Aren't We Lovely

You can’t help it, it’s deep and it’s bleeding, and it’s all we need; it’s love. Living in Xizhou, I see the navigations and mechanisms of Chinese love everywhere I go. There’s fiancée love. Every day on my way to work I walk past couples posing for a 23-year old in joggers crouching with his DSLR, while an unhappy assistant holds up a light reflector. They’re engaged, and they will stop at nothing to have the world know of their undying affection for the other. Their garb ranges from traditional Chinese wedding attire to bedazzled matching sweat suits. Half the time the bride is dressed to the nines, hair extensions flapping in the wind, while the groom smokes a cigarette in a sports coat and adidas. I’ve seen a woman clamber atop her man, makeup sweating off in the sun while he holds two thumbs up to the camera, a cigar jauntily perched upon his lower lip. This all the while holding up an elderly farmer sitting in a truck he’s had since ’62 (coincidentally, the last year he had any patience to suffer fools). Rain or shine, there they are. China’s lucky in love, frolicking in a rice field, and to hell to those who care enough to stand around and judge.

 There are Chinese boyfriends and their unique brand of chivalry. Patience beyond belief as they take photo after photo of their beloved, each pose more absurd than the last. And they’ll hold your bag. It’s as ubiquitous in Xizhou as it was when I saw it in Beijing. Walk down any street in China and you’ll see half the men sporting everything from Longchamp to Louis Vuitton. But these unspoken rules of behavior reveal a truth, and it’s that Chinese boyfriends are attentive, and they are kind. I’ve sat down at a restaurant and seen my friends’ boyfriend immediately grab her bowl to serve her some rice. Her tea is replenished without her even noticing, and her bill is paid at the end.  

My first week here I was caught in the rain and met M for the first time. He saw I didn’t have an umbrella and insisted I stand beneath his. Throughout my walk home, he pointed out every little puddle and grabbed my arm to make sure I wouldn’t fall in, slip, or get run over by a motorbike. I was still getting accustomed to using my Chinese, but he was patient and funny. We ended up stuck underneath the tents of the Xizhou market for twenty minutes because the rain was too heavy to leave, the two of us holed up next to an asparagus farmer, whispering and giggling. I haven’t forgotten the feeling of being cared for like that, but I don’t think he gave it a second thought. I saw it again when I met his girlfriend. He carries her things, and they always share food. They’re neither loud nor quiet; they just are. They orbit each other and laugh at each other’s expense, and he is always as caring with her as he was with me that day. Lately I’ve been hearing that his girlfriend is feeling insecure as she is from a minority ethnic group and her skin is naturally darker than most Han-Chinese women. M, who is Han-Chinese, began to consider a tanning regimen to become darker himself and ease her mind.  

There’s young lesbian love, where the phone rings and I know my friend is talking to her girlfriend because she lowers her head and smiles, shushing us with a simple “it’s my baby.” They talk about the dog and two cats they have adopted together. There’s talk of when the new girl (me) is going to find love herself. “Why not him!” my friend points to a young man walking past us on the street. “He is so tall. That’s all you need, really”. China is a country with a dramatic and tragic history and it is headed in countless directions no one could have expected. But amid this grand, historic, transcendent, phenomenal growth, I see pure and simple love, in all of its forms.

There’s an underbelly to Chinese acts of love, don’t get me wrong. Apparently once someone marries, they cannot interact alone with single people of the opposite sex regardless of whether they were friends prior to the marriage. The fear of cheating is present in the minds of many. Very Mrs. Mike Pence of them.

Oh, but I see all kinds of love, not just romantic. Young girls in China are very physically affectionate with each other, always walking side-by-side, chatting rapidly with fingers interlaced. My friends come up to me and lean their heads on my shoulder; it’s gentle love. There’s families living in the same courtyard home kind of love. Eating, sleeping, and washing together. There are grandparents holding their grandchildren love.

There’s so much love here I can’t escape it. Holding each other on an electric motorbike love, getting your bus fare paid for love, and of course, welcoming the big-nosed, curly-haired, stuttering foreigner into your fold, kind of love.

Tea Leaves in the Bottom of my Cup

Two Bai women coming home from work

Two months of Xizhou. Of amber rice fields past their point of harvest. Indigo tie-dye tablecloths blowing in the wind and firecrackers heard on the streets - wedding or funeral? I came to Xizhou straight out of undergrad, to a village of 2,500 people in Yunnan, a mountainous and primarily rural province in the Southwest of China. It takes about three different modes of transportation to arrive here from anywhere relevant and the food comes in two varieties: spicy and spicier. But I had my reasons for coming. I’ve studied China and Chinese, and previously lived in two of the biggest cities in this country. If we’ve learned anything from the 2016 US presidential election (the learning truly never stops with that one) it’s that there was a fallible impulse in all of us to read what the New York Times and Washington Post had to say about the East Coast elite and assume it represented the whole. I didn’t want to make the same mistake when it came to China. This part of Yunnan is tiny. It’s beautiful and full of color and depth. But it’s tiny. I won’t be leaving town in ten months with an idiots guide to the Chinese countryside, but I think it’s worthwhile for anyone who is interested in this country to get acquainted with the dirt and the wind that defines the life of so many of its people.

Those first few days are always difficult, but I was surprised by how hard hit I was from the transition from city to rural life. It’s not the lack of access to modern amenities like a cheap cup of coffee or the fact that I don’t have a closet in my room and have just hung up my jackets individually on nails hammered into the wall. The pace of rural life is slow. Slower than the Adderall-induced frenzy of Cornell, slower than my past lives in Beijing, New York, and Hong Kong, and slower still when you’re living alone. My instinct is to push back against the gentle ebb of rural life but that’s not what I fundamentally came here to do. There is process and there are rituals, and the one that I love the most and helps make sense of the screeching halt that is my life, is when I see Chinese people make tea.   

There is an order to things when you brew a good cup of tea, not much of a surprise when you find yourself in East Asia. What is a surprise is the degree to which young people have maintained those precise and meticulous practices. One of my roommates, 24-year old QY from Hunan province, loves to brew tea. I remember it from my first day here when I walked into her teashop, all wood and ceramic tiles piled on top of each other. She took me to visit her friend from a Northwest province the other day. He was young, soft-spoken and wore a military surplus cap. We sat down on the bench of his home and he began to brew. First water is poured into your kettle and set to boil. Then you take your leaves and weigh them on an electric scale. The water should begin to bubble soon. Sprinkle your leaves into a mid-sized cup and pour in some water. Pour into each of the teacups. Each cup holds about three sips of tea. Then dump it all out. This is to wash your materials and warm your cups. Pour some water from the kettle back into the mid-sized cup. Now pour into the teacups and drink. Your tea will be refreshed every few minutes.

It was sweet and quiet. This guy silently swirling, pouring water from a distance, the motions so exact that not a drop was spilled. QY bringing the cup to her nose and murmuring, “a little bit of plum flavor”. She audibly slurps. I have to learn to slurp. Rather- I have to unlearn how not to slurp. It’s a love of process that you’d see in an older generation but that is still preserved with people in their early 20s. There’s a hipster aesthetic to it maybe, but it’s also wonderfully generous, and I think that’s what makes it authentic. I haven’t paid for tea once since I got here. I can’t think of the counterpart ritual to brewing tea that has remained intact in the United States. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone my age moving so slowly.

Two months of Xizhou; it feels like a long time. The ten months ahead of me loom longer. My friend’s boyfriend asked me the other day where I felt my home was, and I told him that I never had a chance to put down roots growing up, so my home is within me. He nodded and said, of course, 四海为家, sìhǎiwéijiā. I’d never heard it before but it means to regard the four corners of the world all as home. Yes, that is exactly how I feel.  

Seven Days in Tibet

rilong county, sichuan

four sisters mountain in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China

Picture a Chinese person in your head. You have most likely just pictured someone who belongs to the majority ethnic group; the Han ethnic group that is overwhelmingly China’s largest ethnic category and enjoys a wide margin of power. I’ve heard conflicting statistics but we’ll put the percentage of Han Chinese at around 92%. That’s vast. But when you consider the whole population size of China (1.37 billion), 8% of that population is still a lot of people. Roughly 110 million people. To put that into context, that’s twice the population size of England. My point is: the image most of us have conjured up in our heads of China is one dimensional.

There are fifty-five recognized minority ethnic groups in China, such as the Islamic Turk descendants in the Northwest province of Xinjiang, the Miao in Guizhou province and the ethnic Mongols in the Northeast. These distinct groups share their own dialects, garb and many have populations that spill outside of the Chinese borders. My first introduction to the many hues that make up China was eight years ago, on a family trip to Yunnan province. It’s a large Southern province that shares its borders with Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. It is also the most ethnically diverse province in China, with a stunning 38% of its population identifying as non-Han Chinese. You take a trip to a province like Yunnan and it completely alters your understanding of what it means to be Chinese. I was particularly struck by the opportunity to spend time in communities that have Tibetan origins. Their interpretation of Buddhism, their food sources, their facial features differed so much from what I thought I knew China was. This is after years of living in Hong Kong and traveling around other provinces in the mainland. The feeling of discovery I felt at age thirteen has remained with me and was something I yearned to explore in my few months living in Beijing.

So when my parents generously made plans to visit me during my spring holiday last week, I asked if we might be able to go back. We traveled to the province above Yunnan, called Sichuan (Not “Szechuan”, not “Seeshuan”. It’s suh-choo-an). It is best known for spicy food that features a chili that turns your lips and tongue numb, and for its growing panda-centric tourist industry. However I was not interested in touring the Han-populated cities and sampling cuisines. I wanted to go west, west, west. As far into the Tibetan plateau as time and safe altitude acclimation would allow. It is the part of China where people mention that their cousins just moved to Lhasa (capital of Tibet) for better job opportunities and towns are built in the shadow of mountains two-thirds the size of Everest. The further inland you drive, the more Tibetan the names of towns sound, the more prayer flags you see adorning the hills. It’s exactly what I wanted.

We were only there a week, but it’s so easy to lose yourself in the beauty of the landscape and warmth of the people. We were walking around with a look of sheer bewilderment on our faces. As an ethnic group, Tibetans are quite striking. Their skin is leathery and the apples of their cheeks are a perpetual maroon from concentrated sun exposure. As it partially lies on the Tibetan plateau, Sichuan has some of the highest altitudes in the country and it shows. The livestock is almost exclusively yak or yak-hybrid, and much like the buffalo of North America, no part of the yak is wasted. Needless to say, we ate a lot of yak.

To the untrained eye, Tibetan writing resembles Hindi or Sanskrit, a language that is worlds away from Mandarin or Cantonese. And the influence of Buddhism in the region is palpable. To steal someone else’s story: an acquaintance we made had hired a few construction workers to do some work on her house. But she found that they wouldn’t go forward with their work if they couldn’t find an outlet to plug in their TV. After bickering back and forth, they finally found a satellite radio that did the trick. The laborers wanted to spend their lunch breaks listening to multi-hour public readings by their lama, their spiritual leader, and in this way always remain connected to their faith. Theirs is a faith that fosters human commitment to their vast and dramatic land, to other living beings, and to their own spiritual growth.

Among all these contrasts, there are numerous connecting strands running between this region and the rest of China. Despite being incredibly rural, the infrastructure of the roads was phenomenal.  This is a region that seven years ago, was ravaged by one of the worst earthquakes in recent Chinese history. The death toll rose above 85,000 people. But getting from 1,000 meters to 4,000+ in a car was a non-issue. In fact, we didn’t see a single beat-up old car. My dad even claims he saw a Tesla. There is poverty of course, but it doesn’t hold a candle to many regions in Southern Asia or South America with similar geographic and demographic circumstances. Whether it be local or federal, government investment and intervention is apparent. Framed pictures of government officials ornamented the door frames, and once in a while we would catch glimpses of Chairman Mao, peeking at us behind a window or living room corner.

To anyone who’s spoken to me in person or perused through previous posts, it’s clear that I love my life in Beijing. But returning to this city after a week in Sichuan is, well odd. I won’t delve into the question of whether ethnic Tibetans are Chinese or not, but regardless, this region is intrinsically linked to China. What does China’s future look like? Is it an economically inclusive future? Who will we think of when we say the word “Chinese” in fifty or one hundred years? What will they look like? What motivates them? Do they believe in a unified China? I could spend all night tacking on questions to this list. I can only hope to stay long enough that I might be able to grasp some of the answers.

Limbo

I feel free here in Beijing, free in a way I rarely feel at home. Not in Scarsdale, not in Ithaca. I recognize the oxymoronic nature of the above statement by the way. I know public perception of China is one of iron fist communism- a country where its people are silenced and of children tucked away in back bedrooms. And while there is some truth to every stereotype, this freedom I feel has nothing to do with Chinese institutions, policy, or rule of law. It does, but it doesn’t. The freedom I feel comes from living in a developing country. It comes from running across a seven-lane street with my friends, knocking on a cab door in the middle of an intersection and motioning him to pull over. “70 kuai to get to Sanlitun? You must be joking! We’re students! 50 kuai. Okay. If you let 5 of us in the car we’ll give you 55”.

I come from a world where my friends will pull me up to the curb from the street as we wait for the light to change at an empty crossing. Recycling bags line the road every second Tuesday, and the guy selling water bottles on the corner of 62nd and 5th needs four different licenses from the municipal and state governments. It’s nice to have these comforts, but it’s also nice to feel a little human sometimes. A little erratic. Like there is elasticity to the institutions that surround you. “Traffic laws”. “Food and drug regulations”. This is the feeling of climbing up some enticing boulders in the middle of the Beijing Summer Palace Park and realizing there are no signs anywhere telling you that it’s not allowed. No park official ready to yell at you for daring to have some fun.

I just spent a whirlwind weekend in Shanghai- falling asleep at 6 AM and waking up a few hours later hungry for street noodles. I spent as much time on foot as I did with my feet on the pedals of a bike. The bike sharing system in China is not some “Citibike: $12 a day, please park at the appropriate stations and don’t leave your belongings unguarded” business. It’s a “spot three bikes lying on their sides and run like hell to claim them for $.15 the hour. An afterthought: I hope the tires aren’t popped”. We zipped around corners, swerving trucks and pedestrians, dinging our bells at anyone who dared to slow down for an intersection and rolling our eyes at the countless who rang their bells at us. A traffic cop stares us down as we screech to a halt at a giant crossing, but then once we surround him he flashes us a grin and shoots us a quick 你们是哪国人？ We ride on as I yell back in Mandarin, “Irish! Dutch! American!”

I would consider myself a square any day of the week. Breaking the rules makes my feet go numb for some reason. But it’s different here. I called my dad to talk about it. He knew the feeling; it’s why he loves Latin America. It’s living in limbo, where you give up some order but thrill is returned to you in spades. It brought back memories of my time as a summer camp counselor in the flatlands of Colombia. We did some crazy things at that camp: leaving live chickens to roam the bedroom of the messiest camper (discipline), waking up campers with firecrackers in the middle of the night (grit), riding a four-hour party bus through the dry grass to a campsite, kissing my girls goodnight in their tents and falling asleep on the ground with a bonfire blanket licking my feet (fun). These things that would be considered everything from childhood endangerment to sexual harassment in the litigious society I’m accustomed to, turned into one of the greatest experiences of my short life. This is life in countries where instinct actually plays a role in your everyday interactions.

This is not to say China lacks rule of law or efficient public services. Far from it. In some ways China is exceedingly by the book. I took the bus today and there were two government officials with flags at the bus stop, pointing me to my appropriate waiting spot. But then on my way back I stopped at a street food stall that turned off its lights and gas flame when a police car circled the block. Like I said, limbo.

So I talked to my dad, and he agreed that “getting away with it” is a great feeling. But he also opened the bittersweet floodgates. The actions I take and the treatment I receive will always be colored by the fact that I am a white foreigner. Whiteness means status, and it means I might get waved through some doors that others wouldn’t be. It’s special treatment that by definition is implicit. I can never know how else a Chinese person would have been treated in my place. I’m a card-carrying foreigner, and it’s crucial that I never forget it. Now I wonder if I’m doing things I’m not meant to be, and people are letting it happen just because I’m a foreigner. Little things bother me, like eating on the train. It hit me halfway through my egg pancake that no one else had food. Was that not allowed? People have waved me through with a look of exhaustion on their face- does it grate to have to explain the mundane details of this one social convention to the ignorant foreigner again and again? There is no race in the US or any other Western country that holds more unquestioned status than whiteness, which is why it’s difficult to conceptualize this idea if you’ve never left the country. We just don’t grant our foreigners that authority or respect.

Like those of most people, my experiences here are nuanced. My identity as a student does occasionally surpass my identity as a visitor. I’m aware that these elastic institutions I’ve found might accommodate me a little bit more than I deserve. It will take time to maturely digest everything I’ve seen and felt, but I safely pronounce, two months to the day of my arrival, damn. I’m going to miss it here.

I Have A Working Theory

Absolutely gorgeous. Now what does it mean.

On my headstone it shall read: Here lies Veronica. Beloved wife and mother, friend to many, and a lifelong learner of the Chinese language. My time in Beijing has brought me to a conclusion I had suspected for years but have only just begun to accept. As a foreigner, you have no chance of achieving fluency in Mandarin unless you end up with a Chinese spouse. The only examples I’ve seen of foreigners chattering away in Mandarin is if they also have Chinese in-laws. While I concede that this hypothesis lacks empirical data, I have yet to see it widely disproven. Mandarin is a lifetime commitment.

I had many expectations for this semester abroad in Beijing, but the highest by far was to have the language light bulb in my head turn on, and for my Chinese competency to soar. I had imagined that just sheer exposure to everyday Chinese people would improve my oral skills tenfold and I would leave a capable and self-assured speaker. Learning through osmosis. However, through a combination of my own failings and unforeseen events, I find myself a quarter of the way into my semester and so far let down by my progress.

To begin with, practicing oral skills in any language you’re not comfortable with is paralyzing. My reading comprehension is passable, and I do find real joy in practicing characters, but when confronted with an impatient shopkeeper, the words in my head remain static in my throat. I was recently shown a video of Mark Zuckerberg debuting his Mandarin at a conference at Tsinghua University. Zuckerberg, who has a Chinese wife I might add, spoke for twenty minutes in front of a crowd of native Chinese speakers. While his 中文水平 (Chinese level) is that of an intermediate learner, the ease with which he spoke really struck me. I mean, he even answered direct questions asked to him by the moderator. In public. It was a show of confidence you rarely see in Chinese learners. In this I identified my biggest shortcoming keeping me from taking my Chinese to the next level. I am petrified of making a mistake in public. It’s easier to feign ignorance than to be confronted with a strangers’ contempt. This is not founded in reason- Chinese people are quick with a compliment and find any foreigner’s venture into Mandarin charming. (Compare this to the reaction of your average American communicating with someone still learning to speak English. “Go back to your country! Learn English!)

The other aspect of my experience that has kept me from a full immersion is one that I can neither criticize nor regret. In choosing Beijing as my study abroad destination I made a conscious decision to forego the “European experience”. I decided to give up bi-weekly trips to Italy, Portugal and Germany while meeting delightful strangers on RyanAir flights. But I’m still an international student at 人民 University stuck in the international students dorm. In a completely inadvertent move, I find myself texting my Irish, Dutch, French and Spanish friends every day. I’ve picked up some Irish slang, toast in Spanish on nights out, and plan weekend trips to Shanghai with the “Dutchies” at Renmin. It’s an eclectic group of nationalities, too many to count, and I’ve been completely taken in by the allure of conversations with other foreigners.

My mother likes to say that learning a language is like taking on a set of stairs. Most of the time you’re looking up at the vertical wall in front of you and it takes everything in your arsenal to make it to a flat plane. Once you reach the plateau, you are given a chance to reflect on your growth and relish the feeling of having overcome a challenge. Then it starts all over again as the next step looms before you. I had hoped that by the end of this semester I would see measurable change in my Mandarin ability but I may have to lower my expectations a bit. With any luck I’ll find my soul mate in成都 (Chengdu, Sichuan province) and with that I’ll finally finish climbing these stairs.