Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Lianyungang Revisited

I spent my first year in China living in a city called Lianyungang, in northeastern Jiangsu Province. When I tell Chinese people this, their faces light up. "It must be very beautiful there," is the typical response I get.

Now, Lianyungang is a lot of things, but beautiful isn't one of them. On nice days, it could be pleasantly cheerful, and some of the buildings in the city's traditional neighborhoods were interesting, if decrepit. But in a year's time I doubt I heard anyone other than my students describe the city as "beautiful". So I've always been puzzled why Chinese people across the country believe it to be a beautiful city.

Lianyungang is actually a bizarre conglomeration of three cities: Xinpu, Xuguo, and Haizhou. None are particularly close to each other, and in fact Xuguo (the port) lies about fifty kilometers east of Xinpu (where I lived). This particular fact proved to be quite pertinent on New Years' Eve 2004 when my friend Michael accidentally disembarked at the port train station not realizing he was still almost an hour away from his destinanion.

Even the name, Lianyungang, was troublesome. To this day I can't pronounce it properly. It doesn't roll off the tongue quite like Kunming, or Fuzhou. Mostly us laowai called it LYG, which sounds more like an international airport code than the name of a city. It seemed to fit.

For better or for worse, my first impressions of China were all formed in Lianyungang. I was 23, fresh out of college, and suddenly deposited in a country whose language I couldn't speak and whose customs I didn't understand. I had a job which I performed badly and co-workers who couldn't stand each other. I lived in a soulless hotel suite with a 10:30 curfew amid other byzantine rules. My only media source was CCTV9, China's inimitable English-language propaganda machine.

My lifeline was Lianyungang's small foreign community, comprised of two dozen or so English teachers and about fifty French engineers who treated their exile as a furlough from their wives and families. Our venue, aside from the odd gathering at an apartment, was the bar. If Lianyungang had any cultural life, I missed it. My life was simple: I knew a handful of restaurants, a grocery store, a DVD shop, my school, my apartment, and the bar.

The bar was certainly more than just a place to drink (though rest assured plenty of drinking went down there). It was a sanctuary, a West Berlin, a place to avoid the reality that was China. We assiduously resisted Chinese people who attempted to "English Corner" us, that is, use our presence as an opportunity to practice their English. We complained of brain-dead students, slippery bosses, bad diarrhea-causing food, loud noise, spitting, cutting in line, and virtually anything else one could complain about in China. We were entirely oblivious to the fact that the very people we put down were out living their lives while we were tucked away in a scummy bar, self-medicating as to avoid contact with the reality we had volunteered for.

Before long my nocturnal habits came into conflict with my hotel's curfew, and I was forced to sneak back into my room without attracting the notice of Mr Wu, my guardian at the school. The year before the school's foreign teachers were both New Zealanders in their sixties who had no problem complying with the hotel policies. I was a curveball; a young man with a taste for nightlife and an aversion to restrictions on my freedom. All Mr Wu wanted was to ensure my safety, for if anything were to happen to me- or if I were to get into any real trouble- the school would bear the brunt of the fallout.

I didn't mind any of this, and in fact when Mr Wu came to me with concerns about my safety I breezily told him that unlike in my country, the bad guys in China at least don't carry guns. I took pleasure in being a rebel. To me, I was living in a repressive police state where the citizens were brainwashed into believing a false vision of socialism, all the while blindly fumbling along while Party officials capitalized on their naivete. I would make a difference, or else I wouldn't. In any case, I'd be gone at the end of the year anyway.

Or so I thought. Now, it's November 2007, and I'm still in China, now living in Kunming. I can speak the language now (sort of) and my views of Chinese people have changed as I've actually bothered to get to know a few of them. I look back at my Lianyungang self and see a different person, an embryonic version of my present self. I could perhaps curse myself for wasting time, for not understanding earlier that learning the language would be crucial, for allowing myself to fall so easily for cheap caricatures of the people I was living amongst. But what would that achieve? As distant as that year now seems, I can't separate myself from it. The impressions I formed then still influence ones I form now.

Lianyungang, I'm sure, keeps chugging along. I know my old company still sends a couple of teachers there, and if I concentrate I can still envision some of its streets and shops and restaurants, and even the claptrap taxis my late colleague Murray labeled "piles of shit". And I'm sure, despite the best efforts of the city's planners and the protestations of the students, it still isn't beautiful. But it still means something to me.