bicycles pull along little trailers which are just piled high with all sorts of things. Brand new electrical goods, polystyrene packaging, big bottles of water from the dispensers, furniture from people moving house and more........it is really just amazing. The first few times you see it you cannot believe your eyes and now it is just normality.
Now I think I have to stop as I have gone on for quite a while here, but I really wanted to share some things which are just fascinating about this country. We really hope that some of you will be able to come and visit us and see for yourselves sometime soon.
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Marina
non-member comment
Hello from Boston
Hi, I've been following your blog for about a month now and am enjoying it a lot. You are living my dream of living in China. I can't wait to do it some day. I am single with no children and find it difficult. So I commend you for having such courage. I'm going to be visiting Shanghai in April and am excited to see the things you have talked about. Thanks for sharing your experience!