The euphoria of being here has started to wear off as I have just realised I am actually at work. Which means pursuing my solitary compositions, and in an alien language. Without my lover beside me I am facing a lot of conversations which consist of ‘that one – thanks’ with attendant pointing. But there are plenty of activities in Beijing for the lost foreigner, and I am not going to wallow in too much labour.

Lost foreigners are all over the place. I have been noticing them more as I start to learn how to filter the busyness of Beijing’s streets into useful data. It is interesting that Chinese people openly stare at me but other foreigners prefer to pretend I don’t exist. It’s like if they can’t see me then they can somehow have China all to themselves. There is some kind of expat law about not acknowledging other expats which is familiar to me from Alice Springs – a hard town of exiles where it takes at least a year to get a facial expression out of most ‘old-timers,’ and three years is old.

At the same time I have been feeling intensely observed, which is eerie because the surveillance is somehow permissive. It is the exile’s prerogative to reinvent herself in the fresh, mystifying air of another culture, and I am getting glimpses into how that works here. If everything you do is going to be strange, eccentric behaviour, discussed with amusement and interest, you might as well behave insanely. I walked past a couple of Spanish backpackers in the street the other day who were saying ‘god, to them we must look like extraterrestrials’ and I wanted to tell them it would soon feel entirely liberating.

It’s tempting to be naughty, which is a childish response to not knowing the right way to behave, which social illiteracy is more disabling, I think, than not being able to read. But a bit of willingness to be the laowai, the idiot foreigner, helps. I suppose it’s about having that quality of teachability, and a keg of patience for yourself and others, even when you feel like you’re half invisible and half glow-in-the-dark.

Sigh. Work is always there for me, and I can always be slightly more articulate in this arena than the street. So let me end with a couple of announcements.

1. The page proofs went off yesterday and soon I’ll be getting covers back from UQP for the new book. The title? Gone.

Gone is a good short word which has a lot of handy ambiguous meanings (and I hope it doesn’t sound too genre – the typeface will make all the difference). Also it nicely rounds out the answered prayer of the damn thing being out of my life… at least from now until March, when I hope to be able to talk about it with affection.

2. You will be able to catch a short story of mine in Scribe’s New Australian Stories anthology which is coming out in December. As part of the same application I get a week’s intensive short story workshop at Varuna later this year with the awesome Cate Kennedy and Robin Hemley from the Iowa genius factory. Lucky, lucky me. All the more reason to be more teachable!

Proceeding humbly.