Tuesday 28 July 2020

In memory of Sir Leonard Appleyard (London)

I have just been sharing fun anecdotes with someone about my FCO student Sir Leonard Appleyard, British Ambassador to Beijing 1994–97.  

Went online to check the date he started his ambassadorship in Beijing, as Id thought it was 1993, when I discovered he’s just passed away: on 7 February 2020.

Ive written a couple of blogs about him (only a couple out of many stories):  see blog entries Im the imperialist, and A Chinese teachers status.

Heres one I never got round to writing, so this is a good moment, as a tribute to his sense of humour which made our lessons such a laugh.

I like to play the Devils Advocate and challenge students, asking why to everything they say, getting them to explain themselves, justify their comments, just to make them talk and use the language.  

So, one day, for conversation, I said to him, in Chinese of course: “Youll never be able to understand the Chinese people, will you?  For a start, youre a Westerner, so theyll never show their true side to you.  Whats more, you're a diplomat, which makes it even more unlikely for them to establish a real relationship with you.  Now that youre going to be the big boss, the ambassador, theyll definitely keep you at arms length.”

He said, in Chinese, Youre right.  When I was working at the British Embassy in the 60s, during the Cultural Revolution, I used to sneak out at night to read the 大字报 dà zì bào / big character posters.  我跟中国人的关系就是他们打我 My relationship with the Chinese people is them beating me up!

R.I.P., 苹果院.  Your sense of humour will bring much laughter to the community up there.  Lucky them!  (For his sense of humour, see blog entry Im the imperialist.)

*大字报 dà zì bào / big character posters were a form of political writing, hand-written on paper in large characters (hence 大字) and posted up on some wall in a public place for everyone to go and read.  Appleyard was beaten up because the Chinese didnt like a Westerner reading their (usually critical) comments about their own system and ways of doing things.

*苹果院 píngguǒyuàn / “apple yard”: my code name for him when he said his ambassadorship had not been confirmed, so I was to keep it quiet (see blog entry A Chinese teachers status).  



(China, 1960s; London, 1993–94, 2020)

Thursday 23 July 2020

Dog with no common sense (France)



I arrived one summer at the French farm to find a new canine addition to the house. 

The dogs and cats on the farm were banned from the house.  Jeanette would loudly shoo them out if she caught them, waving her arms wildly about and stamping her feet.  She’s a kind soul, so I think she does it more to get a laugh out of seeing the frantic scrabbling about of claws on the floor tiles.

This new dog was not only indoors, but actually sleeping on the living room floor, lying horizontally right in the middle of the path from the front door of the living room to the kitchen, so that one had to walk around it, or step over it, as it simply refused to budge.  That is, if one didn't trip over one of its outstretched legs or something and land right on top of it.

What a strange spot to choose to be in a horizontal position: more effort involved in trying to get out of the way as it would have to get up fully — that is, if it was trying to get out of the way, which this dog obviously wasn’t bothered about.  That was in the afternoon.  

I mentioned this to Serge and Jeanette, and was told that the dog’s owner brought it to the farm for them to look after as it had a leg injury.  No wonder it got a leg injury, I thought, with such positioning sense.

The following morning, I found it at 8am when I went to the loo at the back of the house, this time sleeping slap bang in the doorway between the kitchen and that part of the house.  This was even more stupid, as there was no room around it, and whoever going to the loo in the middle of the night could very well walk straight into it.  I had to step carefully over it as, once again, it simply ignored me and stayed put.

A bit later, on my way back from brushing my teeth in the bathroom (opposite the loo), I saw that the dog had now edged up to the 3ft-high plastic, upright bread bin sitting beside the doorway, with its head leaning against the side of the bread bin, eyes shut.  

The bread bin is really a tall and narrow laundry basket, made of plastic with big holes, converted into a bread bin because it is the right height for French baguettes and its holes provide the ventilation for them.  

I thought it was unhygienic that its head should be less than even half a centimetre (the thickness of the plastic) away from the baguettes on the other side of the holey plastic, so I moved the bin away.  The dog’s head remained at that leaning angle for some 30 seconds before it lowered it to the floor in slow motion.  It was like I was standing in frozen time.  Another strange dog.

(France, 2011)

If not spooky, then what? (London)


One of the trees in our back garden keeled over in the high winds about a month ago.

I decide to saw up the tree for the exercise, and also to save some of our kitty money for bigger things I can’t do (repairing the roof, getting a new fence put in).

Found an ex-student to take the sawn-up sections as she has a wood-burning stove.  After a few shopping trolley loads, her partner Andrew said they’re running out of storage space.  And it’s still a few more months to winter.  

Asked him if he could find anyone to take the rest, as otherwise they’d get chipped, which would be a shame: for people with stoves to go and buy the wood, and my wood just getting chipped up.  I know, I know, they’d get used in flower beds and all that, but still, why not burn them for the heat and save some money?  We'd need to pay for people to take them away, and for the chipping service, anyway, as the council will only take small garden waste (leaves and twigs), not tree trunks.

Andrew came back and said he’d found a taker.  Surname of Wood!

In the meantime, I’d approached ex-neighbours who’d moved out to a houseboat.  Yes, they do have a wood-burning stove, and would be happy to take the wood.  They’re moored in Kingston-on-Thames at the moment, so I looked up the map to see how to get from Kingston train station to their boat.  Turn right, out of the station:  Wood Street!

Went yesterday.  Walked to the river, couldn’t find their boat, so sat down to text them.  Looked up and saw that I was sitting right opposite Woody’s Bar & Kitchen.

How spooky is that!?!?

(London, 2020)

Friday 17 July 2020

Circumstantial evidence (London)

I was working on The Heart of The Dragon, a 12-part documentary series on China to start being aired in January 1984 on the then-nascent Channel 4.  (We were meant to be one of the series of three:  The Arabs, The Chinese, The Russians.  Then, a few months into our 2-year project, we discovered a Canadian team had finished their 6-part series called The Chinese, so we had to change our name.)

Towards the end, we called in a Picture Researcher, Douglas Tunstall, whod been a Canadian Film Board director / producer, to work on the coffee table book to go with the series. 

He was based in Malaga at the time, so after The Heart of The Dragon, Id only see him when he came to spend winter in London (and summer in N.America).  Wed go for lunch and talk films.  

One day, we were in a Japanese restaurant right by Great Portland Street Tube  not a particularly busy part of London, therefore deserted at lunch time, with only one other table occupied (3 people).  Douglas was sitting with his back to those people, who were on the other side of the restaurant.  We were catching up on what films wed seen recently, and up came the Japanese film: Ai no korīda愛のコリーダCorrida of Love (1976, English title: In the Realm of the Senses, by Ōshima Nagisa 大島渚).  

Now, the visual background: Douglas was 30(?) years older.  He used to wear a mac (the flasher image comes to mind here).  And he had a loud voice.

He said, Oh!  I cant s-t-a-n-d that film!  Sexual intercourse!  Sexual intercourse!  Sexual intercourse!  The people at the other table turned round, and what they saw was:  a white man, wearing a mac, 30(?) years older than the young(ish) Oriental woman he was with.  What kind of image do you think that conjured up!?  Luckily, it was London, not the East (like Taiwan).  It was so funny.

The funniest bit is: Douglas was gay, and had been with his partner Dallas since 1950, even before I was born.

(London, mid-1980s)

Rebellious to the core: 2 (London)

I set homework for Geneviève: five sentences for practising the how? Verb structure, with the how? Verb format given at the beginning of the exercise.  

She does her own word order all the same, ignoring the format given by the teacher/setter.  

Rebellious to the core indeed.

(London, 2020)

Thursday 9 July 2020

The driving instructor (Singapore)


The three of us younger children started to notice that a regular visitor would turn up in the afternoon at our house.  He and our mother would sit in the living room, chatting and laughing.  Our mother laughing!!??  We became suspicious of this man.

His name, it turned out, was Eric.  We disliked him even more for that. 

During my childhood days, Chinese people with self-given Western names were often treated with suspicion, if not contempt.  It’s a betrayal of their Chinese roots, especially if they didn’t even speak English, so couldn’t even lay claim to being “Westernised”.  (The Malays and Indians didn’t seem to be so treacherous to their roots.)  It’s different if it’s a Christian name, because that’s for religious reasons.

What’s more, this man who called himself Eric and made our mother laugh a lot had curly hair!  (See blog Chinese men with curly hair.)  That was it: final nail in his coffin.

The three of us (aged around 11 [me], 12 [my 3rd sister] and 14 [my brother] — the terrible tweenagers!) hung around the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, glowering at this objectionable man who was entertaining our mother.  This cramped his style so much that she sent us away to get a cup of coffee for him.

In the kitchen, we decided to doctor the coffee.  Yes, we did the restaurant kitchen staff trick for difficult customers: we spat into the coffee, each one in turn, then stirred it in properly.

For good measure, we threw in a bonus touch.

In traditional Chinese thinking, the groin is yīn (of yīn and yáng ), being the nether regions.  People hang their wet laundry on bamboo poles to dry.  The poles would go up onto overhead racks:  in the garden, out of the windows in a block of flats, beneath the ceiling of the ground-floor verandah in a terraced house.  As children, we were specifically instructed not to walk under them, because the laundry would include underwear — therefore the same as the actual nether regions themselves for the yīn qì (negative vital energy), so our growth would be stunted.  (It doesn’t make any difference that the underwear has been washed.)

Similarly, if young children were playing on the ground, some (usually male) older teenagers or young adults would often playfully walk over them, straddling their heads.  They’d get told off for doing this, as passing their nether regions over a child’s head would harm the child’s development.

We even have a term for it in my dialect (潮州 / Teochew, or Cháozhōu in Mandarin): yum hee.  Don’t know the Chinese characters for the term; we just picked it up as children.

Although Eric was a grown man, we decided to try this trick all the same on his coffee.  Anything to stunt his growing interest in our mother.  We put the cup of coffee on the floor, then each one, in turn, shuffled over the cup of coffee, legs apart to let it have the full blast of our nether regions and the negative yīn energy emanating from there.  Three doses of yīn qì.  No less.

For some reason, Eric never came back again…. 

(Singapore, 1960s)