New life new paperwork

Hi there from Guangzhou! It‘s been a few weeks, I was enjoying myself in Germany (though I’ve been there during the shitty weather period right between record-breaking heatwave number 1 and record-breaking heatwave number 2), and then struggling with bureaucratic errands and more generally starting a new life in a new place.

The Beijing office for foreigners really didn’t make it easy for me. After two nights with a combined amount of 7 hours sleep, I arrived in Beijing on a Friday morning with few things I could think of that I would want to do less than going queue for an appointment with a public servant. But well, that was the deal for enjoying myself a week in Manila and Singapore. And so I went after dumping my stuff at a friend’s place and having a quick shower.

I’m not a person that usually gets anxious or excited easily, but for this appointment I admit I was. The aftermath of a rejected application would be such an enormous pain in the ass that I didn’t dare to think of it. Matter of fact, there was little to worry about, my friend got the visa with exactly the same type of documentation I would provide, down to the wording in the contract and papers provided by the university and our employer. China might not be democratic, but it does have an efficient and rule-based bureaucracy.

Well so I thought. My application got rejected because the contract included a clause stating a (symbolic) income for me. This is technically illegal for foreign interns in China, however, firstly simply calling the income “remuneration” instead would apparently suffice to comply with the law, secondly, other people I know personally have had the same clause in their contracts and no problems getting their applications processed. Which, after some pondering, led me to the conclusion that either the party policy had changed unofficially (China is definitely assuming a harder line against foreigners recently) or that I was just unlucky, coming across the wrong civil servant. Either way, a second more forceful attempt might achieve a different result. When it comes to being forceful in Mandarin, few people could beat my friend XiǎoCàn (小灿 – little Volcano, and that nickname exists for a reason), so I was very glad when she agreed to go off work earlier to help me.

Same place – same counter – different person. XiǎoCàn didn’t even have to be assertive, just explaining the situation in fluent Mandarin and making a knowing appearance achieved the desired result. Now – two weeks later – I’m finally holding my passport with my new internship visa in my hands and can take the last bureaucratic hurdle to a perfectly legal existence as a foreigner in China – register with the local police.

Guangzhou's landmark - the 610 meter high,slender Canton Tower

Seen from Canton Tower, Tianhe District with Guangzhou's skyline

Finding a flat in Guangzhou was another challenge that took a toll on my nerves during the first week, not so much because I couldn’t find anything, but rather because of the restrictions on foreigners and the Chinese way of managing transactions. It involves making lots of promises about things one does actually not know so that a potential client won’t look further. On top of that, there were always hidden costs that would add up to a considerable amount of the original price and make cheap offers much less alluring. But the biggest problem was certainly that I am quite visibly not Chinese. I doubt that most landlords are really racist (well, at least to white people), but foreigners in China always come with increased attention from the authorities and who would want that when he might as well have a Chinese tenant and stay under the radar? I think it is for this reason that most of the landlords would not even consider me. Again, what helped me wasn’t luck or ingenuity but knowing someone. In this case Karin, my co-worker with extensive family ties in Guangdong. Our vocabulary is insufficient to describe all the people that are considered part of the family in China. With Mandarin however, all it takes to describe that someone is your mother’s younger sister’s husband is two syllables. Anyways, out of this big network, there was one auntie (this term is clearly simplifying her family ties to Karin) whose friend had a vacant apartment located right between Guangzhou’s two city centers Old town and New town in a modern condo building. The price was way below market rate and the flat spacious for one person even by German standards. It all sounded too good to be true, and at first it seemed like it was, because when I agreed to sign the contract, all of a sudden there were countless reasons for why it wouldn’t be possible on this day or that day. My landlord had to go see the doctor, she wasn’t sure where the documents (required for registration with the police) were, she didn’t have the time yet to send cleaners to the apartment… This is quite a common strategy in China to veil a different, bigger problem that one doesn’t want to admit. After 5 days or so, I had already given up on the flat mentally, Karin received a call telling us I could come there, take the keys, sign the contract and move in the next hour – that, too, is not uncommon in business in China. Things might appear to have come to a standstill, and then all of a sudden, within a few hours, the whole situation changes and you’ll probably never know the actual reason behind it. But I’m not complaining, I got the apartment now, got the registration (1 day passed since I wrote the first part of this text…) and will be free from bureaucratic hassle for the next few months.

Home for five months

And not all has been dire the last weeks. Matter of fact, it might’ve been the best time of the year so far. Most importantly of course because I was seeing my family and friends in Germany and could get a glimpse of the summer in Europe. The three weeks came as a welcome variation to and break from life in China. I was enjoying clean air, nature and free space, all of which are scarce here. And then there was Feel festival, maybe my personal highlight of the year. But this is a blog about China, not Germany, so let’s get back on track.

I'm really not a nature lover, but this was such a relief after Beijing

Feel festival...

On the way back to China - can you spot Tiergarten and Alexanderplatz?

After getting back to Beijing and eventually handing in my request for visa extension, I said goodbye to my remaining friends there one more time (it still wasn’t the last time being there though – I’ll have to go back end of October again to meet up with my co-scholars as well as the new class of scholars from the DAAD program), trying really hard not to fall asleep as we were wandering through Beijing’s Hutongs. The next day, I took a 22-hour sleeper train to Guangzhou, arriving there on a hot and humid Sunday morning. Actually every morning is hot and humid here, except when there are typhoons.

On the way to Guangzhou

For my internship, I spend most of the time in front of my notebook at a WeWork office with amazing view in Guangzhou’s old city center, writing blog-posts like this one, just more professionally, and getting into the CNC-milling business. Mechanical engineering is full of wonderful words I’ve never heard before and standards and norms for just about everything. No wonder Germans are so good at it. I will probably never be able to get excited about the precision with which a portal milling machine can mill even the largest metal sheets (to name an example), but I enjoy getting an insight into this most German of all industries.

View from my office

Working aside, after just a few weeks I obviously haven’t settled here yet. Though I like Guangzhou a lot more than Beijing as a city – it’s easier to get around, greener, air quality is generally better and you can easily get to other great places like Shenzhen and Hongkong – finding friends is tricky when you’re just working, not attending university classes. On the other hand, not taking Chinese classes with a bunch of other foreigners forces me to use a lot more Chinese in everyday interactions. Guangzhou is by no means as international as Shanghai or Beijing and the foreigners that live here are often not from Europe or the US but from Africa and the Middle East. Guangzhou has a recent history as a trading hub for Africans, primarily from Nigeria and Mali. However, the black community that supposedly consisted of more than 100 000 people just five years ago has been severely decimated by an increasingly harsh immigration policy. I wouldn’t say the official line was racist however, as a matter of fact a big share of the African population was living in China illegally or used tourist visas for purposes other than touristic ones. On top of that, no other group of foreigners in China is involved in drug-related offences as frequently as people from the Middle East and Africa. Given the extremely tough stance of all East-Asian countries on these kinds of offences, the big raids didn’t really come as a surprise.

Unrelated picture of Chinese using IKEA as their living room

Another things Guangzhou is famous for is food. A Chinese saying, slightly edited for translation goes like this:

“If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”

The cuisine is being famed for its huge amount of ingredients and minimalist approach to preparing meals, often just steaming the raw stuff and adding a bit of sauce. Call me a picky eater, but I don’t buy it. Do I really want to know how steamed turtle meat tastes? Braised Abalone? One thing you can’t deny is that the food here is very healthy though, as most ways of preparing ingredients consist of steaming, boiling etc., there’s usually no oil included. No wonder then that Hongkong and Macao, the richer but culturally similar cities adjoining Guangdong have some of the highest life expentancies in the world.