Six Square Metres
November 2013
Homesickness
Homesickness can take you by surprise, and right in the midst of the thrill of travel. I am presently in Shanghai, a city that feels like the centre of the world. Manhattan used to feel this way. I imagine London felt like this at the time Samuel Johnson asserted that if a man was tired of London, then he was tired of life.
Shanghai is such an exciting place. Last night I walked along the Bund, with colonial buildings on one side of the river and the extravagant present of the Pudong skyscrapers on the other. There is nowhere like this in the world. This is a city caught in the act of destruction and creation. Only a generation ago, there was starvation in this country. The parents of the people who crowd the food courts and the shopping malls can remember people eating grass to fill their stomachs. China is a miracle, and I am lucky to be here.
And yet. There was a moment yesterday, as I sat on a bus travelling through the frayed outer suburbs of the city, when I wished to be at home pottering in my few square metres of soil.
The suburbs of Shanghai are in the process of being destroyed and recreated. From our bus, we could see old men carrying plastic buckets of water on poles as they tended their perfectly square vegetable plots. All around their remnant farms were factories and 20 storey apartment blocks and building sites. These market gardeners will, no doubt about it, have been built over by this time next year.
Further out, there were fields of rice. Every little farmhouse had a pond crowded with ducks. Every space was used to grow something. The men worked the fields with hoes and rakes, and scattered what looked like fertiliser by hand, out of a bucket. They were all old men. China has now had two decades of the single child policy. Most of those single children will gravitate to the city, carrying solo the hopes and expectations of their parents, and two sets of grandparents.
Meanwhile the air was like soup. The pollution in China literally takes your breath away, and makes your eyeballs sting. If you have ever doubted that it is possible for human beings to so damage their environment that it becomes poison, then come to China.
The papers are reporting that children are being diagnosed with lung cancer – a disease that normally takes decades to develop – as young as seven.
Sitting high up on the highway viewing the farmers from my bus, knowing that they will soon be built over, or relocated, or simply unable to continue, I felt a longing to tend my own little patch. I was wondering if the passionfruit vine had grown to the top of the trellis.
I was thinking of my little sundeck, my tomato plant and eggplant growing upside down in their suspended grow-bags, and the lettuce that was just coming into its own. I was wondering whether anyone at home had thought to water the plants. My stomach clenched with longing.
At that moment, I thought how fine it is to have a home, to understand its customs and its ways and to plant a seed and watch it grow, knowing that (if it is not tempting fate to think so) life will be much the same next year as it is this.
China is a miracle, and a dilemma. It doesn’t have that luxury.
@MargaretSimons
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