Month: May 2018

Two more weeks, and then my year in what I call The Chinese Truman Show will be up. As I am preparing to leave my first home in Kunming I walk through my neighbourhood with slightly different eyes. One eye is sentimental, the other one has a sceptically raised eyebrow, and watches the surroundings as a critical architectural historian. This gated community architecture is interesting and very telling about life in China.

Sweet sentiments

When I arrived here for the first time it was early December, after months of pretty hardcore bicycle travel. I was more physically and mentally exhausted than I probably realized at the time, having been very sick and very cold and on the road for about nine months.

Arriving here and staying with a lovely host for a couple of days was a welcome reprieve. I loved how sunny and warm it was even in December, how lush and green and well maintained the community. The beautiful location of the house, right on the edge of Dianchi Lake. How luxurious this apartment is, with its lion-clawed bathtub, it’s German washing machine, it’s floor to ceiling windows looking out at palm trees and other kinds of lush tropical green.

How vast and cool its tiled space. Decorated with butterflies and roses, a baroque settee big enough for two sleeping cyclists, elaborate curtains and drapery above the windows, and as a piece-de-resistance a gigantic bejewelled bed with a rococo headboard that I have christened the rhinestone cowboy.

A palace for a princess, and as a dirty bike traveler I felt too shy to ask if I could have a bath, even though there was nothing in the world I wanted more when I first saw it. Half a year after this first stay I find myself back in Kunming, and I end up renting the house from my princess friend who leaves to travel the world, as serendipity will have it.

Home away from home

For one year I have called this house my home. It is half an hours walk from my work, and once the neighbourhood was used to my white face I no longer felt like a laowai.

The mi xian noodle ladies know exactly how I eat my breakfast noodles (with fresh tofu, a handful of fresh mint and coriander and a generous spoonful of chili). I could leave the key at my neighbourhood supermarket for guests if they arrived while I was working. Neighbours have even brought tired and somewhat lost looking cyclists straight to my front door.

In the garden three floors below my apartment is a talking beo, and the whole day through I hear my neighbours saying ni hao to him. Beo apparently likes to eat mango, because that is what he is shouting most of the day: ni hao! man guo! People in my community greet me, no one stares or takes pictures of me, and one lady tried to set me up with her son. She now calls me 荷兰 (he lan) every time she sees me: Hey you, Holland!

And now for the critical note

My neighbourhood is a cluster of gated communities grouped around a golf course. It has only been here for about ten years. Before there was some very polluting industry dumping wastewater directly into the lake. Dianchi is still very polluted and I never eat fish anymore, for fear it might have been caught from the lake. Now it is an extremely posh neighbourhood. The lake side has been beautified with a park, an amusement park and a sports complex.

The communities surrounding the golf course are built in a faux-Italian style, and the ochre and terracotta colours glow lovely in the late afternoon sun. If you look closely however Escher’s etches might spring to mind rather than Sienna.

I am reminded of the Mediaeval artist who drew an elephant while never actually having seen one in real life and only knew what it was supposed to look like by hearing it described by travellers.

Pilasters apropos of nothing, columns not supporting anything.  Walls à la rustica, but the natural stone is only used as a facade and not structurally. The houses are all made of concrete. The real à la rustica houses are one generation away, in the countryside. There mud brick and stone farmsteads are still standing.

There are Maserati and Porsche cars parked everywhere, on show as status symbols of the booming middle class. A small army of gardeners is continuously grooming the park-like surroundings and forever cleaning up the dog poo behind the ridiculously dressed mini-dogs and their owners. It is paradise. Friendly, green, new, well-maintained, full of nice people and great little restaurants. I love the flowers everywhere. Bougainvillea cascades onto the pavement, a jasmine tree outside my window smells deliriously good, roses and honeysuckle. The winters are short, most trees stay green throughout and there is always something in bloom.

Moving out of my community

Today I am not a tired and dirty bicycle traveller and I see things a little bit clearer. Now the house and the neighbourhood are no longer a rose-tinted mirage but my everyday surroundings. Honeysuckle cascading over the gated community fences, the barbed wire beneath the roses, video cameras hidden amongst the bougainvillaea, the friendly security guards at the entrance gates. Today I realized how fitting a metaphor the barbed wire and the roses are for all of China. Going in and out of my community as well as the country is hard and my movements are monitored. Yet life here is so pleasant you can almost forget the level of control that is exerted. That is, if you are one of China’s 1%, which we as well-paid foreigners definitely are. It is indeed life in The Truman Show. Isn’t it telling though, that most rich Chinese people will do anything in their means to get their children and their money out of the country? The kids will study in America or Europe, money is being used to buy property or enterprises abroad. Truman also wanted to escape his perfect show in the end. To be free.