If there is one problem with my family's idyllic life on this picturesque Chinese mountain, it is a typical one for parents: finding a good school for the children.
After much agonising we chose the Moganshan Foreign Language School, in our nearest town, Wukang, 40 minutes' drive away. Its abbreviated Chinese name translates as "Mofor." Isabel, our eldest at six, is now in her second month there. In her first week I discovered that the "foreign language" moniker is a gimmick to attract upwardly mobile townsfolk. None of the teachers seems capable of conversing in any foreign language.
We hope the school will prepare Isabel and then her brother, Tristan, who is two years younger, for the next stage of their education, which I dread. If we are still on the mountain—which I hope we are—then the children will have to board.
But I've been surprised by the pressure we have already come under to let Isabel board at Mofor. The headmaster told us that 90 per cent of the children do so, on a weekly basis, and they are all much more local than we are. Some even have homes in the next street.
This surprised me because I thought the family was the strongest unit in Chinese society. Yet most children are passed on to grandparents from the day they are weaned and then sent to boarding school, not to mention summer schools (as I did in last month's column). For all the talk of spoilt "little emperors" in one-child families, it seems that most Chinese parents can't wait to offload their kids.
Luxyurie branding
Mofor is hidden among urban villa housing, tucked behind a new, vast and as yet empty apartment block complex on the edge of town. Some of the villas are shared by noisy relatives, with mopeds parked in airy hallways. Some have a single car out front and the doors are shut. There are few shops except for a couple of noodle joints with wooden benches.
Every weekday morning and afternoon, I drive down the grand avenue outside the grand apartment complex before turning into the less grand back streets. Along the front of the complex sits a row of retail outlets. They are empty, their windows slapped with white plastic, but the brand names of the imaginary tenants—subtly mispelt to avoid trademark infringement lawsuits—are on proud display: Freed Perry, Gerogio Armooni, and several variations of Starbeucks. My personal favourite is Roley Roycie, which reminds me of Thomas the Tank Engine. And I wonder, as one does so often in China: why? What is the point of this?
If even the teachers at the foreign language school can't read the signs, who else in the warren of villas and among the future apartment dwellers is going to understand, let alone have heard of the brands? The developer may as well have run the alphabet along the front of the shops. But I suspect that it doesn't matter what the words say, so long as they are western. I find this a sad reflection—like the year-round "samtsirhC yppaH" strung across the wall of one of the noodle joints—on the shallowness of the Chinese consumer.
How to pick up married women
Now that I go to Wukang regularly, I drop into its market regularly too. That's the "wet" market: the shambolic football pitch of concrete stalls under a leaking roof. Early in the morning it positively pumps with life, like the hearts of the bisected fish in the really wet bit.
One day recently, as I was leaving through the exit tunnel, a woman looked up and called to me, "Hey, Mark."
The woman was middle-aged, attractive and wearing expensive clothes. She was sitting on a stool beside a cauldron of tea-boiled eggs, chatting to the stallholder. I had never met her, but since the recent splurge of publicity about the
coffee shop and my dog Charlie—as described in last month's column—everyone seems to know my name.
"Are you going home?" she asked.
"Yes," I replied.
"Can you give me a lift to Yucun?"
Yucun is the village at the foot of the mountain. The local women who work as tourist guides are used to treating our car as a bus up the mountain. So it would have been churlish to refuse.
I forced a passage out of the car park, through the scrum of electric three-wheelers making deliveries to local restaurants, and we drove into the countryside, along a road lined by sycamores with white painted trunks.
"I'm confused," she said. I kept my eyes on the road. "I'm in a terrible way. Haven't been home for weeks. No idea what my husband's going to say. I'm thinking about going back to my home town." She sighed. "It's just too terrible."
I jumped to the obvious conclusion. It is common for Chinese husbands to keep mistresses, openly. I assumed this lady had had an argument, which had possibly turned violent, and left her husband. I started saying something designed to comfort a stranger in such a situation.
She laughed. "It's not my husband, it's my boyfriend! He ditched me. And I can't decide whether to try and patch things up with him, or go back to my old one, but he was too young, barely out of his teens. What do you think?"
"Are we there yet?" I stuttered.
