Cup of Tea and a Bex

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Bye Bye Beijing

by //

My Chinese Teapot

Before we moved to Beijing we spent quite a few months trying to learn Mandarin.

I did Saturday classes and Alex found a podcast which he would listen to with his headphones on, randomly saying Mandarin phrases, with exaggerated tones. Bless him.

He was particularly pleased with all the greetings he mastered. Nihao which is, of course, hello. Zaoshang hao for good morning, Wanshang hao for goodnight and Ziajian for goodbye.

He practised quite a bit and once we got to China he was all geared up to try them out. It didn’t take Alex’s colleagues long to take him to one side and let him in on a little secret.

“We say bye bye”, they told him. After all those hours of practice. Just say bye.
But that was China.

You had to chuck out your expectations and your plans and just go with the flow. And that was especially the case with the air.

Is the air bad?

Many days the air in Beijing was ‘can’t see out the window because the sky is full of fog’ bad.

On those days you could see the smog in the halls of our apartment building and feel it in the back of your throat. I didn’t go outside, but the rest of the city did.

Not every day was that bad. Some days the wind swept through and the city was revealed. The buildings sparkled in the sun and you could see the ring of mountains surrounding the city.
But most of the time there was just a constant haze in the air.
We got used to checking our air quality apps on our phones. We’d often play air pollution bingo in the morning before we opened the curtains. What number was it going to be today? 50 was amazing, 180 was about average and 300 was go back to bed, try not to breathe.
I learnt lots of phrases about the weather in my Chinese lessons but the one I used most often while attempting to chit chat with taxi drivers was ‘congqi bu hao’ – bad air.
Along came baby
The air was a source of annoyance more than anything for the first few months, then I fell pregnant with Teddy and everything changed. I could handle breathing the yuck, but the anxiety about its effects on the babe was unbearable for a chronic worrier like myself.
We got more masks, more air purifiers and we even had a company come in to check the air quality in the apartment. I know.
Our escape
Alex and Teddy

Teddy arrived in May last year and we found new parenthood tough, especially as we could rarely go outside.

I remember walking Teddy in his pram around the complex in the pouring rain one afternoon because it had been the first opportunity to go outside in days. We got soaked but at least we made it outside.

So it was I left Alex working in Beijing and took my 11-week-old bundle on what was meant to be a short holiday to see my family in the English countryside.

We left Beijing on August 3 2013. And we didn’t go back.

A combination of the bad air, the approaching Beijing winter, Alex’s hectic travel and work schedule meant we kept extending our trip.

Christmas came and went and we were still living with my parents in the UK.

It was such a strange time and we missed Alex terribly. But he visited when he could and he knew I had my family’s support and could finally stop worrying about the air.
Return to Oz
Australian native flowers

In February this year (2014), Alex was relocated back to Australia with his job and we all moved back to our house in Sydney. We’ve been back in Australia for a good seven months but I only deleted my Beijing air quality app a few weeks ago. It was a great feeling.

Beijing seems like a dream now. I’m sorry I skipped out of our Chinese adventure early and I’m sorry I didn’t say a proper goodbye to our friends there. But I don’t regret taking Ted away from the smog. The air is wonderful. And I’ll never take it for granted again.

Image Credit: Pink Cloud Portraits for the gorgeous newborn and maternity pictures. 

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Comments

  1. I love your story about Beijing, becoming a parent and how it changed the whole perspective on living there. I grew up in Japan and now live in America myself, so I enjoyed learning your experience as an expat 🙂 Teddy is absolutely adorable and your photos are gorgeous! xx

    • Thank you so much Yuko! I still find it strange to write something quite personal and hit publish! Until I wrote this though it was hard to move on with writing for the blog! I feel I have explained myself now!
      I feel very lucky to have lived in China. Hope I can share a few more stories about it here x

  2. Gosh, living in the UK, we don’t really understand how bad the issue of air quality is in places like Beijing. This really opened my eyes.

    I hope you’re managing to have the occasional lie down and a cup of tea lovely Bex x

    • Oh thank you, Georgje!
      It is very easy to take fresh air for granted when you’ve always had it. It’s hard to imagine how much it can affect your day- to -day life, and your mood, when the air is always hazy!
      I hope to go back to Beijing one day and show Ted where he was born and where we lived. But for now I’ll enjoy my tea in the fresh Aussie air xxx