Iris

Iris

Iris will always be, my best 'Chinese friend', always. Her background, infectious, larger-than-life personality, with her maturity and wisdom made her 'someone special' to me, and a positive influence. We initially met 'in passing' at work in EF, because we were based at different centres, she was in Binjiang Centre, while I was in Yingtai, but she was someone who was talked about in the office always positively. Since Yingtai centre was closing down and I was being transferred to Binjiang centre, we were going to be getting to know each other better, and the colleague-dynamics at this centre would be different from my current one. At Yingtai centre, it was me and all male colleagues, with Dan, Vincent, Chris Yu and Andy, at Binjiang it would be me and all girls, or mostly girls. My future colleagues would be Chinese Janet, who studied in Ireland, Cheryl from Wuhan, Suki, who had studied in Australia, Kat from Manchester, and Lewis, from York, who had two kids with his Chinese wife. So at least the score was evened a little and I wouldn't have the usual male dominated Saturday morning meeting talking about girls, alcohol or objectifying women. It was a nice relief. Each colleague had their own interesting background and 'unique' personality, and to some extent felt kind of 'lost' among the personalities. 

When I first met Iris at Binjiang centre, the first thing she said was 'OMG, I think this is the first time I've met you sober', and I remember being surprised that I would actually have developed THAT kind of reputation, thanks to the influence of Andy. She said that I was a nice person when I was 'sober too', which was kind of flattering-I think. We quickly became friends and got along. She was about two years younger than me, with her birthday in December and had just arrived back in China, living with her Dad after spending six years in the US studying and working in marketing for Dolce and Gabbana, I assume as an assistant or intern. She had to leave because her work permit had run out and it was decided that her job could be done by an American person. Her English was exactly the same as a native, she had a complete American accent-to the extent that you would mistake her for being an American native. She even had the fashion of saying 'Girl' at the beginning of every sentence, just like a true American. After spending so long consecutively in the States, and few Chinese friends over there, she was trying to 'reconnect' with her Chinese roots and re-discover China and the culture, as it seemed that she truly embraced the US. Her parents were divorced with her mother living in Beijing working in the insurance industry, and apparently going to school with Jack Ma, since she was a Hangzhou-native, and being raised most of the time by her Taiwanese father, both of her parents couldn't speak much English. 

On the evenings in the weekends and her days off she was a little mysterious. She had a crush on a few of the foreign men at the centre, including Brandon and Lewis, whom also seemed to like her, but not enough to date her, and she suspected that this was because she was not 'Chinese' enough. During the evenings, she hit the dating scene, and was online, dating different foreign men, I guess this was her 'slutty' phase as she recalled it, not something I had been through-yet, but I assume it was APPs such as 'tantan', the equivalent of Tinder. She seemed to date some interesting foreign guys-they were usually tall and thin, most of whom were computer nerds, one Romanian I knew about, another, apparently wealthy Harvard-educated, Indian guy she talked about often who she nicknamed 'Shiny' boy, because he was polished, clean and would jet-set across the world. Seemed too good to be true to me. But I liked the fact that she was living life with all these different, but slightly unreliable, maybe dodgy guys. 

She had most of the same hobbies and topics of conversation as me. Janet was a new mother and would prefer to talk about her son all day, while me and Iris would talk about clothes, make-up, eyebrows, skincare. But the one thing we all had in common that we loved was food. Me and Iris in particular would always want to try the same dishes in restaurants, we both loved spicy food, dongbei hearty food, but all Chinese food. 

After work one Sunday, before our 'weekend' on Monday and Tuesday's, we went to the Dongbei restaurant just below the centre, with self-make peking duck rolls, stringy tofu, fried aubergine, with lots of meat, and our rule that he had to have 'something green' with every meal, whether we ate it or not, we were at least trying to add some nutrition, but we would often go to this restaurant because we loved it so much. She always finished off every night with a stop at 'yidiandian', the famous milk tea shop, a tea drink loaded with sugar and topped with sweet cream and tapioca balls at the bottom. She even said that she asked her Dad to buy her a milk tea shop for her birthday, she loved it so much. 

Me and Iris had Monday off together and the same bank holidays, so while it was QingMing, we decided to meet up and spend the day exploring Hangzhou. In true Western style, we travelled on the subway together to meet up always updating each other as to our estimated ETA, and she was waiting for me. We went to Wagas for brunch, and came to around 120yuan each-a little pricey for coffee and salad to me. Afterwards we went shopping in the Kerry Centre, in every shop we could, and even played a game where we would both find clothes for our friends, send them pictures and ask them which they preferred, mine or hers, so it became a 'group activiy'. Despite spending the day in every affordable shop, sampling everything we could and then buying nothing-we still had fun window shopping. For us, spending the day together was more about-food. Iris found a vegetarian restaurant in a back alley on Dianping, which was a Buddhist charity. It was amazing. At only 5RMB, it was an all you can eat buffet, everything meat-free-and it was most certainly better than the 120RMB meal from Wagas-wish we had Chinese food from the beginning. Probably one of the 'best kept' food secrets in Hangzhou. 

In true 'Chinese style' spending the day with a Chinese person really does continue 'all day', but this was no chore with Iris, she was good company and her English was excellent. We decided to go to the cinema, which was the first time for me in China, though she wanted to see a Sci-Fi Korean movie, which made absolutely no sense to me, not sure about whether she understood either, but at 30RMB, it was worth the experience-and the cinema was fully packed-out. Western movies seemed to be more expensive-at around 100RMB plus, from what I saw on the board; Chinese people generally knew all the tricks to getting a good discount with coupons. What Iris most liked was the chocolate popcorn, and she wouldn't stop talking about it, even at work for the next few weeks, she wanted to go back to the cinema just for the popcorn, with no mention of the movie, though it was good-but not worth a special trip. 

After this day, our relationship as incompatible friends was cemented, and we started making our own 'bucket list' for future activities, which involved going to a waterpark, more shopping, brunching, and lost of different types of foods. At work, me, Iris and the other Chinese girls developed our own dress code for Wednesday's, which was sometimes colours, such as  'blue', or themes, for example, 'stripes', which even the guys followed, and became an important part of building 'camaraderie'. 

Whenever I had any problem in China-I called Iris, there was one time when I had left my purse in a shop and it had been locked in the shop over night, and Iris even helped me at 4am in the morning to communicate with the Chinese people to get it back. 

Later when I moved to Nanjing, she continued to be someone of immense help. During spring festival of January 2020, I was in the gym, and I hadn't been in contact with her for around a year, but suddenly I received various frantically written messages on WeChat warning me about how I needed to 'buy a mask' and the situation was getting scary. I decided not to reply, because I had no idea what she was talking about. I had heard that a few parties and social events had been cancelled due to a 'fever' going around, and my Chinese classes were cancelled too as a result, but assumed this was simply a common cold, and routine, since I wasn't active in the expat community with a more solitary introverted personality I didn't know any different. 

However, Iris wouldn't let this go, I simply replied 'Ok', and I told her she was being over-dramatic. But then she called me at the gym and told me to buy a mask, any mask. I replied that I had no idea where to buy a mask as I've never needed to buy one-she told me to go to any convenience store. I ignored her and simply said I would do it later, since I didn't want to ruin my workout, but she kept calling and refused to leave me alone until I called her while I was buying a mask. So I left the gym and went downstairs to the convenient store and saw two masks, the only two masks left, which were not medical grade, but the cotton masks, and decided to just buy both of them since I wasn't sure what type I was supposed to buy. The lady in front of me was also buying masks. As I was in the queue, I called Iris and told her that I was in the queue buying masks and then she left me alone. 

I took them home and didn't open them. The next day, Jan 17th, I continued to get on with my work at Starbucks on my laptop, and suddenly, around noon, was told that the store was closing down and that I had to leave. A day later, China shut down, and it was not possible to even enter a mall, a store, or any transportation without a mask. There was even a 'black market' of face masks, with people selling them for 200RMB. My colleague John who I bumped into while walking on the way to JingFeng shopping mall told me that he couldn't even go into a shop to buy water, asking me where to buy a face mask, but it seemed everywhere had sold out and there was a shortage. I explained that I could go and buy the stuff he needed in the malls. 

But I have to thank Iris for being persistent and relentless with me in buying a mask, or I would have struggled to survived. The masks for a few weeks were like gold, I made sure that I kept them in sight until it was possible to buy fresh ones. The masks really did save me, allowing me to go into the malls and shops to buy water and groceries as normal. I owe Iris a really big thanks to her for thinking of me at this time, and always will. When I met with her next on a quick one-day visit to Hangzhou, we even talked about living together in the UK and just growing old-which even now, sounds amazing, I certainly wouldn't say no to growing old with a long-time and forever girlfriend.