My fake life in a fake nation

I tell people that I live in a fake house.

On my contract it says my house is only 16 square meters, whereas it’s probably more like 60. This is so my landlord can escape paying as much tax. He told me he made this place himself. Like so many things in China, it looks passable, but once you start using it, you realise how dodgy it is. It’s a two level hutong style apartment, hastily thrown up between other older, no less ramshackle, hutongs, and though it’s only a few months old it’s already showing the kind of wear and tear beyond its time.

There is a permanent damp in the house and funky smell forcing me to leave the windows open. Not nice when Beijing’s bitterly cold winter air is beginning to blow through the city. I tried to make curtains for my windows and when I put nails through the wall the paint fell away in large flakes, and the concrete kept crumbling. Like it was shedding its skin and its muscles had turned to grey dust.

Almost everything has broken at least once in the three months I’ve been here: the new stove, the shower heater, the heater in my room. We’ve even turned off the yellowing, second-hand fridge, hoping to find out if it’s causing our inexplicably enormous electricity bills. Time and time again my agent tells me he’ll come over and deal with it. But he never has. His promises are fake too.

And it’s not just the house, it’s so many things in China. My friend bought me a kettle for my birthday. It was faulty, it didn’t work. The signal from my WI-FI box is incredibly weak. My mobile phone keeps switching off indiscriminately. At Greenpeace I learn about illegal pesticides used on vegetables and sold in supermarkets, about toxic waste being secretly dumped in waterways, about the government masking air quality by leaving out critical measurement criteria. Nothing is as it seems.

I must qualify that I realise much of this is because 1. China is still a developing country or at least transitioning out of one. And quality control standards rise slowly. Greenpeace is part of that process. 2. I get the feeling the Chinese government encourages a degree of moral flexibility when it comes to lying/faking in order for people to “get rich”. The kids who die from poisoned baby milk or the passengers who die on high speed rail crashes are just collateral damage.

The last “fakes” in my life are the relationships I have. As a foreigner, I am only here temporarily and that colours the way you live your life and your attitude towards the people around you. Like the manufacturers of this country, your standards are lax. You come here alone, and are forced to make friends very quickly and without nearly as much discrimination as you would apply at home. You are also forced to lose friends very quickly as each of those foreigner friends will eventually reach their “China expiry date”.

And while the majority of my friendships are thus so, I have found some exceptions to the rule in which I consider them to be of real substance. The other day I was hanging out with a couple of them and it was so fun, and comfortable, that I became conscious of it. This is really great, I thought with a glow in my heart. But then immediately after, or really in one collapsing moment, I felt sad. Because we know our time together, like this, will draw to a close. Even the sweetest moments here are tinged with a bitter aftertaste.