Neighborhood 1 comments

By Joel Hartse

It’s my friend Liu on the phone. She is calling because she, like everyone else, cannot find our apartment building. I ask her where she is.

“We just passed number 63,” she says.

“Are you near some big office buildings and a Starbucks?” I thought she might have gone too far east, which happens to a lot of people who miss the spray-painted #47 on the concrete wall in front of our building.

“No,” she says, “No, we’re on, um, on a not-so-good street, it’s very small and dirty.”

So I know she’s in the right place.

Before we go on I want to remind you that the song “Neighborhood” by the forgotten UK pop band Space was actually their first single, not their second one, even though you probably heard “The Female of the Species” (the second single and better song) first. I just heard this song again for the first time in years. Normally, hearing a crappy song from the 90s on a bus isn’t a meaningful life-event. But don’t you find, sometimes, that the most insignificant songs can wield a strange clarifying power? They jerk us back into the past even as they snap the present into clearer focus.

I heard this song on the bus a few weeks ago which I couldn’t quite place, though the rhythm and melody were instantly memorable. By the song’s end, I’d realized it was a cover version of “Neighborhood.” It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I started thinking about how weird it was to be hearing such a disposable song after so long, and, you know, hearing it sung in Chinese on a bus in China.

The original song is not at all poignant. It’s a cheesy caricature of British dysfunctionality (think of Lily Allen’s “LDN,” only not as subtle), but hearing this Chinese version prodded me into—I don’t know—musing, I suppose.

This is an unfortunate malady afflicting expatriates, perhaps those of us living in China most of all. When confronted with an artifact from Back Home, we are given to reveries of nostalgia, cultural comparison, and fatuous pronouncement on The Way Things Are Over Here. After all, China is a very foreign country indeed. The place where you end up when you dig a hole all the way through the center of the earth. The opposite of home.

The irony, then—I forgot to mention that these tiresome ponderings are often ironic—is that all I could think of after hearing the song was how, for the first time in my life, I felt like I lived in a neighborhood, and how much I liked it. This not-so-good street, this narrow and not particularly clean stretch of XiXi Road, is the only place I’ve ever lived where I actually feel part of things.

I don’t know anyone’s name here, and they don’t know mine. In a way, I miss the casual chats I was able to have with friends and neighbors back in the US—my limited Chinese language ability precludes all but the smallest of talk here. But the conversations I most treasure are ones like “How much is this pineapple?” or “What time should I come pick that up?” or “I’ll take that soup to go.”

That all sounds like commerce, but I take real pleasure in being able to go out every day and do these things on this street. If one is pinkish-hued, one is frequently reminded that one does not belong in this country. My official job title, for example, is “foreign teacher.” I no longer get embarrassed or angry when somebody gives me the foreigner double-take (or triple-take or quadruple-take), but to know that I can simply walk to the grocery store or the fruit stand in my neighborhood, just to buy fruit, not to explain who I am and where I’m from and why I’m in China, is a great comfort.

I’m not the only non-local here either—my wife and I live in a building full of other foreigners, and I get the feeling that almost everybody who runs the mom and pop dumpling shops and vegetable stands and quote-unquote massage parlor is from somewhere else in China, because they all shut up their shops and left town for two weeks during the recent Chinese New Year holiday. In a way, most of us here aren’t locals, not really. It’s just that we all live here.

I walk outside to flag down Liu and her boyfriend. “Look for a foreigner waving,” I say.

“I wasn’t sure if we were in the right place,” she says.

The thing is, I am pretty sure we are in the right place. This may not be my country, but it’s my neighborhood.