The circus tent was big enough for an audience of about 700 but only a few dozen of us had battled through the torrential rain that hit Beijing at the weekend. I was sitting in the front row with my friend Song, who had not been to a circus since he was 12 and was peering at the tightrope with a sceptical eye.
“They’re not going to fall on top of us, are they?” he said.
The first act featured four acrobats on the tightrope, sometimes blindfolded, walking backwards or balanced on top of one another. The youngest of them, who looked about 16, appeared later somersaulting on top of a giant treadmill as it was spinning at speed high in the air.
The only animal act featured five performing poodles who jumped through hoops, pulled tiny rickshaws and danced on their hind legs for their trainer, who looked like a kindly version of Rosa Klebb as played by Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love. Most of the audience were families with small children, all of whom loved the slim, good-natured clown as he dipped into a bag full of tube-shaped balloons which he hurled towards them like javelins.
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The show lasted just over an hour and even Song agreed that it had been a delight from start to finish. He had been reluctant to travel out to this suburb in the southwest of the city until he discovered that 10 minutes away from the circus was a museum of Chinese gardens and landscape architecture.
Among Song’s enthusiasms is Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin’s novel about the declining fortunes of an aristocratic family during the Qing Dynasty. Much of the action takes place in the Grand View Garden, an ornamental garden that serves a similar function to the Big House in Irish novels as a symbol of the family’s decline.
The museum had a replica of a literati garden of the kind created by the educated classes between the 16th and 18th centuries as places of contemplation in harmony with nature. As Song led me through it, lifting the red ropes to enter each cordoned off space, he pointed out notable features and delivered a little lecture on them.
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Afterwards, with a couple of hours to kill before the circus, we sat in a huge empty restaurant where he slurped loudly on a lamb broth. I remembered how off-putting I once found this noisy eating and I asked him about the habits of westerners that gave Chinese people the ick.
“Wearing shoes indoors, especially in the bedroom,” he said.
Chinese people leave their shoes at the door, but they keep their socks on and according to Song, “if you’re a man, nobody wants to see your bare feet”. Most people shower at night rather than in the morning and going to bed without bathing is another turnoff.
If you are in a queue in China, the person behind you will be right behind you and they don’t think of such proximity as an incursion into your personal space. Nobody minds being jammed against one another in the subway either, but when it comes to social interactions, it’s better to keep body contact to a minimum.
“Shaking hands is okay but all that hugging is too much,” Song said.
Too much eye contact is also perceived as a bit creepy and if you accidentally catch a stranger’s eye, you should look away immediately. Noisy eating, slurping and chewing with your mouth open are fine but picking up food with your fingers and putting it in your mouth is disgusting.
Song was tentative at first when I asked him about our nasty western habits but now he was getting into his stride as he thought of fresh horrors.
“French kissing,” he said.
“It’s too wet and we don’t like the tongues. A lot of people don’t open their lips at all when they kiss.”
This brought us onto sharing bottles and other questions of hygiene but there was one matter I knew he would not mention without prompting: the smell. East Asians have a higher prevalence of a gene variant that means they have less body odour, making them more sensitive to what some call lao wai wei, or foreigner smell.
“It’s armpit but it’s sour and smoky like a barbecue said.
“We’ll say to each other, ‘here comes the barbecue’. It had been a long day in the garden museum with the temperature in the high 30s and humidity in the 90s and I started to worry about the level of my lao wai wei. Song read my mind and looked out the window.
“I don’t mind it,” he said.
“Not really.”
