i’m sorry to disappoint on the visuals here… had an appointment to interview James today, but turns out he didn’t want to be filmed after all, will consider it now that he’s met me, but don’t know if he will go for it in the end. please hope you can make do again with random thoughts in lieu of:

James answers the phone abruptly in Chinese: “谁给我打电话？” He says he’s an australian-chinese huaren, but his excellent mandarin, phone demeanor and not-very-australian sounding english accent make me a bit skeptical. but an interview is an interview, and he is the first one to respond to the ad i posted online, so we take our chances…

Upon meeting, however, he seems much warmer and more gentle, a middle aged man with glasses. of course, the first questions i ask him are about where he was born, how he considers himself a huaren (because he was born in China, Shanghai and Beijing parents). We had talked about this before, about whether or not we were considering immigrants as well as  the concreteness of birthplace, but speaking to James placed ‘huaren’ as a frame of mind more than anything else. He does not consider himself to be Chinese or Australian (where he lived for 30 years). He is a frequent traveler, his ex-wife is British and his son is mixed. James says he is homeless. His identity is just him.

Sarah is also with us, a friend of James (“Sorry, I mixed up my appointments…”). He introduces her as Australian-Chinese as well, but it turns out that she hasn’t left the country yet. She is in the process of applying for immigration to Australia. But she can identify with us in a certain sense; she is Inner Mongolian. Living in Beijing for some years, she will always be looked at by the locals as an outsider, and definitely not Han Chinese. But her hukou (residence permit) is now listed in Beijing municipality, so if she goes back to Inner Mongolia, they consider her a Beijinger.

The conversation gets interesting. Sarah asks me, “You, with American citizenship —- if China and the U.S. were to go to war, on whose side would you fight?” The question is blunt and bizarre to me; i fumble a bit. “I’d probably flee to europe.” She agrees, and perhaps it’s more a female response not to engage in war, though she is the one asking, and then smiles looking at James, “Ask him how he responded!” He starts shaking his head, and they get back into what seems like an on-going debate between them. He would fight for Australia. “You enjoy the food, the lifestyle, the freedom of the country to which you immigrate, but you keep talking about how China, the homeland, is better? Isn’t that kind of cheating the country you take from?” She says that China, and Chinese blood, your parents, are what brought you into the world; one cannot deny the very fact of one’s existence, so of course there is a love for China.

James is critical. He talks about racism in China, the impoliteness, the pollution —- all the most common points to be made looking from the West. Sarah says that people in the West have the education, the power, the support of a system to fight for what they want; in China one is helpless against the system. And here it comes again, I’ve heard it so many times: “在中国没办法的”. Sounds like James has heard it, too, because then he talks about how people in the West are educated and culturally ingrained with the sense to help themselves, to fight for their own quality of life, on a personal level but also on a social one. I think of the conversation with Milo a few weeks ago in Guangzhou: “Here, no one would bother or dare to speak up about the bad quality of the roads or broken street lamps, even if these are services that should be naturally provided by the city. Everyone knows this money is going into the pockets of politicians. No one feels they would be able to make a difference about the faults of the system.”

Of course, whether we are Western or Chinese or any other nationality, perhaps we cannot as individuals realistically make such a huge difference in a broader system or society. The difference is only, perhaps, one of a frame of mind. James says  that it is this difference that will make China unable to really change or move forward for another hundred years. Does this make him more Western than Chinese? I don’t know, and, really, it’s not so important. I’ve gotten into too many conversations here about how much someone is more Asian, or more Western, how this is Chineseness, and that is not. I’ve come to realise that these boxes have been weighing me down, closing me in, for a long time now. But acknowledging our barriers does not necessarily mean we are free of them. Especially in the case of identity, because i don’t think identity cannot be so luxuriously only our own self-conceptions. It may be easy for James to say, his identity is just him, and it does sound reassuring to hear. He is older than me, he still surfs, goes diving, can play five hours straight sets of tennis. People here will still look at him as a foreigner, and in Australia, probably the same. So where were we again?