Feifei and I have talked a bit about ideas of privacy in America and in China. We say the stereotypical things: I say Americans aren't accustomed to the Chinese habit of asking questions about income and marriage status; she says that Chinese people ask because they are concerned about your wellbeing and want to take care of you. She grabs me by the arm and steers me around in the grocery store; I say that American people guard their personal space very carefully. I tell her that if you bump into somebody in America, you immediately say excuse me or sorry or something; I tell her this as people nudge and elbow and sidle past us in the store. I think I want to let her understand that I feel both Chinese and American, and that am Chinese enough to understand that when she protests against me paying for entry to Bird's Nest Stadium, she's being polite, and I should insist on buying the tickets, and that my reactions to things I experience in China isn't
going to be the same as the experience of other Americans that she meets. I wanted to tell her about not minding the plate of undead headless eels still slithering over one another at my hotpot dinner with Hejun yesterday...well I don't mean to sound like I'm bragging, I just don't think I'm very typically American. This is why when she asks these curious, profound, difficult-to-answer questions, such as, "What are the conditions for Asians in America like?" and "Do you love your country?", I don't really know how to answer her.
I really like that she asks these questions, though. I told her, "我认为我们的想法很像" (an attempt to say, "I think we think alike," don't know if the grammar was right) after she responded to my question about whether she loved her country by saying that before she left for her year of teaching Chinese in Thailand, she thought that China had too many problems to love, but after her year abroad, she decided that she must love her country in order to feel compelled to improve the things she found problematic about it. I think she's very smart and thoughtful and sweet, and I really like her. Conversation in both English and Chinese is slow with her, but she's very patient with me. There was a moment as we were walking into some car safety expo at the Olympic Park (where we watched a trivia challenge for a moment) that I was fumbling for a word to describe my roommate. I was telling Feifei that Hejun had called our waiter "帅哥" (shuaige,
handsome bro) and I asked her if this were normal. She said that she was too 害羞 (haixiu, shy) to do that, and it wasn't normal. I wanted to say that Hejun was flirtatious and extroverted, and both of those words required me to stand in the park and page through my dictionary. After we found these words, Feifei got an "Aha!" look on her face and we talked about shyness and introversion for a little bit. She said she was an introvert and sounded surprised when I described myself as an extrovert. I really like how engaged she is. She's very intelligent; I can tell from our topics of conversation. I feel very lucky to have her as my teacher.
As Feifei spoke to me in English, all the while I thought of how difficult it must have been for my parents to move to America. I am ashamed to admit that I have been socialized to find the Chinese accent in English unattractive, and the Chinese style of dress fobby, and Chinese habits rude or coarse. (I guess to answer Feifei's question about what the conditions are like in America for Asians, I would have to describe how recent immigrants are viewed as social inferiors in America.) But being in China among young Chinese people - for the first time among intelligent young people instead of among expats or Chinese-American kids or old tourists or my relatives - has helped me realize how shameful and culturally contextualized these beliefs are. I am seeing so much here. I find Hejun's way of being totally flirtatious, cute and fun. She did all manner of ridiculous things over dinner, not only calling the waiter "Hey, handsome! Handsome, come here!" but
pouting when the chopsticks wouldn't come and shouting for the soup to be refilled while gesticulating with both arms stretched extremely high above her head. I found these imperious manners totally appalling when performed by my unloved uncle, he of the rotting nose tip and the special dog-beating stick in the trunk of his car, but now that I see a cute young person doing it, I find it charming. Hejun was also a funny driver, saying things like "同志门,灯是绿的!" ("Comrades, the light is green!") in a singsong voice when tooting her horn at a crowd of pedestrians crossing the street against the light. In contrast, Feifei is a little shy, a little introverted, but not serious and quick to smile. She sometimes will speak very slowly and patiently to me, and sometimes when I do something stupid (like if I write "太好！好死了!" in the comments section of her evaluation form) she will either look over her glasses at me in bemused disbelief, or
sometimes she will bend a bit with laughter and move to cover her smile with her hand. She invited me over for lunch and cooked for me today, moving around the kitchen in a very practiced and relaxed manner even though I was hovering over her and observing her in a way that would have made me feel uncomfortable if so observed, shaking spices out of a little spice spoon, washing the wok with a brisk movement of the brush, bending over to peer at the flame. We ate the dishes she cooked (radish and ribs in broth, mushu eggs and pork, bell pepper and [white root] stir fry, and mala thousand year old eggs) sitting on opposite sides of a high table at seats that were inappropriate for both of us, she on a bed that was being used as a day bed in the living room, me on a sofa about 8" too low for the table. We ate and slurped and talked with our mouths full and spat out the bones from the soup onto a piece of newspaper she'd dragged over; I felt self-conscious
and clumsy, but after a while I realized there was no need to, and I just enjoyed the delicious meal she had prepared. After lunch we sat together on a single chair and looked at her photos on her laptop. I saw that she had written "vampire" on a post-it in English, with the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling next to it, and asked her about it; this got us to talking about how cute she thought Robert Pattinson was and had me looking in my dictionary for the words "overacting," "dramatic," and "histrionic," none of which were suitable for what I wanted to say. She hung up some underwear on the yangtai and I tried to wash the dishes.
Bringing this back to my immigrant parents. All to say that I find it really delightful to be going around with my two new Chinese friends and experiencing their vastly different but equally interesting and idiosyncratic personalities. It made me think of how much of their personalities my parents must have felt they had to suppress in moving to America, where they were perceived by Americans as two of an undistinguished mass of black-haired, small-eyed, funny-talking, funny-acting dog eaters. Mom told me when they first moved to America, she tried to buy some meat at the butcher section of Lucky's, and she was called an "animal" and a "beast" by the butcher when she requested some cut of meat he didn't have. Then there was that lonely, emphatic note I found in a notepad in the garage that must have dated to the mid-1980s, in which my dad had written, "American women are BITCH. They don't care. They are BITCH," or something like that. I found this in
1998 and kept it for a while, but it's lost now. I don't know what circumstance triggered my dad's anger. So now I imagine cute and earnest Feifei in my mom's place, Feifei as pretty and young and small as my mother must have been in 1978, just looking for ingredients to make familiar dishes, and getting snarled at by a total asshole. What did the butcher see in my mom thirty years ago that would make him treat her that way? And how much senseless cruelty, or even just disinterest, could a person withstand before feeling utterly defeated?
I don't know what these feelings add up to. Hejun says she's interested in moving to Canada, because she has some friends there, and she wouldn't think it very lonely (I asked her if she would), but I feel like warning her away from moving. Things are so rich here, I want to say. You can live like you've always lived. Of course there are problems, major problems, with China, but least in the day to day, if you are a Chinese person and you grew up with your Chinese habits, you can go on enjoying your chaotic bike rides through Beijing and your delicious food everywhere and your underwear on the yangtai and your casual conversations and flirtations with strangers, because that might not exist anymore for you once you leave. What are these, thoughts of sacrifice? Idealistic thoughts of affection for a motherland that is not really mine? Second language learner's syndrome?
Who the hell knows. Must study now.
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