ShanghaiMamas

If Just For One Racy Day

Tuesday, November 11th 2008

By Katrina Beikoff* 

Every now and then, when living abroad, there is cause to wholeheartedly embrace the country from whence we came, when we can throw aside our deference to where we are living, our efforts to embrace the culture, the people and the oft-confounding mores, and revel purely in the essence of our homeland. 

It can be a time to value like a sweet indulgence, when the matters of home don’t have to be put into the foreign context, but can be celebrated with vigor for their own importance. 

It is a time when, instead of acting like a guest on best behavior, we can behave like we’ve returned to our own lounge room, flopped on the couch in a pair of trackies and comfortable slippers and even been able to indulge in carefree-at home behavior (but not as extreme as throwing caution aside and drinking water from the tap). 

This has been such a week.  

 It has been a week when Americans, strangers who may only have identified each other by voices carried across the clatter of traffic-laden Shanghai streets, embraced over the outcome of the presidential election and the hailing of new era. 

When US expats have been unabashed about discussing what they think such a result and progress says about themselves and their country and their place in the world — and then what everyone else thinks about them, their country and their place in the world. 

And, of equally profound nationalistic import, it was a week when Australians blew off a day to watch a horse race. 

It was the week of the Melbourne Cup. And the first time I celebrated it in Shanghai. 

It is also the first time I have been to an overtly Australian function in China.   

I’m not a huge horse racing fan, but am acutely aware of the exalted place of the Cup in the Australian culture, have attended a number of Melbourne Cups at Flemington and have even found myself being far more interested in the horse flesh than fashions in the field. And never, not as far back as I can cast my memory, have I missed dropping whatever was at hand — school spelling tests/work interviews/babies at the breast (not literally) —  to scramble to the nearest television to watch horses career 3200m around the track.

 Yet I have to confess I approached the Melbourne Cup function I had chosen to attend in Shanghai feeling vaguely uncomfortable.   

Was it right in another country where we took great effort to extract as much experience and knowledge as we could from locals and everyday life, to all of a sudden coagulate into a such foreign group and just be so…Australian?

Wasn’t this the very behavior we as expats, with the notion of not raising the ire of our hosts and creating a greater social chasm between us and them,  generally try to avoid? 

But it was the Melbourne Cup. 

And, just for a day, being totally Australian in Shanghai was delicious.

 We wore frivolous frocks and silly hats.

We drank and we bellowed at a giant screen displaying the race. 

We tossed tickets in the air as we cursed horses who failed to live up to their promise and breeding, even though we had never heard of until any of them until we won them in the sweep.  

We rued not being able to bet, though few would have bothered checking the form or laying down our hard earned cash were we at home. 

With all our pretences down, the Australian accents got stronger. The ridiculousness of the conversation veered into Okker cliche.  And we didn’t care. We were among friends who knew thongs were fashionable footwear, who knew cockies were birds and birds were women, who knew a pie should be full of meat and gravy, not a chart.    

I loved the hearty cackle of the roomful of Aussies, and the amused bewilderment on the faces of some of the other foreigners attending their first ever Melbourne Cup.

I utterly enjoyed a critical discourse on the culinary delights presented for our dining pleasure with one fabulous woman I was seated with who bemoaned all the ‘fancy food’ they were serving and confessed that she really just hankered after a good old sausage sizzle. 

And then when it was done, things became even more absurd.

 We gathered for an after party at Sasha’s on Dong Ping Lu in the fashionable French Concession.

 It should have been an utterly incongruous scene — a group of Australians and other foreigners committed to beer and margarita drinking laying claim for the evening to the garden of one of Shanghai’s historic houses, the 1920’s French manor house owned by Charlie Soong — he of immense wealth and influence, but even more famously of three celebrated daughters.  The first of the daughters married an industrialist, the second married Sun Yat-sen, revered as the man who banished feudalism in China, and the third became the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Nationalist China and later of Taiwan.  

But it worked so well.

There, the beers were cold,the conversation lively and the surrounds so comfortable.   

The house has been wonderfully restored and an explanation of its history is contained on the bar menus. 

It was on reading the menu notes that reality came back into focus. 

We aren’t at home.  We are foreigners in Shanghai.

But even though it is such a cool place to live, it was fun to forget about being abroad, just for a day. 

 

*Katrina Beikoff is a Shanghai-based writer and mum of two.  She writes fortnightly (ish) for Shanghai Mamas.     

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