As you read this, my father and three elder sisters — one of them with her family — will be with us in Beijing. I think it’s fair to say that it will raise the Punjabi quotient of where we live by many percentage points.

It’s interesting, the planning hosts do when visited by family and other animals. At first glance, it’s to do with trying to guess what your guests want to do, eat, look at. Will they be happy to be led around by the hand, bowing to your “local expertise”? Have they come with a to-do list — the Wall, the Summer Palace, a hutong or two? They are, after all, tourists. You can’t be turning up your nose at their checklists when those are the very first things you sought out as well.

What do they want to eat?

Are they happy to experiment, as you’ve learnt to do, to point at things in restaurants and on menus and hope that it will be what you think it is? To savour the wins — and there have been many — and to steel yourself for the occasional fails. They’re only here for so many days, you think — mustn’t let them down on the food front. God, do I need more rajma?

This sort of thing can go on forever till you work out that it isn’t the thought of letting yourself or your family down that’s stressing you out.

It’s the fear that you’ll be letting down where you live, this place you’ve chosen to make your home.

****

We’ve had people come and stay, though we’ve hardly been inundated. At the end of our first year here, this was a matter of some surprise to us. Yet this is quite common, we found, once we started asking around among the expats in our circle. Even now, most people can’t seem to muster the sort of enthusiasm for visiting China as they may, for example, Thailand. (Beijing-Bangkok is only a four-hour flight, to put it in perspective.)

Beijing (and, by extension, China) is the sort of place one feels one already knows from the space it takes up in the media. At the same time it is sufficiently different to almost define “elsewhere”. That mix of familiarity from the prevalent narrative and its pervasive cultural apartness makes China a tough sell to most people. “The lack of curiosity about where we lived was surprising,” said one British acquaintance, describing the reception on his first trip home to the UK. This was among his friends, progressive types he believed would have been agog to hear of his experiences and willing to come doss on his couch when he returned to Beijing.

It was — easy to infer, though he didn’t say as much — almost wounding.

****

I jumped at the chance to come see China, to live here, to give our son a crack at being “new” in a place such as this. But it wasn’t always so.

I’ve travelled quite widely, and always with curiosity, but until quite recently, you’d have been hard-pressed to convince me that China, the Koreas and Japan were bucket-list worthy. If pressed, I would have offered the standard excuses, language chief among them. Yet I backpacked 20 years ago in Vietnam, where English was much rarer than it is here now.

A more truthful assessment would have been that I, like many, perhaps most people, was intimidated. China, as a civilisation (and I use the word in as non-loaded a way as possible), always struck me as complete in and of itself. Much as Japan is, much as I imagined Korea to be.

Let’s worry at “civilisation” a bit more. Wherever else one travels in Asia, one can see the signposts of our Indian “culture”. Whether it’s in the memories of the Indianised kingdoms of Southeast Asia; the manifold Sanskrit names one still sees from Myanmar down to the arc of the Indonesian archipelago; the still existent “soft power” of Raj Kapoor and Mukesh — whatever our disposition, we remark these things when on the road, and always, let’s face it, with a smidgeon of entirely undeserved pride.

But China? That other hegemon of antiquity and vast current exporter of people, cuisine, and cinema? That country whose current trajectory has so significantly eclipsed that of India’s?

Would it know I exist?

Now that I’m a parent, of course, I’ve grown used to dismissal. Once you stop stressing about it, you can start enjoying a world that is truly new. (Yes, I know, Aamir Khan’s Dangal owned this place a few months ago, and across in Japan, Zen can be traced to “dhyana”. So what? I’m over it.)

I’ve made my peace with China’s apartness, learnt that its aloofness is anything but, and have settled in quite nicely. But I still worry, when people visit, whether I’ll be able to introduce her as I see her — voluble, smelly in parts, hard to comprehend, yet always exciting.

Will they, in their few days here, grow to respect China as I do, as a world worth engaging with on its own terms?

But that’s what I need to come to terms with. I need to get over myself.

China doesn’t need me to mediate her to another person.

She’s a big girl. I don’t own her either.

Avtar Singh is the author of Necropolis. He lives in Beijing; blink@thehindu.co.in

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