BEIJING | Day n

Even in Beijing I am a creature of habit; every night I have to come back to TV. To countless marriage-and-the-city Chinese shows that are not so much watchable as native-spoken listenable, to ads that make up for their visual simplicity with their verbal sophistication – and to Shankou Baihui (Yamaguchi Momoe).

I have been hypnotised by her 80s serial, Xie Yi (Akai Giwaku), since I found it on a Chinese channel. Boy meets girl, she’s going to get leukaemia, he’s going to find out that he’s her half-brother – I can foretell it all but I can’t bear switching channels.

“Eh, you don’t have to bathe, meh? Haven’t you seen this show?” says my room mate for the week, Fei.

“Yes, but I was too young.”

I was six or maybe seven: too young to remember her going to Paris, getting a wedding gown and looking rosebud lovely in a red beret. “Did you see that? The French look never goes out of fashion.”

“But the skirt is so 80s,” says Issey Feiyake.

“But the colour is so not 80s.”

Seeing and hearing it anew now, I am also intrigued by how in the Chinese dubbing she is described as a guniang. Not nuhai, not nusheng, but guniang. Quaint, isn’t it?

Sometimes we do hop to the news or something. Although you don’t get stories about China’s ban on the film Lost in Beijing, you do get weather reports and stories about the comrade of the day. (“Today, a tourist reported losing his comb on the train on the way from City A to City B. Rail workers in City A combed through the train for the comb and sent it to City B…”)

“You are right. This is so fictional,” says Fei tonight. (He is right more often than me, okay, so when he says I am right – ahem.)

“Why do you think I watch those serials? You might as well watch real fiction, right?”