F2F Class Notes 26th April (Celeste) [R]
Reading
‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain
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Still, in my naive mind, I was convinced I would find an artistic movement to be part of, something like the Beat generation or the Dadaists of the old Europe. But all I encountered were angry teenagers who screamed at me as they passed on their stolen bikes and grabbed my bag – they were the most frightening group I had ever met in my life. Before I came to England, I thought all British teenagers attended elite boarding schools such as Eton, spoke posh and wore perfect black suits. It was a stupid assumption, no doubt. But all I had to go on were the English period dramas that showed rich people in plush mansions, as if that was how everyone lived in England.
In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: “So is this what the rich west is really like?” If that was the case, I wanted to cry. Cry for my own stupid illusions. What an idiot I was. Now I realised there had been some truth to my own country’s communist education: the west was not milk and honey.
After the hostel in Marylebone, I had to move to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, 20 miles from London. There were only two big buildings in the town: a supermarket called Tesco and the National Film and Television School, where I was to spend a year studying documentary film directing.
I felt like a complete alien in Beaconsfield. I was told that this was the richest village in all of Britain. For a Chinese person, “village” is synonymous with peasants, rice paddies and buffalos. Here, every home was surrounded by trimmed rose bushes – yellow roses in the front garden, red in the back. And everyone seemed to own a pair of cars, parked alongside their house. It was not quite The Forsyte Saga, but almost. If you walked out of the village, there were neither rice fields nor farmland to be seen. Instead, a car factory lay on the outskirts, alongside warehouses with trucks delivering goods to Waitrose or Sainsbury’s.
Most students commuted from London, so I was a rarity in Beaconsfield. And on the weekends, when I went out looking for company, I found the village absolutely dead. The only place with an open door was a brightly lit pub called the Old Swan, where I used to spend my afternoons. I liked English pubs because they had a particular smell that reminded me of my mother’s silk factory in Wenling, with its heavy scent of steam, stale air, human sweat and scorched protein.
Vocabulary
plush / posh / fancy / elite / luxurious / rich
outskirts n. – the outlying district or region, as of a city, metropolitan area, or the like
commute/s n. – daily or routine transportation usually from work to home and back
eg. Celeste’s commute is a 15 minute walk.
commute / commuting / commuted / will commute
eg. Most people in Shanghai commute by metro to work.
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