Hmmm…

A really lovely thing about Beijing is the number of children and elderly people. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but I always found it really odd that in Manhattan everyone seemed to be between the ages of 21 to 50. The young and the elderly were…elsewhere.

In the parks, in the streets, outside my apartment block you can’t move without bumping into grandmothers minding toddlers, young families spending time together or groups of elderly men staring intensely at a game of Mahjong.

It makes Beijing feel like a real living city. And although it’s similar to New York in that most of the people who live here are orginally from somewhere else, it has a much more “family” feel to it.

As I get to know my Chinese workmates a little better I am increasingly less surprised when I learn they are married with a child.

At my former office in Australia the majority of my colleagues in their 20s and early-30s were unmarried and childless, here, the opposite is the case.

That said, it’s not so easy to get married in China. A recent newspaper article documented a growing trend for dating agencies setting up weekend trips for singles to get to know each other over a couple of days. In the West such a trip might resemble a Contiki tour on steroids, here the participants spoke of “brushing hands,” with a quickening pulse.

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A colleague at work is celebrating her 30th birthday tonight and brought cake to the office. She told me that in China, major birthdays for women are 30, 40, 50 and so on, same as in the west, but for men it’s a big one if it has nine in the number – 29, 39, 49 etc.

So now you know.

Oh, and the cake was a sponge with cream.

“English is what saved us,” an Irish workmate told me recently of his economically troubled homeland. “Our young people can go abroad and work because of English, if it wasn’t for that there would be riots on the streets of Dublin.”

Speaking English is of massive benefit when looking for a job, travelling and communicating all over the world. Despite the troubled global economy there is a huge demand for English teachers from Seville to X’ian and businesses from Stockholm to Shanghai communicate in the global language. My job in China is largely thanks to my mother tongue.

But what if you only speak English?

In a speech to the Queensland Tourism Industry Council this week, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd urged Australians to learn Mandarin. “It seems the times are upon us,” he warned.

Rudd suggested the Australian Broadcasting Corporation needed to turn their focus to Asia (couldn’t agree more – Australian media is hopelessly Euro focused), and tourism operators need to learn Mandarin and start writing signs in Chinese. It’s pretty minor stuff, but it’s a start.

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