Blog: Hi Ho, Hi Ho.

That’s it in the middle. My office is ¾ of the way up the leg on the right..

Five weeks after arriving in Beijing, I was finally allowed swipe my pass, push through the turnstiles, wave at the snappily-dressed gentleman from the PAP (the People’s Armed Police) standing sentry in his glass box, put my bag through the scanner, swipe my pass again and enter the hallowed halls of the hollowed out trapezoid that is the CCTV Building on busy Guanghua Road.

It took me that long because my two weeks in quarantine had been followed by another two weeks working from the hotel and then home, and then an extra week of working from home, before the station’s management deemed me sufficiently safe to be allowed to meet my colleagues.

There were three of us being inducted that day, Hanali from New Zealand who was joining the HR department and Brian, from the US, who was going to be working on Breaking News. As I later discovered, our arrival was hotly anticipated. 

“Oh, you’re that guy who’s come to join Dialogue, right? We’ve been wondering if you’d get here before they closed the borders. How’re you enjoying Beijing? ” one of the other writers on my floor asked me later that day. “Lucky you arrived in time. We were sure you’d be stuck outside.”

I’ll admit, that prospect had crossed my mind, as well, which is why with a sense of determination that I think may have struck the HR department as slightly worrying, I had blithely brushed off the warnings about closures, and masks and restrictions, and maintained all the way through the long, and often delayed lead up to finally arriving that yes, I still wanted to come to Beijing, yes, I knew about the virus, and no, it didn’t matter, so would you kindly get me there as soon as possible?

Certainly, that determination had struck some of my friends as peculiar. At the time, the pandemic hadn’t quite become the all-encompassing worry into which it has since evolved, but as I watched it creep closer and closer to England, my overriding fear was that either China, or the UK would shut their borders and then, well, then I’d be well and truly stuck.

But my determination paid off, and so instead of languishing in a grey bedroom in north-eastern England wondering what the hell I was going to do next and how I was going to make a living, here I was striding down the halls of Rem Koolhaas’ Esheresque contribution to the central Beijing skyline, rubber soles noisy on the polished marble floors, on my way towards my first paycheque in years, new job, new apartment and new life in hand. I was so relieved to be in Beijing, that from the moment I arrived, I’d found myself struggling not to give in to the giddy desire to burst into song, and as I squeaked through the vaulting atrium, towards the lifts that morning, the twin leaning towers of my new office building rising high above my head, I pictured myself tap dancing across the floor, like some latter-day Fred Astaire.

The rest of the morning was taken up with new job things, filling out forms, adding funds to our e-passes for use in the café or one of the eight restaurants, and touring the building, which also houses a supermarket, a doctor, a gym, two banks and a barber (all still shut as a result of outbreak regulations).

Rem’s Rocking Interior: I don’t care for Koolhaas normally, but this building is a beauty.

After lunch, it was finally time to meet the teams, though as I discovered, few of my colleagues were in the office, in part because most were working from home, but also because with the Covid-19 changes, few were coming into the office until shortly before the live evening broadcasts of the shows.

Over the next few days, I got to meet more of them, though I still haven’t met everyone, and discovered that I would be splitting my time between two current affairs talkshows, Dialogue and The Point, editing scripts, coming up with questions and taking part in episode meetings via WeChat, as face-to-face meetings were not (and are still not) taking place. They are young and dynamic, most in their mid-20s to mid-30s, though the hosts are older. One of them, Liu Xin, who is the host of The Point, is also something of a national icon, catapulted to fame after a live debate on the US-China trade war with an American anchor, Trish Regan of the execrable Fox Business TV network, last year. They also work extremely hard, so hard that I wonder what kind of work/life balance China adheres to, if at all . Messages come in around the clock, and almost every day, though thankfully, only a few require me to reply.

Work arrives in batches, sometimes in a flood, but more often than not in a steady drip through the day. Some shows are pre-recorded, others are live and when they are live, I am also required to go into the office in the evenings, to sit in on the broadcast and determine what subtitles are used during the show, and in the case of The Point, to also prepare a few Tweets and a teaser for use on Chinese social media network, Weibo. As The Point doesn’t air until 9:30, this can mean that I’m in the office until 10:30 or even 11pm, if there is disagreement over which Tweets are most appropriate, but normally that isn’t the case. As Dialogue is broadcast 6 days a week, I am also required to work some weekends, though time off is then given during the week.

For the most part, though, I continue to work from home, so in some ways, life is much the same as it was when I was freelancing. Whether this will change in the coming weeks, especially as office life returns to normalcy as is believed will happen after the upcoming annual meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, which is apparently going to officially announce the end of the majority of restrictions still in place, remains to be seen. If I do end up spending much more time in the office, at least once all the facilities open, there will be plenty to keep me occupied in the quiet moments between bursts of work and I have already made the lovely 38th Floor café a regular haunt, mostly for the panoramic vies it affords over the city.

In all, the transition has been smooth, both in terms of work and life. Work is both enjoyable and interesting. Occasionally, the constant ping of messages is enormously distracting, especially when I am trying to write, but as instantaneous communication also enables my out-of-office workstyle - and once I have an iPad with a cellular connection, to working outside home, too - it seems a reasonable price to pay. Beyond that, my new home Beijing is a remarkably easy city to live in, especially now that translation apps abound, but then after 20 years in the world’s least predictable, immensely frustrating but most utterly lovely country, anywhere else (with the possible exception of an actual warzone) was bound to be easy. And for giving me that advantage, I will thank Lebanon for the rest of my life.

Blog: A Cool, Refreshing Glass of Fetal Treasure.

All things considered, quarantine is going pretty well.

Now in my 7th day (or 6th, if Monday, the day I arrived is not counted), I haven’t felt the walls closing in, or the desire to squeeze through the window to freedom. Mostly, that’s because doing so would be followed by a four storey drop, and also because the window is on a horizontal hinge, and so doesn’t even open up far enough for Michael Jackson to dangle Blanket (shortly after renamed Prince Michael Jackson II and now Bigi), successfully. 

I find I have plenty to do. I have to report my temperature to reception and the office twice a day, at 9am and 4pm. I order my meals through the restaurant associated with the hotel, and they are deposited on a chair outside my door. Then, between online Chinese lessons, browsing the Internet (welcome back, Reddit), reading (thank God I swallowed my misgivings (and my scruples) and bought a Kindle), and a bit of yoga, the days have flown by. It also helps that on Friday, I started working, with my first job writing a summary of the online forum on Covid-19 CGTN hosted on Friday night.

Outside, the weather has been consistently beautiful, bright blue skies and crisp air, and while that has led to occasional pangs, especially after watching a BBC clip about life slowly getting back to normal elsewhere in Beijing, it’s definitely better than grey and rainy. As much as lovelovelove a blustery day, I’m not sure it would improve the view from my window, which is industrial, but perhaps not chic.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Quarantined Mind. Or, Look At That Beautiful Beijing Blue!

So I’ve managed to stay chipper. A colleague downstairs hasn’t fared as well. A smoker, he lost his lighter on the plane and today, he confessed that he had tried to make a ‘prison lighter’ using a battery and a piece of metal (I didn’t asked how he learned about that. Or where.) and was even trying to refract sunlight through a water bottle.

But I’m obnoxiously fine. Not even Damien, aka The Demon Child, and his shrieking mother in Room 436 across the hall, who punctuate the day with regular bouts of crying and shouting, or the occasional odour of cigarette smoke wafting through the vent in the bathroom, have managed to dampen my spirits. While this level of neighbourly noise would normally make my blood boil - yes, The Greens Dubai, I’m looking at you - I am currently in a sufficiently Zen place to empathise, and also to appreciate that being locked in a room for 14 days alone is infinitely preferable to being locked in a room for 14 days with someone else. Particularly when that someone else is too young to understand why he can’t go outside. Rosemary, you have my sympathies.

The interwebs also keep one in ‘contact’. The wonders of Skype, and a card linked to a bank account outside Lebanon, thus freely giving me access to all online services (Beirut, I still love you), mean that I’ve been able to keep in touch with my Dad more easily, which is good, as he’s currently back in hospital again. My future colleagues at CGTN – I say future, because we’ve not yet met IRL – are solicitous and regularly ask me if everything is going well. The food is delicious (hello, Scrambled Eggs with Fungus) and although the Internet slows to a crawl at time (it’s the hotel, not China), I haven’t had too many problems using a VPN. This is helpful as a number of the sites I’m visit to catch up with friends – FB, Google, Gmail, Whatsapp, Instagram – are currently blocked. Though I miss Google and Whatsapp (well, when I’m not VPNing), when it comes to FB and Instagram, inaccessibility might be a good thing.

The app everyone uses here is WeChat. It seems to combine aspects of all the above, and more. I’ve not yet fully explored its possibilities, but it combines instant messaging with news and articles and you can post photos and stories. It also functions as a payment platform, so you can order food, pay bills, rent, buy sofas, you know, useful things like that, and includes a nifty translation subroutine, so you can easily translate messages sent to you in Mandarin.

I also use Google Translate, mostly for the camera function, which WeChat does not seem to have yet. I downloaded the Mandarin file before I left, so it works offline and for the most part, it functions perfectly, though I’ve noticed that when it comes to translations through the camera, it is less reliable, especially when it comes to names and places. The Chinese characters on my bottled water, for example, which is labelled C’estbon (one word, no spaces) in English, translate through the camera function as ‘Fetal Treasure’ on Google. Hence today’s title.

Aimed at the menu I order my lunches and dinners from, it produces the kind of clangers you used to see on websites devoted to mocking translations around the world. While that mockery was mostly devoted to translations into English - you know in that irritating Anglo ‘foreigners, eyeroll’ kind of way - cultural crossed-wires cut both ways. I still remember VWs embarrassing climb-down after they released the Nova in Latin America, and had to be told that this probably wasn’t the best name for a car.

Think about it.

So, Chinese produces even greater opportunity for such mix-ups, as most characters have multiple and sometimes multiple, multiple meanings. This means each can be read (and sometimes also pronounced) in a number of different ways, which must make it a lot of fun to play on words, here. Specific meaning is determined by context. And Google Translate, running on an algorithm, isn’t quite there when it comes to context. Thus, it can’t work out that ‘Wooden Erythers’ are unlikely to feature on a restaurant menu and nor would Dried Partial Beans, Sriffy the Potato, Sack Sauce (I suspect that one’s just missing an ‘of’), Tools Stew, or Fragrance with Fish, though admittedly, that does sound delightful.

Of course (he says, with no trace of hyperbole), I should soon be able to read those menus for myself, for you see, my dear 朋友, I plan to become as fluent as possible, in the shortest time possible. And yes, you may remind me of that promise in a year’s time. By which time I hope to be able to blithely reply 但是我当然会说普通话 !  农民, 你不能吗 ？