Young at Heart

China was not what I expected. I have experienced Asia before. I went to Singapore as a child. At the end of 1999 I spent a month trekking through Nepal. In 2004 I spent three weeks in Japan, travelling north from Tokyo. But China is different. Kunming is different, and I should have known.

Kunming, I knew, was a city of roughly 4 million people. Just like Sydney, I thought. It was closer to Ha Noi than Beijing. The weather was good. Kunming, the Spring City. There were sprawling, green, public gardens. It was more laid back than other Chinese cities.

None of this, admittedly limited, prior experience and knowledge prepared me for the sheer life of this place. The people. The cars. The streets. The markets. The bacterium.

Life spews out of the urban landscape. The roads flow like rivers. Cars, trucks, buses, electric bicycles, mobile food stalls, a woman on rollerskates. All are swept along in an orderless flood of mutual awareness of each other's presence. The streets are littered with temporary shops. Pineapples on sticks. Locksmith on wheels. Socks and underwear laid out on a blanket.

Amongst all this, and holding it all together, are the people. People are people, but one thing which has really struck me about China is the youthfulness of the mind here. How it almost prospers in a work environment which seems, relative to Australia, exceedingly harsh. Thus, the focus of this piece will be the apparent ability of many Chinese to stay forever young.

Young at heart begins with youth of years. Young children, three to ten years, are everywhere in China. They wander the streets seemingly unsupervised, often well after dark. They also man the street stalls. A 10 yr old boy asleep with his face in his hands, a pile of pineapple peels lying at his feet, a full days work still a few hours away.

On the second or third day of my arrival I witnessed a young boy, barely three years old, walk to a street kiosk with a plastic bag in one hand and bundle of small notes in the other. He bought some kind of packaged chip food, took the food in his bag and returned to his parents, who I just realised were waiting for him about 10 metres away. ‘Jeeeez’, I thought, ‘people grow up fast here’.

There is no day care for those who aren’t wealthy (practically everyone). So the children go to work with their parents. I walk through a fresh produce market on the way to school everyday. There are young children everywhere. I have seen them sweeping the floor at the front of their parents’ stalls with miniature brushes. It is not uncommon to see a ten-year-old child with a baby sibling straddled to their back. There is always at least one child hunched over a couple of stairs or a spare bit of space on a fruit and vegetables table, with a pen in hand and paper in front, studying away while the world goes past around them.

Yet amongst this hectic childhood lifestyle, youthful fun flourishes. It is not uncommon to see young children sitting round a table on the street, at 10pm on a weeknight, playing cards. I once witnessed two kids having the time of their life, holding onto the back of their father’s motorcycle as he revved it lightly, just enough so they thought they were actually stopping him from driving away. The kids use materials salvaged from unfinished apartment complex entrance gardens to make sand creatures and fight with wooden swords. I’ve been hit with a flying dishcloth when the primary target deftly jumped out of the way. Toddlers double up and ride careering into the backs of your leg on plastic cars, as you attempt to browse stalls at the second hand market. In short, play is well and truly alive, and allowed, in China.

Grown ups here maintain a delightfully surprising youthful fervour too. Maybe it is a sign that I myself am getting on. The ‘adults’ who surround me, my fellow students, my teachers, seem as unwilling to be fully and officially grown up as I do. Yet there is something particularly shameless about indulging the youthful mind here.

Maturity is not gauged on whether you are willing to play a game of musical chairs with a bunch of strangers at a university party where there’s no alcohol and no discernable In Crowd. It just fun, so you do it, and you bloody well enjoy it. I’m a little cautious to admit it, but the most fun I’ve had in a while was trying to sticky tape toilet paper and newspaper to the clothes of a girl, in a competition to see which group could create the most interesting outfit from materials provided in under five minutes.

Our teachers go out to lunch with us. The other day a teacher invited us all over for a tea ceremony. We sat and watched her wedding video. Two of our teachers came to a house warming party the other night. They stayed longer than many of the students. One got into the baijiu and started dancing with some of the Thai students; the other spent the whole night chatting with one of the UTS girls. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen in Australia, but the social barriers of age and status-implied maturity seem less restrictive to having a good time here.

There appears to be more time to observe fun as well. There is a little garden and paved area between the exit to my apartment building and the street. There are usually a few people tottering around, hanging up washing, shampooing their hair, taking out the garbage. There are also always a few little mutts running around, guard dogs no doubt, playing in the grass, barking at strangers, lying in the sun. Often, as I walk to and from school, there will be a few people just standing watching the dogs play, entertained by the simple enjoyment the animals are providing themselves.

Fascinatingly, it is the older members of the population who are often the most irrepressibly young at heart. Several weeks ago I went on a field trip with a Chinese girl from uni’s mother and aunties. There were five sisters in the girl’s mother’s family and they are all at the age where their own children are well and truly grown up. We arrived at a grassy lunch spot and before we even had time to get comfortable, several of the aunties were organising a playing field for a few group games.

We played a Chinese game which resembled the ‘tips’ you play in Australia as a primary school student, and a number of other simple, fun, team games. It was really enjoyable. When it was over, we all noted the irony that old Chinese ladies had reintroduced us to games we hadn’t played since childhood.

Old people get out of the house, sit on the street, and just watch life go by here. They do it in Sydney too, but it is usually a lone person that you see, struggling up to the shops, taking a break at a bus shelter, before returning to the couch and television. That’s if they’re lucky enough to not be in an old age home.

In Kunming, the elderly appear from everywhere (generally at around 10pm on a weekday I have noticed) and congregate. They leave the house for the sake of leaving the house. They go down to market and buy fruit and vegetables for the day, or they just sit and chat amongst friends. It is rare for me to not get at least one random smile from an elderly person as I walk home everyday. Granted, the elderly have a tendency to smile at you for no particular reason no matter what country you are in, but there’s more of it here!

To elucidate it bluntly, the general synchronised movement of old people here is so prolific that on the one day I have a 10am start, I have to forgo my walk through the market to avoid getting bogged down in a sea of wandering grandmas and grandpas.

I have spent a little time considering the possible reasons behind the apparent abundance of youth here. But nothing I can think of provides definitive explanation in any practical sense.

One theory is that youth is tied more physically to old age in China. Grandparents look after the children. Everywhere you look there is a old man or woman, face covered in wrinkles from decades of smiling, navigating slowly down the street with a plastic bag of groceries in one hand and walking cane in the other. A sleeping baby strapped to their back.

It is possible that this physical proximity to the young keeps the elderly in touch with the young mind. I have personally noticed the apparent need for old people to be in the vicinity of the very young at family Christmases. If there is a young mother present with her baby, she will often find it exceedingly difficult as the day goes by to pry her newborn baby from the arms of, say, a mother in law. Here the oldies get their youth fix all day long.

Returning to my earlier reference to China’s relatively harsh work environment, it is possible that adversity actually promotes fun, humour and stress release. History has shown that adversity can foster creativity, as with the black chain gangs in America and the development of blues music. Maybe the need to survive also keeps us young. People in Sydney are faced with the adversity of impending deadlines and relationship issues, and the less well off still struggle with day to day finance, but there’s almost too much time to get caught up in things that, in the big picture, don’t matter all that much.

Maybe the external context of my situation has warped my judgement. The positive ‘culture shock’ of landing in a totally foreign environment. In a couple of month I may find that the negative energy of pushy old ladies at bus stops and the thinly masked despair of young street beggars begins to override the youthfulness abundant in other aspects of society.

But right now, it is spring here in the city of eternal spring. As I sit at my computer by my bedroom window, it is half past five in the afternoon and I can hear children laughing and playing on the ground below. The sun is shining and rising above the dull, but now unobtrusively familiar, sound of far off horns and unseen machinery, is the sound of birds singing to each other. You would have to try pretty hard to be pessimistic in such an environment, don’t you think?