China on my mind

Beijing was the only place I ever visited in China between the mid 1980s and 1998. I never got to like the city any better even as I watched her remake herself from a grim grey bureaucratic nanny to a grabby greedy garish capitalist whore.

When we went to Xi'an in February this year, it was a full 10 years since I was last in the country. We did not expect much. If we had a decent level of comfort with accommodation, could get around by taxi without too much hassle, ate familiar food that was edible, end the day without spittle on our shoes, we would not complain.

Xi'an was so unexpectedly enjoyable. The people who smiled and went the extra mile when we needed help. The taxi driver who undercharged me because he did not have the exact change (I regret that I was too stunned to tell him to keep the change). The locals who were, well, just regular folks going about their own business.

If Beijing shut my heart and closed my mind, Xi'an awakened a sense of excited curiosity and optimism about the country and her people.

So in short time, we went to Chengdu. Where we continued to form favourable impresssions of a country coming into its own. Chengdu reminds me of Singapore in the 1970s, when the old stood side by side with the new, a transient period of co-existence before one fades to form yet another historic chapter so the other could forge ahead.

There is incongruency in this transitionary phase. I think of the trio of lady musicians on classical Chinese musical instruments (above picture) setting the mood at lunch time on a day in March in a restaurant in Chengdu. Everything felt so right. Unexpectedly, they struck up Auld Lang Syne.Why? WTF? I realised that this was the last song of the last set only when the stage lights dimmed and the musicians left the stage. So there was logic behind what first appeared to be illogical. I like that they tried to be international. I have lived through this stage in the transformation years of Singapore too.

And so I look forward to visiting China again. And again. While the charm of the old still exists to satisfy our sense of the grand and the gracious . While the pragmatic new accords us the comfort and convenience of modern day expectations.