Making peace with China

A ten-year-old sits on the second floor of a duplex and ties bed sheets together.  She's thinking about how she can use them to crawl out the window unnoticed--when her mother enters the room.

Months later, I'd try to run away again, this time while my family was in China.  I remember I packed a few RMB, some clean underwear, and maybe some White Rabbit candy or peanuts.  We didn't have many snacking options.  I don't think I brought any water--I was 10, remember?  I walked along the dirt road that wound through the sand dunes.  I was walking east.  I came to an overpass and stopped, realizing I hadn't seen any water the whole time.  I don't know how far I'd walked, but it felt like a good hour had passed.  All around me was sand--just sand.  No water.  No animals.  No people.  No plants.  I could count to ten in Mandarin, and say hello and thank-you, but I had no idea how to say, "Get me the hell out of here and back to my hometown and back to the life that my parents gave up so we could come to this hell hole."

I was only 10, and I wasn't exactly thinking of all of these things, but I could feel them.

Golmud (sometimes on the map as Ge'ermu) was at the end of the train tracks in Qinghai Province.  Back in 1988, there was no airport in Golmud, no high speed train.  A chugging steam engine took three days to go from Beijing to that little town in the middle of the desert, where criminals were sometimes sent.  As if the town were a penal colony without walls.  I'm sure it felt like the Old West in America--nomadic Mongolians and Tibetans (the "Indians") and the Han Chinese and laowai (foreigners) (the "cowboys").  It was poor and dusty and colorless, and there was plenty of moutai ("whiskey") to drink.  If Chinese people were allowed by their government to own firearms, I feel certain that there would've been a fair amount of shooting going on.

 

I think it was that first evening in Golmud, when our bus pulled up to the hotel, that Mom sat on her bed and cried.  I didn't see this.  She told me about it later.  I don't remember if I cried then.  I do remember seeing some wild white ponies on our way in, and, as a horsey girl, that sight alone made the idea of living thousands of miles from home seem not quite so bad.

But that didn't mean I wanted to be there.

I had friends back home.  My whole world was Cheyenne Road where our yellow and white house was.  Pets that had died were buried in the back yard.  My handprint was in the concrete we'd poured.  How could Mom and Dad have given that up?  It was my homeland.

I'm now nearly the same age now as my parents were back then.  The thought sometimes gives me pause.  Of course I understand better now.  But back then I was so angry.  My mind was dead set against China from minute one, and so was my heart.  I was determined to hate it, and it wasn't hard to do when we got out there, because the living conditions were worse than those I'd experience later as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  The locals, unused to seeing white people, touched my hair and my sister's constantly.  I started wearing my hoodie up with the strings tied tightly.  People said "Hello, hello!" and formed huge groups whenever we stopped to buy something at the market, or look at something at a tourist site.  We were stared at the way amoebas are examined under a microscope.  And China was gross!  People hawked snot and spat all the time!  Their cigarettes stank.  The men had long, dirty fingernails.  Sheep were butchered steps away from our dining room, and after walking around their bloody corpses, I had no appetite for the stuff.  Yak milk smelled funny and tasted funny.  The tofu was tasteless and looked disgusting.  The sweet and entertaining cook had some strange ideas, like putting cloves in the spaghetti sauce.  The bread grew mold at an alarming rate.  Beer had dead flies in the bottom of the bottles.  My sister and I existed on white rice and Chinese fruit juice that came in little green boxes.  We ate peanuts and White Rabbit candy and whatever luxuries came from home (my favorites were peanut butter and oatmeal).  There was one channel, CCTV.  The only bright spot were the interesting commercials, and the episodes of "Journey to the West".  Our newspapers came through DHL weeks after the news was fresh.  And of course, there was no internet or Skype back then.  The President could've been assassinated, and we would have never known.  Especially since the Chinese would've kept it from us if they'd found out first.  I feel pretty sure that that's true.

 

When it was 2013 and I'd accepted my job here in Shanghai, my dad smiled and shook his head.  "I can't believe you're going to China, Heather."

But here I am, and nearly two years later.  I've learned that Shanghainese are some of the rudest people in the world--they push, they shove, they cut in line, they never say "Excuse me"--but also some of the sweetest people--students give me gifts of candy and fruit juice, exclaiming, sincerely, about how great I am and how much they love my classes.  I've been invited to a Chinese home for Mid-Autumn Festival.  I've made some good friends with locals, both at work and outside of work.  And I know that some of those friendships are some of the most genuine I've had in my whole life.

China is not America.  That is the truth in 800 different ways.  But my mom is right--there is a sweetness about China that does not exist in America.  There is an appreciation for learning, for study, and a respect for teachers that I feel is lacking in my own country.  I have left my wallet accidentally in a market and half a dozen people yelled at me in Chinese, one man running up to me with it in his hand, grinning.

I'm not saying China is better.  I wasn't always wrong.  China can be gross!  I still dodge lugees on the sidewalk, and I still see men peeing on the street all the time--in broad daylight, next to main roads.  I saw an eight-year-old girl pooping about 10 feet from the gate to my apartment complex.  The side streets are still slippery with rotting vegetables and the blood of freshly butchered turtles and frogs.  There are sidewalks covered in dog poop and oily noodle water, discarded in the gutter.  And then there are sidewalks in Jing'an or the former French Concession, buffed to sparkling--neighborhoods I could never afford to live in or even to shop in.

And I'm not saying that America should be a Communist country--far from that!  But this experience in China has been my own.  It was my choice to come here this time.  And the experiences I've had have changed my mind and my heart about so many things that I thought and felt as an angry 10-year-old.



Qingting 13 August 2014

I was on my way to record audio at EF headquarters, walking along Nanjing Xi Lu and listening to my headphones.  Voice acting is fun for me, and today's session would be mostly dedicated to the Rio project.  EF is the official English language provider for the 2016 Rio Olympics, and I feel proud to be contributing to that.

As I walked, I noticed a man coming toward me on the sidewalk.  His yellowish robes, shaved head, and ready smile seemed very familiar and friendly as we made eye contact.  My family and I had visited some monasteries and had met a few Buddhist monks here and there during our time in Qinghai in the late 1980s.

While still about 50 feet away from each other, I noticed he was holding a small pink book in one hand and a little yellow card in the other.  I saw a couple of Shanghainese swerve widely around him, as if he had a disease.  I wasn't surprised at their reaction, but it still hurt a little.  After all, this guy had renounced everything in his life to follow Buddha--couldn't people treat him like a human being?

I smiled at the monk as we passed each other, and he handed me a little card.  It was a cheesy holograph of the Guanyin Boddhisattva.  I was familiar with her--a being of compassion that figured as prominently in The Journey to the West as Athena did in The Odyssey.  A boddhisattva, for those of you who aren't sure, is a being that had achieved enlightenment (like a buddha), but has stayed on Earth to help others do the same.  The closest thing in Christian religion?  Sort of a guardian angel.

I'd barely taken a quick look at the card before the monk pushed his pink book under my nose.  I noticed that others had written their names in the book (in Chinese characters, of course).  I think he meant to pray for me?  A pen appeared from one of the folds in the monk's robe, and I said, "Oh!  Okay, I'll sign your book."  We smiled at each other again, and as I was signing, he slipped a bracelet around my left wrist.  It was made of brown and tan marbled plastic beads, with a silver buddha on one side and a Chinese character on the other (I later learned this was the Mandarin for buddha). 

"Oh!"  I said, delighted, "thank you.  Xie xie!" 

"Bu keqi," he said, and pointed at the next column in the book.  I noticed that there were numbers.  200 and above.

Something clicked in my brain.  He wanted money.  Well, that's how a lot of religions work, I thought.  Amazingly, I wasn't getting frustrated about this.  I pulled out my little wallet.  It was a cross between burlap and canvas.  My sister and I had bought them at Yuyuan Gardens--a total tourist trap--for 10 kuai (or $1.50) each.  Mine had Chinese characters on it that read:  Qian bu shi wenti.  Wenti shi mei qian.  Money is not problem.  Problem is no money.

When I started to pull out 20 kuai (I knew that bracelet couldn't have been worth more than that), the monk waved his hand back and forth:  no no no!  "One hundred," he said in English.  I was pretty sure he'd peeped into my wallet and knew I had the money.

"Oh, God," I mumbled.  "Okay, okay."  100 RMB is around $17 USD.  I handed him the note.  All RMB is stamped with Mao's visage, which I thought was really funny right about now, considering Mao had tried to shut down Buddhism during the Cultural Revolution. 

In spite of shelling out more than I'd wanted to, I couldn't stop smiling at this guy, and I continued to feel delighted for the next half hour or so. 

Later that same day after work, I was walking to the train.  Passing through the tunnels was always interesting around Wujiaochang.  A recessed circle--a sort of courtyard--was sunken beneath the freeways overhead, and The Egg--an interesting oblong shape made of woven metal--was all lit up overhead.  Blue and green lights chased each other over The Egg's entire 100-foot length.  People bustled here and there, holding fancy paper bags with Uncle Tetsu's cheesecake inside, or plastic bags with takeout in them.  The ladies wore bright green and yellow dresses with jungle patterns, tiptoeing on their high heels like exotic birds.  Men held their girlfriends' pink handbags without the slightest hesitation, and other men looked like dandy gay models in their super-skinny red cropped jeans and tilted fedoras.

There were a few old people I always saw--grandmas trying to sell little things they'd knitted or men trying to sell puffed rice or corn cooked up earlier in the day.  One old guy was always shirtless, sitting on some steps and playing a Chinese flute--quite well, I might add.  His music sounded like old China--imagine one of those traditional black and white watercolor paintings, the misty mountains and waterfalls of Guilin.  I'd given this guy money before, but wasn't passing close enough to him today.

There was another old dude I'd passed before, a guy with tufty white hair and a broad, childlike grin who wove interesting animals out of palm fronds.  Dragons, birds, and crickets dangled on the long palm "leashes" he'd somehow woven into their backs.  He held these in his hands like balloon strings.

I'd talked to him before going home to the States for 3 weeks.  Our conversation, all in Mandarin (I say proudly) consisted of me bartering the price down to 10 kuai each and telling him I couldn't buy them now but would buy three when I went home to visit my family in America.

However, when the time came for me to pack up and leave, I couldn't find the old man. 

The same night I met the monk, I ran into the palm animal guy.  We smiled big smiles at each other, and I walked right up to him, my eyes on a specific one.

"Shi kuai, shi kuai!"  he said, remembering our price, even though it had been nearly two months since I'd seen him.  "Qingting," he continued, noticing where my eyes went. 

"Qingting," I replied, unnecessarily pointing to the dragonfly.  I handed him my 10 RMB with both hands, a sign of respect, and he laughed, one small little laugh.  I walked away, delighted, like a child holding her first balloon.