Life in China
When Lorraine arrived in China in 1995 she had two small boys and baby son. Her daughter Honor was born two years later. Family life in China was a surprisingly easy as the Chinese people are very family-orientated
In it was, and to a large extent still is, usual for people in Beijing to shop for food on a daily basis, usually from street stalls. Large covered areas offer a myriad of fresh produce from dawn to dusk seven days a week, but there are also smaller open air stalls which appear for just a few hours in the early morning (and sometimes in the evening) in every neighbourhood so that people can shop before and after work, and miraculously disappear. Many visitors to Beijing never have the fortune to experience the camaraderie and vibrancy of these markets as by the time they venture on to the street everything has been cleared away.
At the weekends Lorraine and her family often left the confines of the city for the countryside. By covering the distance of the a normal London commute they could reach another world, known to the Chinese as nong cun or countryside where most people still manage their own smallholding and grow their own produce.
