I Grew Up on a Chinese College Campus
No. 26
By Ban Ban
Shantou University is its own tiny world. I fluttered in that cage for 15 years.
Sir Li Ka-shing, the most famous millionaire in China, built the university in the Chaoshan area of Guangdong Province, and I was raised there.
Shantou University was basically in the middle of nowhere. A 40-minute bus ride to downtown Shantou, it lacked even a decent market, let alone shopping malls.
If you wanted to buy a bottle of soy sauce, you’d have to ride 20 minutes from one end of the campus to the other—a story my mother never bores of telling. Professors who had come from the countryside and then spent 20 years at Shantou University liked to say they had never been in a city their whole lives.
Yet the campus was like a city with its very own ecology. It had teachers’ apartments and students’ dorms, facilities for all kinds of sports and schools for children of all ages, a post office, a publishing house, and even an asylum. With enviable funding from the Li Ka Shing Foundation, young men and women from all over China flocked there.
There was also a reservoir more than 2 meters deep. Some would go there to swim and play. Others would go to commit suicide. When the reservoir was drained, it was a nice place to walk, though sometimes you might step on cow dung.
I Constantly Forgot That I Lived on Campus
I was quite ignorant then.
There was an old man I often saw walking his dog. I remember him coming to my class when I was in middle school and chatting about everything. But I didn’t realize he was Wang Furen, a master researcher in modern literature, until I saw his obituary.
Living among academics, I rarely knew what any of them were teaching or researching. What I knew was where you could find the most shrimp in the artificial lake, which trees to climb, and when to catch tadpoles.
Here, below Sangpu Mountain, the civilization and savageness of the campus taught me about the world in its own way.
Shantou University. Credit: erzhong1988 from Pixabay.
While the natural environment felt vast and wild, the university community was small and tight knit. As a child, you could always be identified just by your parents’ names. Everyone knew each other and there was no room to lie.
In a sea of southern coastal dialects, the campus was an island of outlanders speaking Mandarin, cultivating, building, and breeding. It had its own customs and even its own fusion cuisine.
Aunt Shao came from a northeastern Chinese town known for dried spicy cabbage and pork, and became an expert pickler after she married a man from Hunan Province. Her take on Shantou rice dumplings always made my day.
My own mother was a woman not born for the kitchen, yet in Shantou, she learned how to make northeastern-style dumplings, the fermented rice of Chongqing, and all kinds of specialties from all over the country.
Where Do You Come From?
I spent the month before my high school entrance exam in the library, leaving only to eat, sleep, and attend classes. It felt like I was inside the belly of the beast, and I loved leaning against its stomach wall, touching the membrane.
A lot of familiar faces came by as I enjoyed the air conditioning. When I got sick of a chair, I could spread out on a sofa. If I forgot to bring my pen, I could just ask the receptionist. There were movie magazines on the shelf if you got bored. It was really a luxury for us—because of our parents’ positions, we could make ourselves at home in the library as if we were university students.
After I entered high school, my family moved out of the campus. I was excited because I’d never felt attached to the institution itself; it was merely my mother’s workplace.
It was when I started boarding school that I was thrown in with Chaoshan people for the first time. I started to learn about local food, but I still couldn’t understand a word of the local dialect. I’d always mistaken it for a branch of Cantonese.
Often, I’d be having a conversation with someone, then another person would join, and suddenly the two would start speaking in dialect, leaving me aside. I’d try to guess at what they were saying but always ended up smiling awkwardly. Yet though this dialect remains foreign, hearing it still makes me nostalgic.
The most awkward thing is when people ask me where I come from.
I was born in Shanghai, my father’s hometown. My mother’s family is from Jiangxi Province, and I grew up in Shantou, in Guangdong Province. But I cannot speak the local dialects of any of these three places. So the better answer is perhaps Ningbo, the ancestral home of my father’s father.
I don’t feel attached to Shanghai at all. Before I started college, I had only been to Shanghai during the school holidays to stay with my father and stepmother for a couple of weeks at a time.
I still remember how nervous I was the first time I visited them. I was so afraid that she would introduce me as her daughter and I would feel like I had betrayed my mother. Yet she simply said, “This is Zhi Yue’s daughter.”
I was relieved, and probably the only one who cared about it. Soon I came to accept their relationship, and my presence in their lives.
I hit it off quickly with her two children. At one point, I grabbed a broom and dustpan to clean up after the arts and crafts we were doing. An uncle who saw me complimented my stepmother: “Oh, your daughter’s so nice and thoughtful.”
The word “daughter” gave me goose bumps all over my body. I slipped away with an awkward smile.
Moving to Shanghai
Credit: Sławomir Kowalewski from Pixabay.
In my last semester of school, I had to decide where I would take my college entrance exams. Either I could stay in Shanghai, facing unfamiliar textbooks, and having to catch up on everything I didn’t learn, or I could return to Guangdong, which would mean I’d have to give up the prized Shanghai hukou residency. Eventually I decided on Shanghai.
Because I was transferring so late in the academic year and good schools are very careful to maintain their college enrolment rate, the only school that would take me was a continuation school, where most of the students had already failed the exam and wanted to retake it a second or even third time.
I lived with my aunt and uncle, and their son who was beyond spoiled. It seemed as though my cousin never washed a single plate, and he was never asked to, just like he was never asked to go visit his 90-year-old grandmother in the nursing home.
My cousin was 30 years old and worked as a producer in a gaming company. He was a legit adult, yet his father would serve him breakfast and weekend lunches in front of his laptop. It went against the way that my parents raised me and it made me feel sick, but no one in their family seemed to think anything of it.
Maybe it’s because I’ve always been an outsider, whether in a city or in a family. Maybe I was just jealous. Maybe I was just judgmental.
Bird Without Legs
My first choice of university was in Guangzhou but I didn’t do well enough in the exams so I ended up in staying in Shanghai. I moved into a college dormitory but at weekends, when my classmates went home, I had nowhere to go. My mother encouraged me to get in touch with my family members but they felt like total strangers to me.
Despite living in Shanghai for several years and having my father’s family here, I have no intention of becoming a local. I might wander through the laneways and eat local breakfast foods or volunteer at the film festival, but it’s just to get used to the city.
It seems I’ve been connected to so many places, each one ends up as a kind of label. But all the labels make me itchy.
I still return to Shantou sometimes, just to visit my mother. Sometimes I get stopped by security and asked for my student ID.
“My mother works here,” I say.
“Which building?”
“24.”
In fact, Building 24 no longer exists. It was demolished for renovation along with Buildings 60 and 72. But the guard let me in without another word. I realize I’ve given a secret signal, and he must have worked here for more than 10 years.
There’s a famous quote from the Wong Kar-wai film, Days of Being Wild.
I’ve heard that there’s a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life... that’s when it dies.
Eventually I realized I’m not that bird. I’m prepared to land at any time. Really.
Ban Ban is a student at the film academy of Shanghai University. She has written for SandwiChina, an online writing platform of China30s.com, and interned at WorldBeat Cultural Center in San Diego, California. She loves writing and food.
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