Everything Changes (1)

'You cannot step into the same river twice'

2020

Those of you who know me well know I spend a great deal of time alone. This is not necessarily out of choice, I tend to do better around people. But, like most introverts, I need time to recharge so I value my alone time. At least that’s what I thought.

Until, China.

Eight months doesn’t seem so long in the great scheme of things. You can probably look back over the past 8 months and life has barely changed. But eight months with your back to the wall in a bewildering culture, under ridiculous pressure and without anything in the way of back up, can seem like an eternity.

And after all that time in China the last year in England has seemed like a lifetime as I went all out to breathe in every moment, relish every friendship, every country road, every blade of grass, every thatched cottage. I even revelled in motorway service stations, just because I was so delighted to experience all the stuff I missed when I was away. 

Aww, sweet little sentimental thing that I am.

During that long drawn out trip in China I experienced a loneliness that was incalculable, partially due to the fact that I received no indication from anyone when it was likely to end.

I recall one occasion, on the opening of yet another site the Billionaire swept through the place followed by his entourage before settling into my beautifully appointed private dining room ( a design achievement of which I was quite proud for ten minutes but haven’t had the time to return to since) and holding court as you might expect a Chinese Billionaire would.

Note: there are only 2000 billionaires in the world, they are a rare species so if you find one you should handle them with care, like an Orchid or small song bird - or perhaps a grouchy Silver Back Gorilla, as in this case.

Needless to say, I had no idea what was going on. I was still frazzled and coated with dust from the trials of turning a derelict warehouse into an operational business and I was still behind myself on the timeline. It was only yesterday after all that I was standing amidst piles of debris wondering how we were going to deliver this thing on time and within budget. But we did, and here we were, settling into a meal with various dignitaries who looked important - the fact that they looked important was enough for me so I behaved accordingly.

The Billionaire would issue various edicts and everybody would nod and agree. That’s the way it goes on such occasions. Stare into your soup, try and ‘stay in the room’ and stop thinking about what it took out of you to get to this point, and hope that somebody appreciates what you’ve done.

At some point in the proceedings my rare Billionaire turned towards me and said… something. Everybody nodded in agreement and I smiled and bowed.

There is a lady sitting next to me, delicate blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, as gentle as lamb but with an underlying strength that few people see - young, but a long term lifer in the East who can speak fluent Mandarin and knows the subtleties of the art, bestriding East and West. She leaned in and spoke “He said ‘You are Chinese now’”

Well, yes, this is a tremendous compliment but I’ve got a few questions to ask to be honest. If I am ‘Chinese now’ then where’s the money for being Chinese for a start ? Oh, so many questions.

Yes, this is a compliment of the highest order, especially from the Chinese, who don’t take foreigners to heart very easily. But it also felt like imprisonment. I mean, whose to know ? ‘You are Chinese now because we love and respect you’…or… ‘You are Chinese now because we have taken you prisoner and separated you from everything you know and love and - what are you going to do about it anyway ?’

I have no idea. I really have no idea. But my gut instinct tells me that it’s the former because, to be honest, these people really seem to get it, or get me. But I’ll come to that later.

For now, this is more about the down side.

The point is being told ‘I’m Chinese’ is flattering, but I’m not Chinese. A term often applied to me is that I am a ‘boiled egg’ - white on the outside, yellow on the inside. I’m not sure if it’s pejorative or not, but I’ll take it.

The truth is: I’m dealing with a level of loneliness here that I can’t articulate.And it’s the fact that I can’t articulate it that is worse than the actual loneliness. If I could articulate it then I would at least be able to get some kind of a handle on it. But I can’t.Every day I’d get up and find myself walking down a street thinking ‘I’m still here, I’m still here, when does this end ?’ That’s all I could think. I just couldn’t get beyond that. And that really bothered me.

The main motivation for getting back to the UK was ‘I just want to see that it is all still there’ - it was as if it had ceased to exist. 55 years of life, of streets, of gardens, of friends, of motorway service stations, of being able to sort things out by myself, of being able to moan about the weather to blokes in garages… or just talk to blokes in general… and working class checkout girls. It had all become something that belonged to another fading world that seemed to be receding rapidly into the darker corners of my mind. I had started to wonder if any of it still existed so I had to get back to see it.

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2022

It wasn’t until I had been back in the UK for almost a year that I finally found a way to articulate it. So here it goes - and pay good attention because this might well be the most important thing that came out of that first time in China.

I was in a fine old house nestled in the crook of an ancient hill in ancient Wales, a place I truly love, with a dear old friend (whom I also truly love, it goes without saying) and we were hard at it, drinking hard and talking hard. You know how it is with old friends, it doesn’t take long to get to the good stuff so we found ourselves talking about the intricacies of human relationships and we strayed into the realm of sociopaths and people who will use tools to manipulate, massage and seduce in social situations. My friend ventured that we all know it but we also all do it to some extent - We may not be sociopaths but we all have subtle tools of communication that we use to get by. Which was when it struck me.

That’s the difference - when in China, I can’t use my techniques. I can’t use all those subtle methods of endearing oneself to another, of easing the relationship, of managing personalities, giving and getting what I want or need, or simply what is expedient.

In a working situation we really need that stuff but I had found myself stripped of the armour that is so much a part of us and how we interact that we don’t even notice we have it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I couldn’t reference obscure Monty Python jokes or song lyrics, or Shakespeare or film references from Withnail and I to Star Wars or the Shakespeare references in Withnail and I and Star Wars.

And when you find that you can’t use any of that stuff, you realise just how much of that stuff you use. There is a shocking realisation that you are largely made up of a whole bunch of external references that you use to position yourself, get things done and generally be likeable and liked.

So, to my epiphany in the Welsh valleys. It goes deeper. Beneath the mass of external references and touch points that make up…oh…say 70% of who and what we are, there’s a whole raft of subtle ‘plays’ that we use to survive. Frissons, flirtations, parries, thrusts, jabs, sympathetic nods and gently probing questions, empathy and compassion, shots across the bows - the list is endless.

And I had none of that to work with.

I… the thing that was ‘me’, was reduced to the mechanics of what I produced covered by a thin veneer of first base ‘niceness’. Commitment, integrity, compassion and diligence were all there, sure enough, but without those vast and depthless cultural undercurrents that we are all swimming in together here in the West.

I guess we don’t realise we are in it until we are out of it. Rather like the saying that a fish doesn’t know what water is. Suddenly, I was yanked out of my ability to interact on anything other than a fairly superficial level.

And that… is the loneliness I experienced.

Think of that for a moment: 90% of WHO YOU ARE can’t be used.

That is real loneliness. Perhaps it is the definition of loneliness ?

“So, how are you feeling about going back ?”

“It’ll be easier this time because I know how it works and I’ve got stuff set up”

Well, here’s the thing -knowing what I now know won’t help because:

It will be completely different.

Why ?

Because it’s always different.

Every time you set foot in that place the whole world has changed.

In 2018 it was all “Yay, China is democratic… they’re just like us !… lets all do business and make money”

In 2020 it was “The rest of the world has descended into a hellscape but China is totally on top of this”

In 2022 it was “Hmm… a political landscape tilting back towards Maosim, economic meltdown, protests, droughts and a collapsing GDP”

I would be going back to a different place because it’s always a completely different place. But this time it would be a super amped -up different place. It had become about as different as it was 100 years ago and for that reason it made it worth going to because there are so few places that are truly different these days and I found that prospect enticing.

It occured to me that you might be given many reasons for travelling to the other side of the world but I wondered if my excuse was a rare one: I would be travelling into the unknown to avoid another Winter of punitive gas and electric bills. That hardly seemed like a good reason to venture forth but such was the state of England that it had come to that kind of a decision.

As my old friend H had said, “It’s the 18^th Century all over again dear boy” and he was right in many ways. To me it meant I was following in the footsteps of so many British adventurers who took off to avoid the debt collectors. So I guess my motives aren’t all that strange after all. I may be running the risk of spending World War 3 in a Chinese internment camp but at least I won’t have to pay the utility bills while I’m there.

It's just like the bygone days of exploration and adventure where pretty much anything could happen.

So let’s be philosophical about this: Change is inevitable - it comes for us all.

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2023

China has been different since my arrival in July 2023. It is different because that is what China does.

In 2023, the spectre of end of times economic meltdown has been reduced to an uncomfortable back ground hum, the threat of war is largely a Western narrative to obfuscate the fact that China is, well, quite friendly to the rest of the World and in many senses keen to do business.

The greatest change is in me. And in that is the stark realisation that the greatest changes are always within us. My experience of loneliness and my definition of loneliness has been reduced to phantoms that occasionally return to haunt me and rattle their chains at me in the dark of the night. Instead I have found myself forming meaningful relationships with a wide variety of people. I may not have the social armour that I spoke of, but there are other ways.

I have a coterie of fine female friends who I met online and have slowly developed an interesting depth of communication with. Many of these women I have never met, some of them I don’t even know what they look like. But I see a certain pattern in our relational behaviour that, words fail me, seems like something out of a Jane Austen novel.

A typical message might read something like ‘Forgive me if I am being forward but the kindness you have shown me has awoken in me feelings of the most tender nature…’

You know, that sort of thing, sometimes in a horribly mangled version of Chinglish - but the sentiment is real. All the women I know are independent, hard working, very Westernised and modern… But… that is thin veneer, a shell formed by the expediency of the world we live in. Beneath it lies the delicacy, grace and sensitivity that seems to echo down to us from the history of a culture that was producing exquisite calligraphy when we were still clothing ourselves in mud and eating any Romans that dared to stray across our borders (I’m talking about the Scottish here).

I had only to allow a space for the people I met to express themselves in that way and the floodgates opened, with alarming regularity.

And this isn’t limited to my interactions with women. I have Gym Bros. Yes… I have Chinese Gym Bros. I spend my mornings hanging out with ripped young adonis’ who could comfortably kick the head of a bronze statue if it looked at them funny. Yet, the same thing occurs. I need only steer the conversation slightly towards life’s philosophical challenges and my new friends open up, usually in the form of seeking some life advice from this wizened old Gandalf sitting in from of them.

“You could be my Master” said one of them to me after a particularly fruitful exchange.

Another actually bowed to me when I quoted a line from Confucius I had heard on YouTube the night before.

On another occasion I met a Malaysian Muslim and we took a long walk through the city one afternoon. We paused on a bridge as our conversation flowed effortlessly. The late afternoon sun bleaching the distant mountains a soft apricot grey.

We gazed at the view in silent reflection for a moment before he turned to me and said “You have emptied out your life of all that is unnecessary, you have created a vast volume of space inside of you, ready to receive… See what flows into it”

Ah, I can see where this could lead.

Another six months of this and I could be either a life-coach, cult leader, or wandering sage.

‘Everything changes, nothing stays the same, you cannot step into the same river twice’

Heraclitus

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