CHINAGIRL
• Marcel D'Agneau

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She was tall, her eyes darting towards anyone who came by, desperate to make contact with anyone who might talk to her. Few did but never the right one. I stopped, smiled and asked her name. ‘May’ she answered relieved to be getting any kind of attention at all.

She was from Schezuan, a city of 300,000 people where good cooking comes from and lots more these days. She’d arrived two months ago to polish her English, which was now very good indeed. She was also quite beautiful and proud. It is something that very confident people have, a way of standing and talking that means you can’t give them any shit. She’s listening, watching, taking it all in, making judgments.

She’d come down to Falmouth to see about a course here, but couldn’t find the right people to talk to. It was proving quite hard to find someone who could define it. At 24 she’d already been a manager of a design studio back in China for 18 months. She knew exactly what enterprise was and what was necessary to run it at a profit, what kind of investments were needed, what computers and software. She completely understood about drive and energy. It was a puzzle then that she’d chosen to visit this backwater of England that is Cornwall to study creative enterprise. Clearly she had an impression of the place that was different to the reality. (Brochures can be so enticing). The Eden Project clearly is sending out signals that we are dynamic.

We talked. It was clear that England was turning out to be a disappointment for her. She loved the beauty of it all. The fact that we could drink coffee by the sea on a sunny evening, the clean air was a wonder, but she plainly missed the energy of China.

She’d been studying English in Newcastle on Tyne. Living in primitive digs, damp and noisy, people fighting. She mentioned the dirt in the streets and I imagined some godforsaken slum they’d put her in, but was astonished to hear she was staying in Jesmond Dene, one of the elegant parts of the city. She hadn’t found the natives friendly.

We dined at Bistro 33, Falmouth’s finest fish restaurant and her eyes lit up as she surveyed the menu. I realised, as she ate, that no one had offered her lunch either. This girl was hungry. I shall always remember her ploughing her way through her steamed skate with resolution, eyeing my own food to make sure I was going to eat everything. She was a girl with a lot to say about her experiences in the UK and no one to tell them to. She also was funny and intelligent, and I got her life history pretty quickly. As a single child, she had to do an MA , her mother expected it. She had to do it to repay her family’s faith in her.

Of course she wanted the best MA she could find to do and was bewildered that the glory that is England’s educational establishments weren’t, well, quite up to scratch. Certainly not up to Chinese standards. But she’d committed, she was resigned to being in England for two years to study and she would study.

I wondered what motivated her so strongly. The desire to please her parents is a big incentive.
‘I owe them so much.’ There is also the knowledge that without a higher degree her promotional prospects were much harder in a field so competitive as hers. She hates the idea of being away from home for so long, but she isn’t afraid. She is this amazing, strong person making her way , taking chances and making choices in an alien country. Somehow you know, from one meeting that one day you’ll read about her again in Time Magazine or CNN business news. Star quality isn’t just about being there, it’s about radiating all on your own with some internal reactor that keeps you motivated, keeps you strong, makes people make space for you.

She hasn’t come to study in Cornwall. She’ll do her ‘time’ in Newcastle. She’ll emerge with that MA and go home stronger for all the Third World experiences of life in Britain. She is the future,apparently we are the past.

© Marcel D'Agneau 2001

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