Change of scenery brings friendly jibes, funny looks

Some of my Chinese friends laughed at me when they heard that I’d decided to swap Beijing, China’s bustling capital, for the smaller city of Kunshan, in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

“You’re really choosing to go from a first-tier place to a third-tier?” one friend asked after hearing the news, his face a picture of incredulousness. “That’s entirely opposite to what every Chinese wants to do.”

He was only half-joking, but he still managed to make me momentarily picture myself as a salmon furiously swimming upstream, with my friend on the riverbank shouting, “You’re going the wrong way!”

I’ve moved around a lot during my 20-year career in the media – seven cities on three continents, by my count – so I’m used to major change. Before the start of this year, I’d been settled in Beijing for a decade, the longest time I’d lived anywhere outside my hometown in the northeast of England. I had even begun to refer to the city as “my adopted hometown”.

But, as they say, familiarity can breed contempt, and 10 years had started to feel long enough. So when I spotted an opportunity to do something different in a new place, I went for it.

Almost two months after relocating, things are going well in my new job, but I’ve begun to realize some differences between living in Beijing and in a city that, although developing rapidly, is still short of what you might call a cosmopolis.

The main thing is getting reacquainted with le regard, or the gaze, a term used by philosophers and psychoanalysts to describe the act of seeing or the feeling of being seen. Specifically, I’m referring to the latter, a sensation I’ve not experienced on a daily basis in China for years.

In Beijing, which has a large and widespread population of foreign residents, the locals have largely accepted – or possibly grown indifferent to – waiguoren and their “strange” behaviors. Yet in Kunshan, despite having no small number of foreigners, including a diverse group of international students, I’ve found myself regularly under the scrutiny of curious onlookers, even when completing the most mundane tasks.

An elderly woman in the supermarket made a beeline to examine the contents of my cart the other day – shaving gel, muesli and two donuts, if you must know – while a man so fixated on my presence outside a large shopping mall almost walked into a glass door.

I’m never offended by curiosity, but whenever anyone stares at me, my first instincts are to 1) check my fly isn’t open, and 2) seek out the nearest reflective surface to make sure I don’t have something stuck to my face or in my hair. Ironically, such reactions usually only solicit further funny looks.

“Maybe it’s because you look handsome,” a friend back in Beijing said on WeChat when I mentioned to her my thoughts about the gaze. Hmm, I thought for a split-second, before she quickly followed up with an emoji that left no doubt as to her lack of sincerity.

So at least one thing doesn’t change: Wherever I live, my friends will always still be there to mock me.

Note: A version of this story appeared in China Daily on March 12.