wu fei

A funny thing happened tonight when I went to go write an entry on my blog describing the personality of my new friend Wu Fei. I remembered that she had a blog, and I went to go check it.

The second entry down on her blog was one describing my personality. Maybe the coincidence explains in part why in only three weeks we've become such friends as we have become. We both like to observe things, particularly marvelous ridiculous things, and write things; now I have learned that we spend four to five hours a day together observing things, and then retreat to our separate computers and our separate languages to write about them.

Wu Fei is one of my two teachers at the language school. I vastly prefer her over my morning teacher, not at all because my morning teacher is subpar, but because Wu Fei is such an excellent teacher. I call my morning teacher my listening comprehension teacher, because we rush through the textbook, neither of us with any interest, because the dialogues are easy and inane, and then I probe her about her feelings on Mao Zedong, the Tiananmen Square protests, North Korea, Hui Muslims, the twenty-four seasons of the Chinese agricultural calendar, the linguistic games that Chinese people play with each other, the facial features of Westerners, and so on, and because she is a well-educated, opinionated, powerful, and straightforward person, she then delivers a 15-20 minute soliloquy and I focus on keeping up with the language. This is fine for me, since part of why I was interested in coming to China was to hear young Chinese people talk about their understandings of the world.

But Wu Fei I find a better teacher as well as a better companion. To the first, she is patient, clear, and diligent, so that her classes are just better planned and executed. She also pays much closer attention to the way I learn than my other teacher; e.g. she will cajole me into dialogue by asking hopelessly open-ended questions such as "How you do think children should be raised?" and "What is your opinion on money?" because she knows it is more challenging and useful to me to voice my opinions in Chinese than to listen to a Chinese person's soliloquy. She also expresses her delight in funny things much more passionately, so that when I relate my linguistic and cultural mistakes (like going into a shoe store and asking, very politely, for lack of better entree, "Do you sell shoes here?"), she giggles at me but in a way that makes me feel like I'm entertaining China with my physical comedy, not simply making an ass of myself. This I find very encouraging.

What makes her a good teacher also makes her a good companion. She is curious, open-minded, fair, and eager to listen to people who may know about things she hasn't experienced. She has had experiences that make her more mature than her twenty-five years, including a year spent living alone in a rural farm preparing to retake university entrance exams, and a year spent living outside of Bangkok teaching Chinese to Thai kids. These may be the pseudo-adventurous, predictable psychosocial moratoria of rich Westerners, but I think they are genuine novelties, hardships, and curiosities in a culture that doesn't prize going off on larks as mine does, and they speak to Wu Fei's character. Wu Fei has stories about living with wild pythons hiding in her bedroom, and stories about studying from 6am until midnight almost every night for a year.

She is quick and she remembers and connects things: three weeks ago I mentioned something about how I assumed that the other Americans she was teaching were evangelical Christians because they told her they reviled Obama and home-schooled their children. Later she confirmed this, and today she noted the irony of the Chinese government's desire to have foreigners learn Chinese (as a way of spreading Chinese culture) and foreigners' desire to learn Chinese (as a way of penetrating Chinese culture with Christian evangelism). Today we slowly walked around the campus of Qinghua University talking about how to stand up for yourself against catty, strong-willed people (i.e., a certain well-educated, opinionated, powerful, and straightforward teacher), which led to a long discussion on how to find the proper balance between being kind enough not to hurt other people but demanding enough to get what you want out of life. Later topics of discussion were: bananas (the term is the same in Chinese as in English for people who are yellow on the outside, white on the inside), how what was wrong with traditional Chinese ways of thinking was the same thing that was wrong with conservative American ways of thinking, Han dynasty clothing, how loudly Chinese people talk in public and how fastidiously polite Thai people are, and East Asia's highly-developed culture of cuteness. She asked me if it was true that Harvard students took all of their clothes off and ran around during stressful periods in the semester; I affirmed my own participation in this and explained to her the Western ritual of streaking.

It was 20 degrees today - a sudden snow dump in Beijing left me stranded at an airport in Shanghai yesterday for 13 hours, enough time for me to finish both Pride and Prejudice and 4/5ths of a Michael Connelly thriller - and we walked around for the two hours before twilight, occasionally pelting each other with crummy snowballs, but mostly just chatting, chatting, chatting. As much as we are both loath to speak in generalities about our respective cultures, I think we've found cultural guides in each other. I play up my American openness, and she receives it with some degree of admiration. As we passed by piles of fallen leaves on the quad, she said, "Oh, it would be so fun to roll in these leaves, but I'm so embarrassed. So many people are watching, they'll think I'm an idiot," and it was then my turn to say, "Who cares what they think? It'll be fun!" and then it was up to me to take the lead in rolling around like an idiot on the leaves. She tells me that her boyfriend doesn't let her dance, swim, or ride elephants because those activities are too sexy/dangerous, and then laments how Chinese guys are controlling of their girlfriends, and then it is my turn to bite my tongue and accept that Chinese culture puts a stronger emphasis on coupling younger and for life and with possibly not 100% perfect partners, instead of saying DTMFA as I would to an American friend.

Anyway, this is not a very good explanation of who this new dear friend is or what it is like to spend time with her. I have notes on a bunch of anecdotes that I was meaning to type up into an English language biography of her before I chanced upon her Chinese language biography of me. I will get to those some day. But for now, let me delight in this coincidence, that her teaching ability has brought my reading ability to the point where I can translate her biography about me at the end of my biography of her:

[Bananarchist]

[Bananarchist] has a J.D. from Harvard*, and I'm really a bit proud of this. Even though I have nothing to do with this, I am still proud, haha.

The first time she opened her mouth, I nearly jumped back in surprise. Her voice was so coarse, more like the voice of a man. Big feet, big hands, broad shoulders, flat butt: she didn't make an objectively very pretty girl. She said it herself: "I'm a big-footed crone, and it's hard for me to find shoes that fit in China," and "I'm a tomboy, and men aren't going to be attracted by that." Each time she uses these idiomatic Chinese phrases, I'm always left rocking back and forth with laughter.

She really cares about the environment. On the first day that I met her, she told me that she was vegetarian for ten years because she was concerned about protecting the planet, but because she loved roasted pork buns too much, she eventually gave up this noble pursuit.

After she bought a bike, she pushed it to a bike shop and said: "Please attach an animal cage!"**

When we got to the part of the textbook on buying and selling things, the homework I assigned her was to go to one of the street vendors downstairs and practice buying something. Then when we went down there, she said to one hat sellers, "Can I try dressing my head with this?"***

Another class, I asked her to give her opinions about money. She said that before she turned 27, she was very good at saving money. I said, "Can you give me an example?" She said that when she got to college, she discovered that her bed did not come with sheets, blankets, or pillows, but because she wanted to save money, she didn't go buy these things. She just put her sleeping bag on her bed and used that both as sheets and as a blanket. For a pillow, she used a plush doll stuffed into a t-shirt. This way she lived for four years.* My god, I just found that incredible. I said, "You must be the most thrifty person I know. There must not be anybody who can save money like you can." She said, "There is! My friend is even more thrifty! He didn't even have a bed,* he just used a yoga mat!" When I heard this, I was speechless.

She is such a real, admirable, and vivid person that I can't use words to describe her. On cold, still nights like these, thinking about her makes me feel wonder and warmth. Thank you, life, for giving me such feelings that I haven't felt before.****

*It only speaks to my poor Chinese speaking ability that her entry has factual errors such as this. It is not a J.D. from Harvard. It was not four years; it was hardly four weeks. Roona bought me a pillow and I found a sheet in the free pile, though I did continue to use that sleeping bag until graduation. And Albert didn't go without a bed because he was cheap, but because his room was small.
**It only speaks to my poor Chinese speaking ability that I was unable to remember the words for "bike basket."
***I am struggling to find the suitable English translation for the cultural and linguistic error I committed on this particular occasion. I used the verb for wearing clothing (chuan1) instead of the verb for wearing accessories (dai4), which was apparently very funny, because the four people buying hats from this vendor all laughed uproariously when I opened my mouth.
****Yikes, now that I've read to the end, I am thinking I might revisit my resolve to come out to her this week. Perhaps too weird. Or maybe the effusive language at the end is just idiomatic, and I only get its literal meaning? Wo bu zhi dao!!