Life in China

Friendship and Life in China

China has a very human face. As foreigners, we come to visit or live here with our prejudices and sometimes we get to experience life in a way that changes us.

On one of the first days we were here in 2008 we spotted an old man in weathered clothes.  He was bent over, struggling to pull an even older overloaded trunk on wheels up a small hill using a piece of rope over his shoulder.  A young man saw him struggling and quickly helped him by pushing the trunk up the incline with him. 

The very next day, we noticed he was set up in a corner just off the road.  He is an old-fashioned cobbler, a shoemaker installed under a tree on the bare ground, his antique looking tools neatly organized beside his big trunk.  He is squatting over a shoe, fixing a strap.  A young attractive lady is sitting on a small foldout seat, waiting for her shoe.

A short while later we learned more about that old man.  We were walking in the rain with a returning foreign teacher who pointed to the spot where the old fellow was set up.  He told us: “I want you to be very nice to this old man.  His son is a full time professor at this university and his daughter is a doctor at a local hospital.” We walked by, staring at that spot where the old fellow was waiting patiently, under his piece of canvas, for the next person who might need his services. 

As we gradually felt more comfortable we explored further and further around our neighborhood.  We were still new in town when we crossed another road using the overpass when a young man approaches Helen and says to her: “ Welcome to Dalian”.  I’m thinking, “How does he know?”  But Helen is happy and, with a bit more bounce in her step, she visits the shops along the street and checks all the merchandise. I follow and finally she needs to take a break, sees a coffee shop called Amici and pulls me inside.  Great idea!  I’d love to sit for a while. 

As we walk in, we are led to a table.  I sit and Helen heads for the washroom, finds a lost mobile phone someone has left behind and gives it to the person working at the front counter.  The place is upscale, cushion seats, clean, bright, quiet, fashion magazines to read, we order in English, great coffee, impeccable service. 

When the ham and cheese sandwich comes, I take a bite and I am instantly and completely overwhelmed by a flashback to home in Canada and I start to cry. What the heck is this about?  Everything passes as quickly as it came and I wonder where that came from!  We take our time, enjoy every morsel with delight, every minute with gratefulness and we get the bill. Expensive by Chinese standards at 83 Yuan (about $13) so I put a 100-Yuan note aside.  Before I get a chance to pay, the waitress comes over with a Chinese lady who wants to talk to Helen.  She starts to speak in Chinese; we look at her and don’t understand a word so she switches to halting English : “Thank you for find phone. I pay bill. Welcome to China”. 

The friendliness of China is overwhelming.  I want to cry again. Helen says: “Get a grip”!

I wonder what time they open up for breakfast?

Restaurants are one thing but the shopping experience is something I was not ready to experience. Helen however was eager to try her hand at it. Helen has a sixth sense.  Maybe you don’t believe in that kind of stuff?  No problem, so explain this to me.

After class Friday, she was itching to go.  I tried to ignore it.  No luck!  Get ready.  Go!  I’m usually walking ahead of her.  Not this time!  Something is up.

We take a bus to town. We have to stand and it’s actually fun to realize the crowd is holding you up and quite comfortably at that.  A little hard to breathe but this is where some shallow breathing works well.  We arrive downtown and spill out with class onto the sidewalk.  I finally spot Helen ahead of me navigating like a seasoned sailor, pointing her sails toward a six-story mall.  I reach her and we push our way in and a Chinese version of a sidewalk sale swallows us. Huge crowds pressed together on every single floor.  I have never before felt like one drop in an ocean.  I now know its meaning.  Very civilized, huge sales, thousands of sales clerks, masses, buzzing like a busy beehive, flowing, constantly moving.  I feel almost panicky but Helen is serene.  And I thought she was cured of shopping.

My one and only thought is to get out and quick (impossible) but Helen is like a butterfly in a new field of flowers.  I want to go, she wants to stay.  We stay!  Pick shoes, pay, get out?  No!  Get 4 copies of bill.  Bring bill over there to pay.  Follow the finger!  There! English sign: ‘Settle Accounts’.  J.P. you go pay, I’ll look around. Yes dear! 10 minutes later Helen checks on me in lineup, moved 3 meters. Not a problem, she’s off again.  Another 15 minutes, elbows out, hand on wallet, I pay.  I get 2 copies of receipt.  Go back to find shoe counter # 86, give one copy of receipt, find shoes, get free carrying bag, keep last copy of receipt to get out. Where’s Helen? Helen?? Helen??? LET”S GO!!!  No! Check purses next!

Those who think there are more men than women in China don’t travel where I travel.  I saw at least 200,000 women and just 8 men, including me. All were sitting down looking at the floor, looking abandoned, exhausted, or hopelessly lost. I stood and forced myself to smile. I don’t quite remember how we got home that evening but I do remember Helen talking about scarves, and shoes, and purses and sweaters and prices and stopping in the middle of a sentence to practice her new Chinese words meaning, “Just looking…  How Much?  Too much!”  And we only bought one pair of shoes.

Helen, did we eat on that day?  Does it matter?

Our life is not only influenced by restaurants and stores. I love the weathered faces and all the ones that tell a story. The street vendor with the corn roaster, the squid-on-a-stick lady with the inviting smile, the morning market mushroom lady at 5:30 a.m. who helps me find the better ones and now throws in a hot pepper or two when I buy her mushrooms, the shoe repair-man waiting patiently, the masked street sweepers whose faces I will never see but whose eyes light up when we say hello, the crouching itinerant workers with their tools waiting for a signal to come and work, the smiling brotherhood of motorcycle-taxi drivers lined up beside the sidewalk, the little children too shy to return a wave, the baby with the round face sleeping on grandma’s shoulder on the bus, the taxi driver wearing white gloves, the old man with the dip net at the dock catching minnows to eat or sell, the dark craggy faces of the ladies walking to market with heaping baskets dangling on a yoke, the nod and smile of many people who would love to talk but know it is impossible, the people we’ve only met an hour ago, who long to meet us again and whose eyes water when we leave.  So many of these encounters leave us dreaming about what could be and remind us to love everyone.

We are known for our complexity, we know them for their simplicity.  I come here as a stranger, I don’t speak the language, and they are more than willing to communicate with us with hand signals and the few English words they know.  Their language is mysterious and so are many of our encounters.

Speaking of mysterious encounters, I think about a home visit we did, a day we visited a young friend’s family.

We were welcomed with open arms.  We, the Canadians, the foreigners, took our shoes off and put on a pair of slippers.  A very nice apartment, warm, simple and inviting, a place anyone can feel comfortable in, with pictures on the walls. The small table was in the center of the room and the pleasant aroma of food made us hungry. Her parents were delighted to meet us.  They spoke no English so our young friend had to translate. The food was quickly brought and filled the table so completely that there was no more room for plates. Not to worry. We sat at the table, did the small talk, and dug into every dish with our chopsticks. We all ate directly from the serving bowls with great pleasure. Every single dish tasted good.  We wanted to know about each other, about life in China, about life in Canada, about life before and after the Cultural Revolution, about life with one child, about Canadians and if they were all like us and if the Chinese were all like them, about life at work, about traffic and pollution and people in general, about religions old and new, about the future of countries and the future of the world and when we had eaten so much that we couldn’t bear it anymore we sat back on the couch and ate small oranges and laughed and asked each other more questions.  We were asked to be friends forever, to come back anytime, to share more with them and to remember them.  How could we forget them?  Parents, so proud of their own daughter, parents who really did not believe she could speak English well enough to translate for all of us, parents like parents everywhere on earth, who were selfless, who cared, who worried and yet when we met, all barriers disappeared and we were as family, comfortable, open, caring, teasing and laughing. And when we went home, it was with a bag full of food and memories to write home about.  This is China, get used to it.

I think about the people here and I think about the people back home.  We are so similar, we are so…one.  Why can’t we see this?  Why do we see ourselves as so different when we are so similar?  Out of the blue, people approach us and ask if we need help with directions, with taxis, they come and ask, they translate for us, sometimes walk a block with us to make sure we are OK and they always seem to get it right. 

Sure we speak different languages but are we so different?  We realize that we are not alone in our struggle with this one, especially when a student writes: “I wonder how we human beings can make up so many kinds of languages?”  Then I read another essay to find the following pearl: “a long time ago, the god punished the persons by giving them different languages and this made them fight for their faiths.  Now that we are learning the English this will stop the fighting because we will be able to speak to each other again.” 

All these experiences are molding anew our way of looking at the world and its peoples. Whatever fear of foreigners I may have had, has evaporated like the morning fog and I long to meet more of my fellow human beings tomorrow and the day after and the day after…                                 

All our commitments have changed, our life has changed, our future has changed and we wonder if we will ever be the same again. Sometimes when I think about home in Canada I start remembering and I start looking at the world here through a different pair of eyes. They are the eyes that show me the differences, the critical eyes, not criticism but rather the eyes that are looking for differences. These are small differences we encounter everyday.

I turn on the lights here and ask myself why I flick down to turn on and flick up to turn off. That’s not the way at home.

I look at toilets in public places, Yes I look very quickly and don’t spend time examining in detail but I can tell you that in public washrooms there are no toilets like we know toilets, just an elongated porcelain bowl at floor level. Make sure you have one foot on each side and that you can keep your balance. That’s not the way at home.

In washrooms if you think you will find toilet paper or something to dry your hands with, you won’t find any.  That’s not the way at home.

The emergency number for fire is 119. That’s not the way at home.

Crosswalks in this town are dangerous if you don’t know that cars have the right of way. That’s not the way at home.

Men play cards on the sidewalk sitting around a makeshift table and they play counterclockwise instead of clockwise.  That’s not the way at home.

The heat in our apartments comes from a central heating plant in the neighbourhood and is regulated by a committee and if you live where I live you get heat from approximately Nov 15th to March 15th whether you need it or not. That’s not the way at home.

These small differences are always with us and yet I am constantly pulled back to another reality, a reality closer to the heart.  I do have to tell you more about the wonderful people we meet here.  The Chinese seem to have the most open hearts on the planet.  They are so sensitive in ways we can't even imagine.  Every day we are thankful for the great opportunity of being here.  We look at each other and we hope that the newness, the spirit we feel here, will never go away.  Talking to these young people who live at the university in dorms the size of one of our rooms back home, 4 or 6 to a room, no hot water, no cooking facilities, no complaining, smiling cheerfully as they walk in all weather the 15 or so minutes to class, some of them 7 days a week, seeing parents once or twice a year … talking to any of them is a gift beyond comprehension. 

Some we invite to our place.  They dress up nice, come bearing a small gift, sit and talk and accept a cup of coffee (heard about real coffee but never tasted it before) and we talk for hours on end. They email us the next day and tell us they were so excited to meet us that they had a hard time sleeping last night and we tell them it's the coffee but I often wonder. One day Helen told the young lady sitting with us that we had moved away from Canada in order to help the Chinese people and the young lady started to cry. They are so appreciative, and so open, and so sensitive, that sometimes we almost can't bear it.  They see hope for the future, they are so incredibly open to a better world that they are willing to sacrifice even more if it will help humanity. This is the seed of a new civilization.  A civilization we will not recognize, a civilization so different from the one I can envision, so totally new, beautiful, and wise that the word ‘civilized’ will take on meanings we cannot yet imagine.

All right, you may think that I came here with blinders or even better, maybe that I am in a Chinese prison and I am undergoing psychiatric correction and that I am writing this way so that the authorities know that I’ve been successfully rehabilitated and that they can release me again into the world as a sane human being.  You can think whatever you want.  I am here on the street, I see the filth, I smell the rot, I see a lot that is crumbling, I see things I cannot recount but if I chose to see with that particular pair of eyes, the critical ones, I would have been on a flight back home a long time ago and I would be sitting comfortably in front of my colour television watching mindless drivel in my air conditioned home thinking about the poor people on the other side of the world and thinking:  “If only they could be more like us…”

I am learning every day here that I want to be more like them, learning to be more patient as when the bank machine swallows my card, does not give it back, withdraws money out of my account but gives me nothing.  I am learning that it takes 4 days to get the money back.  I am learning to live with crowds and in crowds, learning to love the simple things in life, like a bowl of hand made dumplings made in front of your eyes after you order them. I am learning to appreciate the taste of a real pear, a peach and an un-gassed orange, learning to walk gently on the street, to stand in a bus and watch people watch me, to smile everywhere no matter what happens.  I am learning to nod to old men who nod back and recognize me as another human being.  I am learning that many of my encounters will be such that we will never meet again.  I am learning to have as many of these encounters as my soul can take in a day and learning to get back to our apartment before my senses explode.