A Very Long Engagement and Art

Video chat today from dorm in Shanghai

Today, 6th of September 2012, Jinlin flew from Xinxiang to Shanghai with big bags. She is moving away from her childhood home in Xinxiang where she has been living with her mother almost all of her life. This summer she was accepted to study interior design in Shanghai School of Design (上海設計學院, Shànghǎi shèjì xuéyuàn) which is part of Chinese Academy of Art. She has today moved to live in a dormitory at the Zhangjiang campus of the school. It's a big move, she is happy to take this step and I am happy for her. She has worked really hard and deserves the place.

Jinlin is talented artist.
Charcoal work from 2010

Early on in our relationship we were discussing our careers and it become apparent that Jinlin is studying very hard in her high-school and art studies. She described her typical day in email in November 3, 2011:

Honey. I get up at 6 in the morning, get to school at 7. After school, at two thirty in the afternoon to studio painting. Eat at 6 in the afternoon, evening 7 painting until 10 pm, every day of the week. And Sunday afternoon I go to study English just for good communication with you. Although every day is like this, I have very little time with friends. Just watch me when to rest. Everyday I repeat, learning, and painting, although very hard, but I'm doing. Because I have too much can thing, I miss you very much.

It might be difficult to believe, but after this email things soon got even more busy for her studies. In early spring 2012 she moved to a special boarding school "一中" (One China) focusing on studying to the dreaded university entrance examinations that would take place in June. 10 million students every year take this examination and there are university places only for a fraction of them so the competition and pressure to succeed are intense. Its not only competition between individuals: also schools get more benefits if their students get more university places, so both schools and students resort to extreme methods for pushing the limits. In Xiaogang students were using intravenous drips of nutrients during their daily marathon study-sessions to keep them focused and effective for extended hours. Also bribing for good grades happens in the corrupted China.

Students with intravenous drips at Xiaogang

Jinlins decision to move to the One China school created significant challenges for our remote relationship. Some of my friends had been already before this skeptical about possibility of adequately maintaining a relationship with such distance and time. I had been happily explaining them that we can actually have very good and frequent communication with Jinlin using video-chat, emails and exchange of pictures and files. But with the One China school all that changed. She stayed at the school studying from early morning to 10 pm in the evening and was very tired when returning to the dorm. She had no computer access any more and could only send occasional Chinese text messages with her cell phone chat software. Instead of communicating an hour per day with video, there were often several days in a row where she did not reply to any of my messages and even on best days the text chats were short and terse. Gone away were also the plans to visit her during the spring 2012.

"Gold fish", oil painting by Jinlin

Furthermore, the move to focus on the entrance examination was accompanied with her decision to apply to Chinese art universities, with the implication of staying in China at least to the end of year 2012. Before this decision she had planned to come to live together with me in Finland in the end of summer 2012, to study Finnish language here and then to apply for places in Finland's highly acclaimed design universities. When starting to write with her in October 2011, the end-of-summer-2012 target already seemed like almost too far away and now that was being pushed even further.

Jinlin is talented in arts and enthusiastic about her planned career in design. I value that very much. I understand her decisions - which she told to be difficult as well - and I want to encourage and support her in her studies and her career. Furthermore, the intense studying for the entrance exam in the spring did not leave her enough time to increase her skills in English or Finnish languages, making coming here according to our original schedule a less viable option.

A Very Long Engagement

Still, there is no denying that the long months of little communication were tough for the relationship. I remember occasionally thinking: What does it mean to "have a girlfriend" if I can't touch her, see her, hear her or read from her? Do I really have a girlfriend or not? Does this relationship really make sense? I was trying to think that soldiers in wars are in an even worse situation with months away from their loved ones and in danger of getting killed every day. I was remembering the great French film A Very Long Engagement, where a woman is losing her man in the first world war and starts a long and stubborn attempt to find him. I reminded myself of our agreement with Jinlin that I would travel to China to be with her in the end of July. I was reading our old emails and chat-messages in absence of new ones.

And in the end the dreaded examination come and was over  and more sun started to shine to our communication and relationship. The goodness of early times come back. And in the end I did travel to China and meet her and have great moments of love and growing together.

She said after the exam that it did not go quite as well as she had hoped and that it was possible that she would not get place in a Chinese university. She said that in that case coming to Finland according to our original plan would be a good idea once more. It was a quite moral torment for me trying to wish her good success in the exam scores while knowing that lower scores would mean living together with her earlier. And in the end she did get good scores and a place in good university and she is happy about it and I am happy about it as well and happy about her happiness.

Work that won an art competition and was
printed in cover of a Chinese art magazine

So what are our current plans for getting together? I will visit China again in end of October and we try to get a visa for Jinlin to visit Finland immediately after that. I am working in a field of software development where I would probably get a job in Shanghai as well, but my boys are still only 12 and 9 years old and I want to stay in Finland to be with them at least as long as they are still children. Jinlin will gear up her English studies in Shanghai and I will continue to study Chinese here, preparing for our living together. Regarding her current thoughts about when that might be, I wrote her recently:

[...] I am of course very interested in when you can come with me to live in Finland. I'm sorry, if it is difficult for you to answer. But I think I deserve to know when I can expect to be together with you, even if the plan is preliminary and might change. Our love is good, but it is difficult for me to be so far from you, because I miss you much. I love you very much, I hope you are not planning to stay in China many years. If you want to learn a complete a university degree in China, I am afraid that might be too long time for me to wait. Although I much respect your willingness to have a good education. Please tell me dear what you think. I miss you.

She replied:
[...] Do not worry, I'll tell you what I think.

What can I say? It would feel stupid to reply just "well, tell me then" and I hesitate to push for answers. I know we have mutual visits planned and I know the next big move will not be at least for the next three months. So I'll wait, try not to worry and enjoy the happy aspects of remote relationship and other nice things in my life. At least Shanghai is easy access from Finland, flights are surprisingly cheap, and our lovely video-chats are once more alive and well.

Watercolour painting by Jinlin