Laughing in Chinese

by Lily Weed

Note: This essay was written for The New School University’s International Student Services 2011 essay contest. The theme of the contest was: “Global Exchanges: Stories of Your Journey from Here to There.” It was originally published in a printed booklet and in a PDF version on their website (available along with other essays by clicking here). It was awarded second place.

In the fall of 2007, a few days after my 24th birthday, my boyfriend Owen and I moved from the clean air and quiet of the American Northwest to Yichang, a small city of four million in the rural Chinese province of Hubei.

We arrived on Mid-Autumn Festival. At the airport a woman with unblinking eyes and thick lipstick held a photograph of me. We were the only foreigners at the small airport but still she looked doubtful when we approached, turning the image around to examine it again, “You are so young!” She said, looking back to me from the paper. This was our coordinator.

That evening our employing high school insisted on a welcome dinner and, despite our jetlag, we obliged. At dinner we met the other two foreign teachers. Both American men; one in his early twenties and new to China, the other – our team leader – thirty, had been in the country a few years.

We ate in a private room at a restaurant in a local hotel. The table was round but still there was etiquette about seating arrangement. The vice principal sat in the corner furthest from the door with the fullest view of the room, as honored guests we sat on his right. The woman next to me spoke excitedly about having us teach English at her school and told us to call her Green. I nodded, assuming she was somehow affiliated with the high school.

I had visited China when I was younger and in the months preceding our move I’d tried to inform Owen about customs that could catch a foreigner off guard. One I’d neglected to mention was the toasting of baijiu (literally “white liquor”), a foul-smelling clear beverage with high alcohol content. Green toasted us several times, electing to drink yogurt over baijiu she pressured us to agree to teach classes. The room was loud and full of strange smells. The colors of the food, tablecloth and clothing seemed to blur together.

“We don’t know,” we told her as she pushed harder. Eventually the team leader stepped in and told her we’d discuss her plans later.

That night a portly man with a red face named Xiang explained that he was a Party official at the school and that it was his job to be our friend in Yichang. After dinner we declined to go to a karaoke parlor with the other teachers so Xiang walked us home. As we moved through strange streets overflowing with evidence of change – scaffolding, piles of bricks, sand, honking shiny-new taxis on the wrong sides of the street – strangers asked Xiang questions.

“There are not many foreigners in Yichang,” he explained. Along the sidewalk we passed row after row of prostitute parlors. As though purchased from a catalogue, each was identical: blue glass sliding doors printed with bold red characters. On the sidewalk, unevenly spaced, branchless trees spanned the length of the block. Above us people shot fireworks from their windows. “Today is a holiday,” Xiang said as we watched fireworks explode near the thick bundles of wires strung along the street. We turned through a narrow gate and found ourselves in the courtyard of two cement slab buildings. We said good night to Xiang, pulled ourselves up three flights of stairs and, nearly overtaken by exhaustion, we were finally home.

We lay in bed watching as the vibrations from the fireworks loosened clumps of dust on our light fixture. It fell like snow, dancing through the light from the single operating bulb. Our bodies were stiff from 48 hours of travel but our minds raced from over stimulation. The windows rattled, loose in their sills, and a strange smell permeated from the pillows. At around 3 AM, when we’d finally drifted off to sleep, a spider leapt from the ceiling onto my face. Two hours later, as though started at the wave of the conductor’s wand, the metal-smithing shop outside our window and the remodeling one floor above began a melodic cacophony of sledgehammers, electric saws, and welding.

After a morning of cleaning and purging, the apartment was nearly empty and still filthy. Xiang came early that afternoon and informed us that we needed to come with him to Wuhan, the provincial capital, for our medical exams (an integral part of our resident permit applications). We boarded a bus only to learn it would be a five-hour trip each way and that we would stay overnight.

In Wuhan we became survivors. We survived a night in a tiny hotel room where everything – from the dirty carpet and the padded headboard to the sheets and towels were so scarred with cigarette burns it almost seemed like a theme. We survived the taxi ride to the hospital during which, after a missed turn, the driver floored it for three blocks, going backwards the wrong way on a one-way street through heavy oncoming traffic. At the hospital we survived chest x-rays, blood samples, ultrasounds, and urine tests where the cups sat uncovered on a tray with 50 other samples and the bathrooms contained no soap or stall doors. Late that night, while we sat on the bus exhausted and recapping our journey thus far, an irrepressible urge to laugh overtook us and we giggled hysterically for miles. In the seat across from us Xiang giggled too.

Back in Yichang we slowly began to understand our surroundings. We walked for hours in every direction until we gained a sense of our neighborhood as a community beyond what we’d seen the first night. We learned Green was a businesswoman unrelated to our school. She hoped to use us for her expensive English classes. We taught an adult speaking class twice at her school but the students seemed distracted. Later Green explained, “They say you are very young.”

The adventures piled up quickly. All five senses were constantly overwhelmed and we were rarely comfortable. Without warning, the water in our apartment would shut off for days. Access to electricity was random. Everywhere we looked things were changing. A restaurant we’d eaten at for weeks suddenly shut and three days later reopened as a laundromat.

The school had a sideways way of telling us to do things. We quickly became aware that their suggestions were not optional. After four months the younger American had had enough and headed home. Things were never quite what they were presented to be, and our contracts, we learned, were not definitive. Like our laughter on the bus returning from Wuhan, we chose to find the difficulties entertaining, and, though we were occasionally frustrated, we searched for humor instead of dwelling on problems. Each exploitative activity or inconvenience added to our amusement.

The young American was replaced by a young South African. After a week of classes at the high school we found him huddled under an awning near our apartments struggling to light a cigarette, crying. The team leader also suffered a breakdown, eventually refusing to speak with Xiang or the coordinator.

Through the comforts we found in small things we became more than survivors – The scallion pancake lady who refused to let us eat her product cold. Watching the noodle man twist, throw and pound his dough. The discovery of peanut butter at a local grocery store. Sitting by the river watching boats pass. Walking in new parts of the city – these simple activities allowed us moments of peace and reflection.

We learned that despite the differences, Chinese people are like people everywhere else – many are very kind; others are not. Perhaps it’s because we were young and more ready to laugh than most foreigners but everywhere we went people giggled at us. It gave us the impression that people understood that a lot about the world is ridiculous. In Yichang, we found it was the foreigners, overcome with cultural vertigo, too certain about their own cultural ideas, who made our lives most difficult. Taking on extra classes to cover for the South African, parleying messages to the team leader. This was also the case during our second year in the modern, international city of Nanjing.

After two years we moved away from China. We walked across Spain, relaxed in Thailand and ate Thanksgiving in the quiet warmth of my family’s log home in snowy Alaska. We missed the excitement of China where we’d learned that all experiences should be interpreted with humor and humility, that discomforts cannot be taken personally and where through the challenges of daily life we raised our levels of tolerance and our understanding of the world as a whole.

In September we returned. Not for more adventures, though they are sure to follow, but to live in an environment that encourages and requires self-awareness as only a truly foreign place can. This year, though once again in a smaller city, we have little contact with foreigners and find ourselves more comfortable than ever before here in China.