Archive for the ‘Life as a foreign reporter’ Category
Four weeks in Yunnan
Aboard a sleeper bus
I’ve been in the sunny south of China, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, for about four weeks now. I’ve enjoyed the blue skies and warm weather — in contrast to gray, polluted Beijing where it’s been an unusually cold November.
I’ve been staying with a friend who lives just outside of Kunming, the provincial capital, in a one-street town. She works for a non-profit called Teach For China, who send American and Chinese graduates to impoverished Chinese schools in Yunnan and Guangdong provinces.
My friend is from Texas and last week we celebrated an early Thanksgiving dinner in the scenic old town of Dali, alongside two dozen or so of her colleagues who had all converged on Dali, traveling from their variously remote schools.
Yunnan province is larger than Japan and Germany, with hilly terrain, so a group of us have been traveling on sleeper trains and sleeper buses. It’s been quite the adventure.
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Yunnan is home to the most ethnic minorities of any province in China. Let me list some of the names of these minorities: Derung, Nahki, Pumi, Hani, Tibetan, Va, Jinpo, Dai. Another of these, the Naxi, use the Dongba script, which is the only pictographic writing system in use in the world today, according to Wikipedia.
Traditionally, Yunnan has never really been considered a part of “core China”, which was centred around the Yellow river basin, and then, later, the Yangzi river basin. Not until the Mongol invasion of China did Yunnan come under direct administrative control of central government. It’s a diverse part of the country.
There’s a book I want to read called The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, by former China correspondent David Eimer (now Bangkok-based). Eimer spent months traveling the frontiers of China, from the frozen steppe of Manchuria in the north, to the dry Turkic far west, down to the jungly and drug lord-run far south. I’ve read several reviews of the book and there are quoted journalistically interesting passages.
I am hoping to spend time with some of China’s more remote peoples, when I get the chance.
November 4th — in Beijing
I’m homeless.
But it’s self imposed. I moved out of my apartment and I’m currently crashing at a friend’s place. I don’t have my own accommodation in Beijing anymore.
On Friday I will be flying to Yunnan, a province in southern China. It’s a beautiful and diverse part of the country. I’ll be staying with a friend and then we’ll travel around the province a little. I am looking forward to it. I’m a big nature lover and Yunnan has plenty of it. It’s something that Beijing, being a huge urban agglomeration, lacks.
October was a much quieter month than September. Here are a couple of pieces I wrote recently. One is about China abandoning its one-child policy after 35 years — big news. The other piece is about craft beer and coffee in Beijing. The latter piece was something I enjoyed writing. It took me a night and a day to put it together, and its more descriptive style brought to mind the older form of foreign correspondence, when those living in foreign lands sent home vignettes and descriptions as well as news; trying to capture the zeitgeist of exotic locations in which the writer lived but who readers back home could only imagine.
I hope that perhaps I can do more such writing. Although capturing the zeitgeist is harder than it may initially appear.
November and December will probably be downtime for me, which makes up for a mediocre and somewhat depressing summer, a summer where I traveled nowhere and did not do many summery things.
But I took the long view and the wintry downtime is something I feel I need. I will be flying back home in December for Christmas, staying with my family in England. I bought a single ticket. Will I be coming back to Beijing? It’s likely, but the question of when will hang around for a while I think.
Of all the jobs I’ve had…
Perhaps the nicest was the summer job I had picking apples. I was 19 at the time. The farm manager would pick us up in the morning in a tractor, and drop us off to where we’d be working that day, on a row of apple trees ripe for picking. We’d work until dusk, taking breaks whenever we wanted.
It was 2008. I’d returned from ten months teaching English in China and I was looking to earn some money, ready for another stint abroad. I’d start university the following year, where I’d read multimedia journalism.
We were paid 80 pence a box. We each had a black marker we used to initial every box we filled, leaving them out in a row for the farmhand to pick up later in his tractor. The boxes were not large, but the apples were not big either. The old ladies who owned the farm always gave us tips and covered our transportation costs; train fare in my case. But we did not make much.
Alongside me were a bunch of geezers who for whatever reason chose to work this late summer job. For lunch we’d eat our sandwiches and crisps and whatever else we’d packed. And of course we ate apples. Lots of apples. When it was time to take a break, I’d pick an apple from a tree, sit myself down, and eat an apple. Among our heads, there were apples ripening in the sun. We’d hear apples falling on the ground. Sometimes they’d fall on your head, and it hurt a little bit.
As the summer wore on, I’d have dreams of apples. They’d be yellow and red and warm. And I would dream the sound of apples falling to the ground, a sound I can hear still. A low thud, a compact thud, that often came one thud after the other, like a weighty round earth striking a far larger earth, and gravity would ring out the little’s earth slight hollowness.
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It was 2011, and I’d sit alone in my room in a house full of people. Six people and three floors. I was in my second year of university. I’d travel to London every week, spending two nights, attending a free journalism course where I’d hone my pitching skills. This was on top of my journalism degree. I did not work especially hard in my second year. Not on my journalism degree work anyway.
In my second year, I wrote music reviews for a website who would send me CDs in the post. I kept a film blog and I’d go watch movies at the movie theatre alone, keeping notes in the dark, and then write about the film for my blog. I’d submit these reviews to another website which paid me on the basis of view counts.
In that year, I accumulated Microsoft Word files. I accrued more and more sentences and paragraphs. I did not do much reporting in my second year of uni. You might think that strange, but a journalism degree doesn’t actually provide much reporting practice or training. But what I did do was write a lot. It was what you would call a formative year.
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I’m sitting in a Costa Coffee in Beijing, and it’s 2015. I’ve accumulated lots of bylines. But in the past few months I’ve felt little progress. I’ve achieved a few things, in my freelance journalism career. But I am looking forward to going home. For Christmas. I look forward to maybe going to Scotland, to hike in mountains of snow. I look forward to this as much as I worry that I’ll squander away the time leading up to December.
Amid all this, for whatever reason, the memory of that summer, where I picked apples for a living, arrives abruptly in my head, a thud on my consciousness.
The summer wanes — Wednesday, 26th August, in Beijing
I’ve been busy these past weeks. I finished up my teaching job. I was hired to teach journalism and writing to Chinese employees of a multinational company. Designing the course was a full-time consideration, and delivering it was a lesson in teaching effectiveness.
I enjoyed the challenge though. And the fee from the project will help me to travel the remainder of this year.
I’ve decided to abandon my rented accommodation in Beijing. I would have had to shell out for three months’ rent money at the end of September (a lot of rents are paid in this way here), meaning the money I earned from the teaching would have simply evaporated, all for the privilege of residing in Beijing for another three months.
Instead I will take that money and travel. I have destinations in mind. One option is to make my way around the country and check in with various friends. I am also hoping to go to Taiwan, a place I first visited in 2009 and which I enjoyed. I will continue freelancing as I move. And opportunities to do so are not unencouraging.
Another milestone occurred recently too (the first is the journalism teaching which I had not done before), and that is I got my first ever lead story for a national newspaper, their website showing a story I’d written up top.
Apologies for the crowing, but in a year that’s had some troubled times for me, I think I’ll take a celebratory moment. These kind of milestones are what journalists live for.
It’s still hot, but I can feel the summer’s wane. The days now are just slightly less sultry than before. Not that I can complain, the weather now is great: blue skies and sunny; as the government issued orders to close surrounding factories, all for a parade to come the beginning of September.
Money is still very tight, as I await a whole bunch of freelancing money to come in. Bottlenecks such as these are something a freelancer has to do their best to eliminate.
But all in all, it’s a fairly satisfying end to an otherwise mediocre summer. But I’m taking the long view.
Burmese Days
I hadn’t done much reading or planning before I went to Burma. I had a very rough idea of where I’d travel to, but nothing was laid out — these days I don’t even book accommodation. For some reason I thought I’d take a month for Burma, which is far too long. I spent 18 days there in the end.
It was February when I went, a cold and damp month in Beijing. I left the city at night, on my way to the airport, sleet falling on my face, two days after Chinese new year. I remember that I was feeling a little down, for wintry reasons.
Trepidation was accompanying me. The country was an unknown, a chasm only to be filled in by retrospect.
Is this goodbye Beijing?
Beijing and its endless streets and expanse of concrete desert, where it can take a lot of effort to arrange social affairs.
It’s coming up to three years since I arrived in Beijing — three years in which I’ve made friends and lost friends, through the simple drift of life.
In this time I’ve been broke numerous times, have had to scrape and meander. I’ve had starry nights and schemes come to fruition, and moments seldom preconceived.
But what am I doing now? Am I moving forward — is misery just going through the motions?
You might not understand the dilemma and that is fine. I shall put it plainly.
I could never have realized just how hard it is to succeed as a writer.
I could never have imagined what a crossroads sometimes life can be.
I do not want to work to earn money so I can pay the rent, so I can buy more things I do not need.
My instinct tells me I should move out of Beijing and head to some other places in China and stay with friends. Read, write, sleep. Convalesce.
Try to write more — that’s more important than anything. And yet why torture myself? I could do a job that’s enjoyable and worthwhile, and write on the side.
Many writers have had multiple lives. I feel like I should have those lives, because in the end it will make me better and more varied.
There’s no one telling you what your next move should be. There’s no path to follow or predetermined step. Always thus.
Money is and will always be an issue. When you’re younger you think –you’re sure of it in fact– that at some stage you will be wealthy and have enough money to do the things you want to do. But at some stage, it becomes clear that those riches might not become reality.
But that’s fine?
I should go somewhere awhile and figure things out.
Why I want to work this summer – July 11th
This is my third summer in Beijing, and the first one where I want to work.
Looking back to last summer, I spent 20 days in Thailand, and I wrote a post in June entitled “What should a freelance journalist do in the summer?”
In that post I said it should be the season to unwind and get rid of stresses, but this year I feel differently.
I want to work and do productive things. And this isn’t about money. Yes, I don’t have enough of it to travel. And I still feel the urge to go somewhere where I can swim and frolic.
But I wouldn’t want to do that for an extended amount of time; a weekend would suffice.
Why this might be, I am not sure. Perhaps it is natural that appetites change and the propensity to knuckle down and set to should swing by at different life-stages.
Current days
I have various approaching deadlines and quite a lot to do. And new opportunities have cropped up.
Friends of friends have started up a food company that is doing very well, and they invited me to come up with an advertising campaign. This is a fun challenge.
I am also in the process of designing a course on journalism skills and better writing, which I will be delivering to a multinational company’s Beijing office. This is well paid.
I need this money, it will pay for the next three month’s rent, which I have to pay in a lump sum, and the money from freelanced articles will contribute to food and other living expenses.
The plan is that I will hopefully have enough to do something travel-related in September.
A few weeks ago I had a very hard time — I was not in a good place. But everything has perked up again. Living abroad is often about overcoming those dark days, and trusting in the eventual good times. Optimism must sustain you.
I’m still broke — May 18th (life of a freelance journalist abroad)
It has been over a month since I quit my regular script-editing job at the TV company. And since then I have only been surviving on my freelancing income.
Since I came back from my Burma trip, which cost too much due to a mishap with flights, I have been more or less broke — having had to ask for an extension on paying my rent, and for a personal loan to bail myself out.
I have had two job interviews. One of these jobs would’ve been perfect; offering a flexible schedule and a great salary. I did not get it however. The other job is for a big news agency where competition is tough so I am unsure about my prospects.
I had a lot of stop and starts when I first came out here – gigs that fell through, pitches that were lame, a bank account that was at zero so many times I nearly packed it in and went back home (on multiple occasions). — Kate Hodal, freelancer turned Southeast Asia correspondent
When I read these words from Kate Hodal, I always feel better knowing that those before me, and also my peers, have struggled financially doing journalism.
But equally, when I see freelancers who are for more prolific than I am I feel spurred on to work harder and to find my own spread of amenable publications.
This is not to say I haven’t been enjoying myself — enjoying the acres of free time, partying with friends. That’s the beauty of China, money goes further: the experience of being broke here is unlike being broke in England, where relative poverty reduces choices more starkly.
But I thank the lord for my bank account’s overdraft.
Lu-Hai Liang 