Oh Hai y’all

An oldie, but man, nothing better represents China than this ad.

I arrive in Shanghai on Sunday night, twelve hours before starting work, and nobody’s in the apartment I found on Craigslist in which I was promised a room, right. I wander and eventually come across a Frenchman who lives in the complex, who feeds me a beer and lets me use his phone, and I find out the room is not available anymore, the tenant extended his contract. But why don’t you stay in this place on the other side of town while I sort you out? It took me less than hour in this city before I uttered that favourite old mantra: “Fucking China!”

I of course said it again when I got booted out of that apartment the very next day, but I found another landlord, who wound up being a gigantic Canadian, 12-year veteran expat who left a bar he owned in Zhuhai to work as a savior of bewildered expat flat-hunters in Shanghai. He put me up in a penthouse for free while this other place in People’s Square opens up, so, you know, after drama things wound up fine if different to what you expected, which is the classic chain of emotions associated with probably most interactions in China. China!

So, I didn’t even make it a year in Australia, but Melbourne was great. It’s like an entire city made of West End. The food is good and the lack of ticket collectors effectively renders the entire tram system free. School was cool, here are a couple of things I did:

 

I also wrote a long essay on anti-colonial sentiment in Sufi (mystic) Muslims in 19^th century Senegal, which will also no doubt prove super useful in my future career. Which career I want, of course, I still have little idea about, but the two-year programme is half-over, and the 4-month end of year holidays have started. Thinking that spending all summer waiting tables/lugging boxes around a warehouse/entering data at a temp job (and any of the other ways I used to scrape money together this year) wouldn’t serve the degree or my time very well, and also because of my un-shutupable wanderlust, I  got an internship in a magazine in Shanghai. Then school said they would let me count the internship as a subject I was meant to do next year, so, I figured I could act like the stay in Chiner is an educational excursion crucial to my academic future, instead of an excuse to see the huge amount of old friends still living here and drink myself to death. I’m looking at opportunities to make cash on the side while I’m here, but that’s not all sorted out yet.

Work is cool, still new, the office (including marketing, sales, two other magazines, etc) is about twenty percent expats (one used to work for the ABC in Brisbane) and it’s part of a multinational Swiss media company that runs papers, radio and TV channels across Europe and Asia. I started by putting up events on the website, on my second day I went to an animal park and saw bike-riding bears and monkeys race against each other and wrote this for the activity guide:

This sprawling, 200-hectare park is home to an impressive variety of animals, including kangaroos, pandas, and giraffes. Half of the area is a standard zoo, dotted with restaurants and old amusement park rides, which one can navigate by foot or on an enjoyable pedal-powered cart. The other half is accessible only from the safety of a safari bus, which takes the visitor through several large outdoor enclosures belonging to lions, white tigers, and bears (Oh my!).

What will make the trip especially memorable for your child is the daily show, which reveals the fact that many of the animals are trained as circus performers. While PETA wouldn’t approve, the sight of bears racing bikes against monkeys, monkeys performing gymnastics on top of elephants, and elephants playing soccer with audience volunteers had all of the crowd’s children and adults leaping out of their seats cheering.

Easily the biggest problem with the park is its location. The price for the animals’ being able to enjoy their wide open spaces is the hour-plus drive from Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park to reach them. If your littlies are able to sit still for that long, however, City Weekend recommends the trip.

Haha, soft news is the best. The editor didn’t get the Wizard of Oz reference though, so it had to come out. Now I’m writing an article about an interview I had with the president of a support group for expat parents of children with learning disabilities, so work is varied. I got asked to do a restaurant review but declined because I’m still embarrassingly vegetarian, which pushed me even closer to giving up that whole ruse like I did the last time I came to Shanghai, as did the trip to the 5^th birthday of Haiku which had endless free seafood, of which I could eat one type of sushi. But of course, talking about my diet is crazy egocentric. Then again, that’s obviously what blogs are for.

Oh right, on the morning of the third day I thought I could make the ten metre walk from my apartment door to the trash cans without having to put pants on, right up until the door blew shut behind me. To the alternate delight and horror of the neighbours, I wound up spending an hour walking around my complex wearing nothing but a trash bag trying to find someone who would understand my gesticulating. A hundred and fifty kuai later, a locksmith lets me in and I’m an hour late to work with an excuse I really don’t want to give on my third day. Probably not the least embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me. The next day there was a reunion with the old teachers (all of the toasts were “to reboots”) and I got to sleep at 7am, blah blah blah my life is so fucking interesting.

Speaking of how interesting I am, I stayed at home watching Big Momma’s House 3: Like Father Like Son (image)on my first

"Me, in a dress and wig? I'll be the laughing stock of the gentleman's club!"

Saturday night in Shanghai, because I’m cool, and after the (Oscar-shunned) movie was over, I caught some of International Channel Shanghai’s programming. Back in my day, it was Shanghai’s only English language channel, and I was delighted to find that Viviana was still the host of lifestyle show Lifesource. One of the video pieces was on cheerleading classes at a certain Shanghainese gym, and it was put together by an awesomely sarcastic Australian reporter, who had a hard time masking her disdain of the fact that the completed cheer the class had decided to put on was about how terrific China is. I know blogging about this is old hat, but hearing ten different ways to applaud the motherland (“Go China! “Give me a C! Give me an H!…” “I love China!”) really was a fun (and, as per usual, slightly worrying) glimpse of the Chinese that I had almost forgotten about.

It was followed by a televised English class, this is the adult students introducing themselves:

“Hello, Gracie here. I love China!”

“Hello, I am Betty. How are you, what’s up? OK? Let’s go!”

“Hello, the audience. I’m Steve. Let me guess what you are doing now. Oh, I know, you are watching TV! So, don’t go away, back to you.”

“Hello, I am Oliver. Today, I want to cry, because my dog, he died.”

Ahhha, ahhaahahahaahahahaha. *mops eyes*

Anyway, I’m going to go write this article. OK? Let’s go!

——–
UPDATE: This is the article:

When Augusta Klaarenbeek moved to Shanghai from the Netherlands four years ago, she wasn’t just worried about the culture shock. Having accepted a contract to work in China as a human resources consultant, her biggest concern was leaving her country’s abundant state-funded services for citizens with mental conditions.

Augusta’s son has dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and while many Western countries like her own have extensive networks to support people and families affected by developmental disorders, she had difficulty finding specialist professionals in Shanghai.

“A big issue is that expat therapists are always in Shanghai for only a limited time, and it’s difficult to always have to commit to a new doctor with no knowledge of our medical history,” tells Augusta. “Shanghai is also a very competitive environment, and many Chinese schools and families won’t admit that learning disabilities exist, even though one in ten children have one, so there’s not a lot of support from within the schools.”

Fortunately, she discovered Shanghai Chosen Families. Founded in 2006, the non-profit organization was formed to help expat and English-speaking Chinese families gain access to the psychologists, pediatricians, and other service providers in Shanghai who can treat children with learning difficulties. Now an association of fifty families managed by ten volunteers, the group organises regular meetings, one-on-one mentoring programmes, guest speakers, and other events to improve the situation of families affected by autism, spectrum disorders, sensory processing disorders and other special needs.

“I was amazed by the warmth and support of Chosen Families,” says Augusta, now the group’s president. “It’s also great for networking and finding the right specialists who have the right references and recommendations. In the last meeting, we had an educational psychologist speak about dyslexia. Next month, we’re having a therapist who will discuss how the parents of these families need to take care of themselves, because they sometimes neglect their own well-being in favour of their children’s. So, we try to give information from all angles.”

She believes that the situation for these families has improved since her arrival and that “the whole taboo (of learning disabilities) is slowly fading away.” But there’s still plenty of work to be done. Her dream is for a children’s center in Shanghai where world-class pediatricians, neurologists and therapists could work together around these children. “We’re trying to bring possible stakeholders together and generate some buzz, hopefully the right people will pick up on the idea and see the need for it.”

At the moment, though, there’s no small amount of work for the volunteers at Chosen Families, but Augusta and the rest of her team welcome it, enjoying the work and above all recognizing the importance of their service.

“I want to say to all parents who have children with special needs: please reach out. Come to our group, don’t stay home trying to work on those problems by yourself. Share your worries, share your needs – we can help.”

Shanghai Chosen Families welcomes donations. Visit www.shanghaichosenfamilies.org/ or email shanghaichosenfamilies@gmail.com  for more information.

Meetings take place at the Pudong Community Center on the first and third Friday of every month, and at the Minhang Community Center every second Wednesday of the month.

Advertisement