Copenhagen to Reykjavik by way of the South China Seas
I’m squeezed next to a stocky rugby-player of a man on Icelandair flight FI-212 from Copenhagen to Iceland’s Keflavik Airport. Two hours into the flight I can barely feel my right arm. This guy is literally spilling out over the edge of his seat, and he can’t get the table down all the way so he rests it atop his beer gut. Mostly, it stays there at a slightly inclined angle unless he’s eating, in which case, his lady companion leans in from her window seat and spoon-feeds him one delicate bite at a time. Throughout the whole four hour flight he nurses a drink in his right hand, mostly Jack Daniels or cognac. He looks like he hasn’t had a decent sleep in days but I have the impression this is quite a normal look for him.
Apart from when he’s eating, his companion, Xu Min, sits transfixed at the window. She’s his absolute antithesis: a skinny little Chinese woman with red-streaked, feathered black hair in a slightly-outdated Kirstey Alley circa Cheers cut; I guess her to be in her early twenties but she could be even younger. 3000 metres below in the dim Icelandic twilight, you can just about make out the outlines of the coast, a few glimmering lights, and the white crests of rough waves across the limitless expanse of the icy North Atlantic Ocean beyond.
Bárður hails from the an Icelandic fishing village, a small peninsula off Iceland’s coast with a tiny population of 3,000; mostly fishermen and a few sheep farmers. I guess him to be around forty-five, but his face is so deeply lined and weathered he could well be into his fifties. You can almost see him on a pitching fishing trawler happily gutting cod and haddock as the seawater sprays in his leathery face.
Xu Min on the other hand, has the clearest, most unblemished skin I think I’ve ever seen; it’s almost translucent like bone china, and it seems that she might literally shatter at the slightest sneeze; yet I am sure she is far tougher than she looks. Tell-tale signs are her fingernails cut short like a boys’ with chipped pink nail polish, a dim blue semi-circle under her tired eyes, and the cuff of her woollen sweater is slightly frayed; she’s worked hard in her life until now, she’s careful with her money. Whiskey by whiskey, peanut by slow peanut, I unravel Bárður and Xu Min’s story.
There’s no tenderness between them, no handholding, not even the trace of a sparkle in their few glances, and yet they have been married little more than 48 hours. I can see the advantage from Bárður’s point of view; but what’s in it for her? Money? A better life? Bárður pays Xu little or no heed at all. Xu, on the other hand, seems contented to stare out the window, surely wondering what the hell she has gotten herself into. Bárður tells me that he’s been living in a tiny village on the South China coast for the last eight months working on a project building deep-sea fishing vessels; this village, let’s call it Zhu Lo Village, is apparently where they met under auspicious circumstances.
He’s into his fifth or sixth cognac and he’s finally fully lubricated. He says, almost talking of her like the second-hand Harley he just acquired: ‘Yeah, met her one night at the Shi Shi Karaoke Club. She can’t sing worth a damn, but she’s a great cook-you know dumplings, noodles, stuff like that. Just as long as it’s not too spicy, she knows I can’t stand it when it’s too hot.’
‘So how do you communicate?’ I ask.
‘Bit of English, touch of Chinese, a lot of pointing,’ he chuckles, pinching her arm-she doesn’t even flinch. I get the feel that he’s almost happy about the fact they can’t really talk.
‘How did you even let her know that you wanted her to come back to Iceland with you?’
‘Oh, a friend translated.’ (Actually it was the owner of the karaoke bar.) ‘Xu insisted on getting married. So first I took her to Hong Kong, we got hitched up. In Hong Kong we could do the ceremony both in English and Cantonese; now we’re finally here, and I’m dying for some smoked Icelandic lamb.’ Something tells me that Xu isn’t going to develop a taste for it.
They know absolutely nothing about each other’s culture; nor, it appears to me, do they share anything in common at all. And by the look of them both, it’s hard to imagine that this might be about something like-well, animal attraction.
Bárður can just about manage, ‘You like? Hau bu hau?‘ in Chinese, pointing at the sprawling Icelandic highlands and the glacier that shimmers in the pink dusk. She nods coolly. I do hope that a love of nature will keep her going in the years to come, but my gut tells me Bárður and Xu Min is a tsunami waiting to happen. Now, years later, I’ve decided to have a peek at what makes these worlds-apart marriages work-or not. And mostly, how proud Chinese and Thai women manage to survive in a culture, a climate, a society, so far away from their own – in Iceland, a sprawling volcanic land steeped in Viking folklore and archaic language on the very edge of the Arctic Circle.
A Microcosmic Thai Sisterhood
Fifteen years ago, when I first came to Iceland, outside of the main drag of Laugarvegur in downtown Reykjavik, or in designated tourist spots like the infamous Geysir, the Golden Waterfall, or Þingvellir, the seat of Europe’s oldest parliament, you’d hardly hear a word of any other language spoken. In those early transitional years, before the influx of immigrants, even I, a Viking-looking European, would attract wide-eyed gawks at coffee shops, kiosks and petrol stations.
Things have changed dramatically since then; now, you barely cross the threshold of the main shopping mall without hearing English, Polish, German, Spanish, Thai, Tagalog or Chinese. Iceland’s economic boom of the late nineties and early 2000s (while my Icelandic wife and I were serenely living abroad) attracted thousands of immigrants who literally flooded into the country looking for greener pastures.
Today, Iceland, a micro nation with around 300,000 inhabitants, is home to over 30,000 foreign nationals, including Poles, Russians, Thai, Filipino and Chinese. Attitudes are slowly changing, but some habits are hard to break; stereotypes even more so. Reykjavik’s International Culture House, which assists foreigners in all manner of immigration and cultural assimilation, now has translators from over fifty countries and can translate over 65 languages into Icelandic. That’s no mean feat for such a small country.
Of the 1000 plus Thai residents of Iceland, over 850 are women, and most of them wives of Icelandic men. In multi-cultural Britain you’ll find an Indian and Chinese restaurant in every small town-all the way to John o’ Groats; today, in Iceland, you’ll find Thai restaurants have sprouted up everywhere-all this in less than fifteen years. Local Thai residents secretly chuckle about it: it’s not real Thai food, it’s made for Icelandic palates; in fact, it has no bloody kick at all, they say.
Petra Petcharee Deluxsana, a Thai resident of Iceland since the early nineties, tells me how difficult things were for her in the beginning: ‘It was the simple things that got to me: the food-I thought it was bland and tasteless and always brought along a ziploc full of chopped chillies in my hand bag. My parents-in-law thought I was quite mad. Or rice: here nobody eats rice, and the rice you can buy in the supermarket is dreadful. A box of Uncle Ben’s quick-cook rice couldn’t even feed half a Thai family for one day. But now things are getting better, there are a few Asian supermarkets. There’s even a Thai store where they fly in fresh galangal and lemongrass every week. Course, it’s bloody expensive. But what can you expect? This is Iceland.’
I meet Petra and her friend Aree (another Bangkok native who’s lived in Iceland for twelve years) in Hresso, a once traditional Icelandic bakery near the main drag of Reykjavik’s downtown, where now you can also get a quick plate of Phad Thai along side pizza and your regular fare. Once, Reykjavik stay-at-home-housewives would stroll their prams through the park and stop in here to get a cup of coffee and couple of kleina (traditional Icelandic doughnuts), there were chocolate layer cakes in the windows and Icelandic newspapers lined the walls, retirees would sit there for hours nursing their coffees. Now, it caters to tourists, widescreen Viking soccer parties and most of the employees don’t even speak Icelandic.
‘The society has changed dramatically,’ say Petra. ‘In many ways for the better-well, at least for us.’ When she refers to ‘us’, I know she’s talking about her extended community/family of Thai women in Iceland. There’s no official Buddhist temple in Iceland, but Petra and her Thai sisterhood set one up in a converted Icelandic home many years ago. They even have a full-time Buddhist monk on call, flown in all the way from the outskirts of Bangkok. Aree tells me that over 90% of the Thais in Reykjavik attend Buddhist services regularly.
‘Were a close-knit community of friends, we stick together, help each other,’ says Aree. ‘Anything happens, your friends are there in a flash.’
‘Do you have Icelandic friends?’
‘No,’ says Aree, ‘Most of us have very few Icelandic lady friends. The few we do have tend to be those that have lived abroad, have a wider world vision.’
‘What about your in-laws? Were they accepting of you?’ I ask Petra.
‘Well,’ she sighs, then smiles. ‘They mean well. They argue a lot. In the beginning it was…close to impossible. Over the years I’ve gotten used to certain things. I learned Icelandic, it helps a little, but still us Thais can never really full integrate into Icelandic culture. One thing is the language, but you know, I hate to say it, but we just look so-different.’ She pauses, ‘Not like you.’ Of course, she means little-old-fair-hared-me.
Petra reflects for a minute. In my mind I imagine her in her family home in Bangkok, chattering away with her mother and aunties: ‘You know, in Thailand, we visit our families any time. Life revolves around the family-mothers, fathers, grandparents, uncles. A daughter is responsible to her parents to make sure they are healthy, get enough to eat. But here, my in-laws have made a point of telling me not to drop by before twelve on any given day. After a while, you just, um-give up, you know?’
I ask Petra about her husband. ‘My husband’s a good guy, but, you know, he’s Icelandic,’ she says. I can’t help but chuckle despite myself.
Aree blushes, ‘Mine’s still young. I think I’m one of the lucky ones. He’s only thirty-five.’
‘What?’ bursts Petra. ‘Only thirty-five?’
Aree smiles contentedly, ‘Yes. His family has accepted me into their fold, they ask me for my opinion all the time. But I know, it’s not common here.’
Petra still can’t believe that Aree’s husband is so young. I’m sure they’ll be talking about this long after I’ve left the coffee shop. Possibly it’s time to make a hasty exit.
There’s one thing that Petra tells me she is entirely happy about in Iceland, and that is the peace and quiet, the restful pace of life. ‘In many ways,’ she says, ‘this is an idyllic country, not stifling hot like Thailand. When I take a walk across the countryside where hot springs meet the open sea, I remember how lucky I am to have experienced such beauty, such pure, pollution-free air. Sometimes in Bangkok you can barely breathe, the smog is everywhere. And the prices! I would say Bangkok is just as expensive as Reykjavik now-perhaps more so since the economic collapse.’
‘So both of you are fine with living here? Don’t you miss things back home? The family?’
‘Sure,’ says Petra reflecting. ‘I haven’t been back in five years…but that’s okay. For me, the most important thing is my children. They’re my home now. Even if, when they got older and they moved to say, Africa, I’d have to be near them.’ Somehow, in saying this, Petra has distilled her-and I’m guessing, many of her sisters’ lives-in a nutshell. This Thai sisterhood has created its own sense of the traditional family, between their children, adopted sisters and their Buddhist temple, they have all they really need. I wonder, would we fare so well under the same circumstances?
It’s All About the Weans and the Bairns
Recently, a friend of the wife’s family, Gudrun, who lives in another of these 300 hundred-strong fishing villages in the sparse north of Iceland, told me of a new acquisition to the community: the young Chinese wife of thirty-something Icelandic truck driver. He convinced her to come back with him to the ‘good life’ in Iceland, child in tow. Like Xu Min, this woman had never been outside China before-possibly never even seen the bright lights of Shanghai or Beijing; and although she speaks passable English, she has made no effort whatsoever to integrate. She drifts between cable TV, the supermarket and dramatic views of the North Atlantic from her double-glazed bay windows.
Gudrun’s always pottering in her garden, and every day she sees the young woman passing at five o’clock on the nail. Ling is on her daily walk down to the harbour with the little boy in his pram. Ling looks so forlorn, staring out to sea, almost as if she’s expecting a Chinese ocean liner to roll in at any moment.
One day, not too long ago, Gudrun invited her into her home, snuggled down to a cosy chat over tea and kleina, only to discover that Ling is desperate beyond all measure. Just three months into her countryside adventure, and she is about ready to explode. Under normal circumstances she’d already be on a plane back to Beijing – but there’s one problem: her husband refuses to let her leave. Apparently, even with a divorce, she couldn’t get custody of the child. So, for all intents and purposes the girl is stuck between the sprawling ocean and the towering volcanic mountains.
I think back again to Bárður and Xu Min, and I wonder, years later, did they manage to keep things together? Has Xu Min learned Icelandic? I could bet you a million to one that he hasn’t bothered to learn any Chinese, but maybe I’m just cynical. But one thing I now know for sure: it’s absolutely all about the children.
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Photo credits
Neate Photos on Flickr
O Palsson on Flickr
Adrian Purser on Flickr
Diabaer on Flickr
