Many small windows together give the best view

As it goes, I started off writing posts about my colleagues, as they have been the most intimate relations I have with anyone in Shanghai and my best windows to China. First there was Demi, and then Sophie and Peipei and more recently I wrote about my experiences with  Leona on our Philippines trip and a paragraph on Future. I always intended to write about each and everyone at the office, but then the team expanded so fast, and relations deepened and widened so quickly that I got lost and paused.

Little windows onto people's lives
Having read a lot on Chinese culture, I 'know' many things that are happening here. But as we worked, had lunch, traveled and drank together, sharing the little things of life that you never tell anyone but your colleagues, I continued to be surprised, and shocked as these stories got a face, and societal problems turned out to be my friends' personal problems.

A few of the sentences that rang in my ears long after they were spoken:

• The incredible influence that parents have on their (one) child's choices in life: "My mother won't let me have a baby this year, because it is the year of the wooden sheep, and the baby will feel cold and hungry all its life." 
• The long distance relations that many people have "I only see my husband once every two months / once every two weeks etc he is very busy and I live with his mum, who is old and sick"
• The complex relationship between women and their in laws who usually come to live with them after childbirth "My husband and I want to let our baby cry until she falls asleep, but my in laws come into our bedroom and take her away from me when she cries" 
• The enormous pressure from society on girls to marry early "After coming home for Chinese New Year, I had to explain 1000 times why I am not married" "After 30 they say my life will be over if I am not married" 
• Wondering what my assistant was chatting about with her boyfriend from morning til night:  hundreds of Hello Kitty emoticons back and forth, shaping a story in a language that I am too old to understand. 
• Materialism is everywhere, and in short the 'new religion' "My husband and I are always talking throughout the day (on wechat) usually about what we will buy, or what we have bought." 

It's not all clichés

But at the same time, just working for an NGO means going against mainstream thought about what is deemed important in life: money, a stable job, buying a house, buying an expensive handbag, an expensive car, an expensive holiday, etc. So where in general many people have a hard time trusting each other, because that other person might have bad intentions with our money, or break a deal that we are about to sign, we as a team were pretty harmonious and open, maybe because we had nothing to loose, and had already stepped off the societal ladder to fame and wealth. This openness has been one of the biggest sources for gratitude for me. 

The biggest window of all

That being said, my next post will be about my now former director, Alan, who was much more than a window to China because he was among the few who actually provided subtitles to my experiences. A bit of an intelligentsia, he told me the things (sometimes in a whisper) that are beneath the surface, culture, history, religion, rebellion, and that put together gave me many new perspectives while looking at Shanghai and I got to see old things with new eyes.