The cold is incredible. You don’t notice at first, and I strode across the tarmac away from the plane without sealing my coat. At first it seemed chilly but within 10 meters the snot in my nose was frozen solid and I had made sure every garment was zipped, buttoned or zelcroed as tightly as possible. Despite 5 layers of clothing I was shivering when I reached the concrete bunker that passed for the arrivals terminal. Further north than Vladivostock, ChangChun is in northeastern China (it used to be the capitol of Manchuria) and it’s only history rather than geography that stops it being Siberian. Ironically ChangChun translates as “long spring”.

My reason for having spent 14 hours in January 1995 travelling to a frozen, industrial Chinese town lacking any charm was that my brother had chosen to live there rather than admit defeat to our father. Nick had successfully completed his history degree and the first year of law studies and now needed to get either sponsorship from a law firm or a job in order to be able to pay for the remainder of the course. To show how serious he was one of the first jobs he had applied for was with the Chinese government. As 1994 had progressed and the rejection letters piled in “I’ll get a job, even if it’s in China!” began to look worryingly accurate. Dad decided to help by typing Nick’s letters. Nick was less grateful when he discovered that Dad had decided to “correct” them as well. Despite a good degree from Oxford and successful completion of his law course the only positive response was in Manchuria. I’m not certain that Nick even new where Manchuria was, much less how cold. An increasingly nervous Nick had spent the summer sleeping in my living room and getting up at an unearthly hour to make pizzas and do other casual temp jobs. September arrived and we found ourselves escorting him to Heathrow for the fateful flight.

Nick quickly discovered the drawbacks. His apartment, despite having only been built in the last 10 years, was decrepit. His letters home catalogued the sea of mud outside, the windows that wouldn’t shut, the idiosyncratic plumbing and wiring and the regimented heating regime. In true command economy style the date the heating was switched on was fixed. When overnight temperatures dropped to minus 30C a week before the appointed date Nick’s flat froze. He spent a week in which the milk in his kitchen froze solid overnight and he didn’t dare risk washing or changing his clothes that week.

I was met in the concrete bunker by Nick and a small welcoming committee and was driven back in the ancient college Jeep. The next night we were chatting along with the Nick’s English speaking colleagues (an American, Daniel, and a Mancunion, Claire) and some of his students discussing plans for Chinese New Year. The students had been given English names by the teachers, both as an educational exercise and to help the teachers. Unfortunately this was done by bored people in their early twenties a long way from home. As a result the talkative student had been named “Letterman”, a sour faced student “Angel” and a chubby one “Hershey”.

The college itself was far from prestigious, a grim clutch of concrete blocks on the outskirts of a grim industrial city at the north eastern edge of China. The students allocated to the secondary English teachers course at Changchun Teachers Training College were there because they hadn’t done well enough in their exams to get in anywhere else. Many struggled with even basic English (some Cantonese speakers struggled with Mandarin). One student’s English was limited to the Manchester United squad. Mind you, many had been born to poor rural families during the Cultural Revolution, some lacked even a birth certificate due to its being considered a bourgeois affectation. Many came from towns with few or no cars and unreliable electricity. Nick was the first foreigner some had seen, and the first that most had spoken to. That they had reached college at all was a testament to their hard work and the Chinese education system and some showed talent as well as diligence. But all were products of a paternal system that valued unquestioned acceptance of received facts over creative thinking; a shock for a young man almost straight out of Oxford University.

While we were chatting a couple of well dressed people arrived, looking for native English speakers to record teaching tapes for Chinese middle schools. It turned out that ChangChun has one the largest film studios in China, including, as we were proudly informed, the second largest sound stage in Asia. I’ve yet to establish where the largest is.

And so, on my third day in China, I found myself sitting in a small booth in the middle of a huge room, nose blocked by a heavy cold, wearing oversize headphones and surrounded by trees of microphones. Over the next three days Nick and I nasally intoned the surreal phrases that only appear in language books, coaxed and cajoled by a couple of young and good looking civil servants from the ministry of education in Beijing, as well as a middle-aged sound recordist. We were cajoled to differentiate the differences between “f” and “th” by saying sets of words like “thaw”, “for” and “four” as well as intoning appropriate phrases such as “There is something wrong with my nose”. As it turned out these tapes were to be used for all middle schools in China. I feel a level of responsibility for any nasal intonations proceeding from probably hundreds of millions of Chinese students.

This continued for 3 days, punctuated by fits of giggles at the most ridiculous phrases. We were picked up each day and driven through the city to the film studios, past ancient looking trams, goods on the back of pony carts and drab looking buildings. In one especially odd case, the pony cart contained snow-covered pineapples. And since the other major industries of ChangChun are a truck plant and a blue paint factory we also were passed by a number of light blue trucks. For 3 days work we were paid more than Nick earned in a month, treated to a slap up lunch and had our tickets to Harbin bought for us. Harbin is even further north than ChangChun, the home of an “ice lantern” festival and our next destination.