Karolina Wróblewska is a Shanghai enthusiast. She has lived here for over a decade, mesmerised by old Shanghai lanes and their inhabitants. Trained in sinology, she enjoys Chinese ink wash painting and writing about her Shanghai experience.
But I didn’t want to be a strawberry
I like to imagine myself as a memories collector. I find, gather, organise, and appreciate; a seamstress that arranges snippets of fabric into intricate patterns. No wonder, because since childhood, I wanted to be a dressmaker. One of these days, I will take out my patchwork and admire its beauty.
***
The first telephone set appeared at our home somewhere in the eighties. It was a blue dial. It was such a novelty that my sister and I wanted to call someone at all times. It was this kind of magic we could not comprehend. How could a piece of plastic make a ringing noise, and upon picking up the handset, your grandma’s voice came from the inside of it? Incomprehensible magic. You had to have a reason to make a phone call, and therefore we were not allowed to touch it.
But my parents were at work when I returned home from school. (Those were good old times when people were not afraid of letting children come home from school independently, with house keys dangling from their necks.) Hania was a good friend of mine. She was my classmate and a neighbour too. She had two long braids. Her mum was a hairdresser, and her father was a policeman. Her family must have had the telephone installed about the same time as us, so Hania and I came up with a great prank, alternating once at her place and once at mine, we would take out a thick book of yellow pages and call people randomly.
We usually started the conversation by pretending that we called from the kindergarten. Depending on who answered the phone, we would say something like: “Hello Sir, your grandson is waiting for you at the kindergarten. You forgot to pick him up. Come quickly, please!” We tried to sound like adults; kids are so naïve. Seldom an angry man’s voice on the other side of the line would scold us, and we were frightened, sometimes a drunk would utter unintelligible words at us, rarely we were threatened: “Making stupid jokes! I’ll find you, and you will see!” We would hang up the receiver promptly. But I remember an old lady who answered the phone and willingly had a conversation with us. She spoke in a soft and pleasant voice. I feel she must have been very lonely, and our prank was a nice digression in her otherwise lonesome existence. I remember we were asked a lot of questions, so the conversation went on and on. We laughed, and the lady seemed cheerful too.
We were found out as soon as a telephone bill arrived, and it put an end to our games.
***
I once came across “Orange Crush”, an essay written by Yiyun Li. Although she lived thousands of kilometres away from me, I could absolutely relate to her story. In her piece, she described the first time she was exposed to western culture in the form of an orange drink for the Chinese market branded as Tang. A bottle of the beverage was so expensive that you could buy tones of oranges for the same price. A monthly lunch allowance would be just enough to buy a bottle. The drink came into the market with an appropriate TV commercial. The family on the TV screen was not only very healthy but utterly happy. Needless to say, all thanks to Tang.
It was China in the nineties. It reminded me of my own experience, which must have been a decade earlier, maybe the beginning of my primary education—Poland in the eighties.
There were no commercials on TV back then, but we too looked up to America. Same as the narrator of “Orange Crush,” I also had my little American Dream. I wanted to taste exotic fruit, like a banana or an orange. It was an unattainable thirst. Back then, we could only get locally grown fruit and vegetables, so it was up to my imagination to picture myself tasting something so out of the ordinary. Until one Christmas when all of a sudden there was a delivery of bananas to our local supermarket. My mum must have accomplished a challenging task, nearly a miracle, to buy a tiny bunch of bananas.
The view of bananas was so unreal that I consumed my first ever banana in front of a giant mirror in the hall of our apartment. I cannot even recall the impression the taste made on me. All I know is that there I was, standing facing the mirror in a cool, nonchalant pose pretending to be someone for whom eating tropical fruit was the most ordinary thing on earth. For a moment, I turned into somebody else. And I thought how great that would be to be this somebody else.
The banana was soon gone, but the memory of the absurdity of the situation remains vivid till this very day. Since then, I have tried Chinese cuisine, Japanese, Thai. I have tasted sushi, curry. I have eaten avocados, passion fruit, papayas, pomelos. All the things I had not dreamt of because I did not know of their existence whatsoever. With time they became common and ordinary.
***
At one point, I wanted to be a scientist, like my grandfather. He was a biologist. He showed me the magical world seen under the microscope; tiny particles of plants enlarged under the magnifying glass. When I was about seven, we spent summer at a lakeside somewhere near my hometown. We would take long walks in the woods during which my sister and I were trained to recognise trees by the types of leaves, barks; poplar, oak, birch, aspen, chestnut. We could distinguish them all. It was there where I carried out my first ever scientific experiment. My parents were displeased. My mum, in particular, did not appreciate my sudden rush to science. Looking back, I don’t blame her. In my research, I wanted to prove that my corrective eyeglasses (which I was terribly embarrassed by) can float on the surface of the lake. I guess that subconsciously I wanted to get rid of them. The experiment proved me wrong. My glasses (not the first pair within a few months) drowned in the depths of the lake. I, therefore, bowed out from further research.
***
The bakery was my favourite pastime game. There was a sizable sandpit in a playground right behind our apartment building. It was rimmed with a short concrete wall with wooden boards on top of it. All the kids from the neighbourhood loved to spend time there. We had plastic moulds, which we filled with wet sand. Upon flipping them over on the boards, the perfect loaves of bread, cookies, stars, shells and cakes appeared. Miraculously, we could somehow sense the aroma of freshly baked pastry. One of us would be a baker, and the rest were customers. “How can I help you?” would the baker ask. “I’d like this loaf of bread and a star cookie, please”, a customer would reply. “Here you are!” In the way of claiming our orders, we would smash the purchased items with our little hands. Bang! And a loaf would turn back to scattering of sand. Bang! And the same would happen to the star, the shell or the cake.
***
The baking game was great, but “treasure hunting” was probably even better. It meant walking at the back of the apartment buildings in our settlement, under the balconies. There were usually very narrow paths between the buildings and flowerbeds. Searching for treasures meant simply to look for garbage thrown by accident away from the balconies. Once, someone threw out their balcony, not quite unintentionally, a whole box of metal buttons. That was one of the best trophies ever. For many years afterwards, mum would still use them to replace lost buttons in our jackets, trousers, shirts. But it was not the greatest. The greatest treasure ever was thrown out of a car that stopped abruptly on a busy overpass going towards the city centre. Right next to the overpass was an empty clearing with only a few bushes and tall grass that nobody ever mowed. Our block-of-flats was just beside it, so we kids used to play there a lot. And so, on one ordinary day, a car stopped nearby, and a bag full of goodies landed in the grass. It contained some trash; old, broken toys. The only item I remember, which must have been my prize, was a black lace fan. In my little eyes, the fan was the most magnificent object ever.
***
There was some aura of scandal around our next-door neighbour – E and a romance too. I didn’t understand much of it, especially why was there a woman banging on E’s door in a fury one day. She lived alone with her teenage son, and from time to time, she had male visitors. Some were foreigners. One of them, Bogdan, was one of a kind. In my childhood years, people were not allowed to travel abroad, not even possess passports. The iron curtain between us and the rest of the world was tightly sealed. To me, Bogdan was a representation of that unattainable wonderful world. He was tall, handsome and gallant; a real gentleman, very generous too. Bogdan always used to bring presents, so the entire neighbourhood was awaiting his visits. Once, he got my sister and me a tiny doll each. The dolls weren’t much bigger than our hands, but to us, they were the most precious toys in our collections. We loved them and admired Bogdan even more. The other time he brought a set of extraordinary butterfly brooches. They were made of wire and stocking knit. Each butterfly was a different colour. All the ladies (including my sister and me) were to select one brooch. What a difficult choice that was!
***
In winter, my dad and I used to go skiing. Only two of us were the sporty ones, so mum and sister stayed at home. The company that my dad worked for owned a small resort in Karpacz, in Karkonosze Mountains. It was an old, probably post-German villa with the fabulously sounding name Zameczek (The Little Castle). He and I went there nearly every winter. We rented a tiny room in Zameczek and went skiing from morning till dusk.
On the main street of Karpacz stood a miniature windmill, to some incomprehensible cause called The Windmill of Love. I used to demand to be taken there every time we went to the mountains. I stood in front of a petite windmill, mesmerised. Tiny figurines of a miller and his wife on the balcony made me freeze enchanted. It was rising inversely proportionate to myself. As I was growing taller, year by year, it was shrinking in my eyes. Nevertheless, I was always staring at it with admiration, not noticing its decay and fading colours.
Winters used to be colder and snowier than we get nowadays. It is one of the most evident and visible proofs of climate change. These days we have snow in April sometimes, but winters are generally milder than they used to be. I grew older, my father changed the workplace, and we stopped going to The Little Castle altogether. With time I even forgot how to ski.
***
I remember that I always wanted to be a princess. (Thus, I loved going to the Little Castle in winters.) Every year our kindergarten threw a costume party, and for a few consecutive years, my mum dressed me up as a strawberry. Maybe she did not have the resources to make me a princess, but most likely, she just thought the idea too clichéd, too trivial. She wanted something out of the ordinary. I must admit that my mum worked miracles to turn pieces of material into such an incredible, bespoke outfit. The costume included green headwear that resembled a calyx, and there was even a tiny pedicel sticking out. The dress was made of some green nylon fabric. Back then, to buy a piece of cloth was a marvel, so my mum must have had supernatural powers to achieve that. There was a white collar around the neck with a couple of strawberries embroidered on it. And on top of all that, an enormous strawberry was sewed on the front, from the waist down. The strawberry was bright red with white achenes and three green sepals. Everybody admired my mum’s talents and adored my dress. But I, as every girl of my age, wanted to be a princess. I didn’t want to be a strawberry.
***
It was a childhood of spellbinding beauty, enchanting and joyous—that childhood of mine. How many of the numerous toys children nowadays are given by their parents and family friends will be cherished and remembered like that miniature doll in a bright dress or cute, rinky-dink butterflies I was given all those years ago?
I look at a pile of presents under the Christmas tree. December 2020. Two girls compulsively open their beautifully wrapped gifts. There is only a little time to admire each gorgeous, expensive, new toy. It is quickly glanced at as if in passing. Pieces of torn wrapping paper land on the floor, covering already unwrapped toys. Another box is being lifted and the procedure repeated. By the time the last boxes are opened, it’s nearly bedtime. The pile will occupy space on the carpet, or maybe an adult will mercifully put them aside before good night.
04.2021