Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China Read online

  Pretty Woman Spitting

  An American’s Travels in China

  By Leanna Adams

  © 2012 Leanna Adams

  This is a work of nonfiction. I lived and taught English in Wuhu, China, in 2006. I changed some names and details to protect my friends and cohorts. If anything I wrote is inaccurate or offensive, I take full responsibility. I kept detailed journals while in China, but I can be scatterbrained. That’s the truth.

  Cover photo: © Mary Ruggles

  Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by: Kimberly A. Hitchens, [email protected]

  For Dianne Moule

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  WOOHOO

  HOW IT ALWAYS HAPPENS

  HELLO, CHINA

  THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

  WELCOME TO OUR CHINA

  CHINA TAKES ALL TYPES

  GAN BEI!

  MIND OVER BLADDER

  I WILL SURVIVE

  HWAAK CHUU

  CHARLES IN CHARGE

  THE DEANS

  CHINESE COLLEGE LIFE

  I AM AMERICAN, YOU ARE CHINESE

  WAKEY WAKEY

  HOW MANY CHINESE DOES IT TAKE TO FIX A TOILET?

  WHAT IS A CHINESE PICNIC LIKE?

  ROAST PRICKLY ASH

  THE HARDEST WORKING FAMILY IN CHINA

  THE DOORS

  THE BATHHOUSE

  BUMPER CARS

  SIX MEN AND A BABY

  THE ULTIMATE REWARD

  FLESH EATING MONSTERS

  PRETTY WOMAN…

  THE HORIZONTAL TAI CHI

  THE SEXY WOLF

  DO NOT FALL ASLEEP ON THE BUS

  EXPATS ON HOLIDAY

  BARGAINING IN BEIJING

  DIANNE

  A GOOD MAN

  THE MIRAGE

  THE LITTLE RASCALS

  SO LONG, FARWELL…

  A TIME TO SAY GOODBYE

  WATCH, BAG, DVD?

  COMING HOME

  THE THINGS I APPRECIATE ABOUT CHINA

  THOUGHTS ON TRAVEL

  SPECIAL THANKS

  PROLOGUE

  Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is jump on a damn plane and go somewhere. In our everyday lives, filled with routines and obligations, we can get stuck in indecision, uncertain of what to do next.

  Growing up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, I acquired my substantial southern accent and an undying love of fried food and good manners. Going to college at Emory University in Atlanta, I shook off many of my small town misconceptions about the world. My closest friends at Emory came from all over the country and visiting them gave me a first taste of travel.

  After graduation, I moved to Manhattan to pursue an acting career. I failed quietly while working several dead-end jobs, struggling to pay the rent. I slunk back to Atlanta hoping to continue acting while preparing to go to law school and working as a paralegal. Instead of committing to law, I found a series of night writing classes and applied to public health school. When the acceptance letter arrived, all I could think about was getting out of my job – one of my bosses had thrown a stapler at me. I also wanted to get away from my personal life – I’d lived with five roommates for several years and while there were many good times, safely sitting on the couch watching reality TV shows and planning what bar to hit on the weekends had gotten old.

  Did wanting a new life mean I should go to graduate school and take on debt? I needed to do something for myself.

  Moving to China allowed me the freedom to change everything.

  This book is about China and self-discovery. It’s light on history and trivia but filled with stories of real people and places and experiences. It’s the book I wanted to read before traveling to China to teach English at a rural college.

  If you’re going to China, have been to China or are interested in the Chinese, this travelogue is for you.

  If you’re stuck in indecision or hungry for adventure, get on a damn plane and go to China! But read this sucker on the flight over and refer to it when you feel disgruntled over a culture clash or just lonely in a remote place. I’ll be there with you and I’ve been a traveler in China, too. These are my stories.

  WOOHOO

  I was stuck.

  Fascination with the culture didn’t lead me to Wuhu, China. In late 2005, I had a college degree and a work history that could have belonged to a schizophrenic. I was twenty-six and working as a paralegal in a high stress law firm, trying to convince myself to go to law school and have a bright future. I couldn’t do it. I hated the confines of an office and billing my life away in six-minute increments. One thing I knew for sure was that I would rather dance topless in a bar that served Milwaukee’s Best on tap than go to law school.

  I was single.

  Being twenty-six and single in the South is not a good thing. I was going to approximately twelve weddings a year, and at each of those events I was asked about and forced to consider my own marital trajectory. And I’d recently been ditched by a guy I was sure was the one. All that drove me to start looking for ways out – out of Atlanta, out of my job, out of my stuck-in-a-rut ways.

  I was ready.

  Then one night in September I had a conversation that changed my life. I called my sister, Kristan. After an hour of complaining, I told her I needed a new direction. She told me about the greatest year of her life, living in Nepal and Kenya working as a humanitarian doctor. She regaled me with stories of cows attacking her neighbor in Kenya, Sherpas carrying refrigerators on their backs in Nepal, and trekking to a base camp in the Himalayas. As she put it, I was twenty-six, single, owned nothing, owed no one and the end of my adventuring days were drawing near. She said I should start having adventures instead of floating from dead-end job to dead-end job. She told me to go abroad, teach English, and really live. That was how my oldest sister, the married-with-children-gynecologist, convinced me, the broke-wanderlust-singleton, to move to China.

  HOW IT ALWAYS HAPPENS

  It turns out that when you swear off men and decide to seek adventure, little chubby Cupid comes by and stabs you in the heart. In the four months after I’d resolved to quit my job at the law firm and find a teaching position in China, I had managed to meet someone. Someone kind and honest. Someone who would never leave me at a party to be with another girl.

  George was everything I wanted. He was in medical school. He didn’t mind that I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. He liked the fact that I preferred drinking, telling dirty jokes and cussing to being what the common herd considers a lady. And he almost kept me from leaving the USA. Almost.

  Saying goodbye to George at the airport in Atlanta on a cool February morning was like one of those dramatic scenes in a movie where one person is destined to die and the other destined to live a miserable life without them. We both cried and I was sure this would be the end of the healthiest relationship I’d had in years.

  I kept thinking: you’re a fool to leave him. Women are supposed to find husbands not leave their boyfriends to travel. Then again, I never was any good at doing the supposed. I was supposed to find a prosperous career. Instead, after college, I’d worked seven jobs in five years while living in two different cities. I was supposed to be married and having kids at my age. I was not. I was supposed to be financially prosperous. Again, no. And there was a part of me that needed something of my own still. So, I landed a job teaching English in rural China.

  After George and I said our goodbyes, I boarded a plane bound for Shanghai. I was traveling alone for the first time in my life.

  HELLO, CHINA

  I’m white-knuckles-we’re-all-gonn
a-die-a-fiery-death scared to fly. That’s why, when I boarded the gynormous Delta plane headed to China, I popped two prescription Ativan in my mouth to calm my anxiety and get me through the long flight. I was especially glad to be half-knocked out since the Chinese man sitting in the tiny, pleather seat next to mine kept slowly nodding his head of thick black hair down on my shoulder and then jerking unexpectedly during his sleep. Normally, I would have wanted to suffocate him with my blue neck pillow, but the sensory-dulling medication did its job on me. If the man had licked my face, it wouldn’t have bothered me.

  Later in the flight to Shanghai, I learned that he was from Beijing. He’d been on a visit to New York. He spoke almost no English and I had to do a Mad Lib in my head to guess what he was saying as he told me about his travels around America. Then he asked me if I knew how to speak Chinese. Remembering the two Chinese words that my mother taught me after her vacation to China, I said them to my plane mate.

  ‘Nihao’ said like ‘knee how’ meaning ‘hello’ and ‘xie xie’ said like ‘she-A she-A’ meaning ‘thank you.’ He worked on my pronunciation by repeating the two words over and over until I could parrot them perfectly.

  I noted then that the Chinese seem to talk in the back of their throats whereas we speak on the tips of our tongues. After that ten-minute chat, we smiled at each other, turned away and slept most of the rest of the way to China, realizing that there was literally nothing more we could say to each other.

  Fourteen hours later, I arrived to a mind-numbingly cold winter night in Shanghai. I was so groggy from the multiple rounds of medication that I had taken to relax and the free red wine that I washed it down with during the cardboard-ish in-flight meals, I could barely haul my carryon suitcase across the terminal and down the escalator, where I was supposed to meet Linda Wu, the school liaison.

  Linda and I had only spoken via e-mail and she had sent me a picture of herself. Scanning the crowd for Linda, I wondered what a shaggy mess I must look like with my clothes rumpled, my face splotchy and my curly, newly-dyed-brown hair sticking out wildly except for at the back of my head where it hung like limp lasagna noodles.

  Days before leaving China, I was a blonde, but after reading on the internet that I might be the only blonde in Wuhu, I dyed my hair brown in the hopes that I might blend in for a while. I was beginning to see how ludicrous that idea was as I walked through the Shanghai airport. Just looking around the terminal, I could see that nearly everyone in China had ink black, straight hair and almond coloring – a stark contrast to my alabaster skin and light brown curls. There was more variety of course and nuances of the Chinese look, but with my pasty white flesh and round blue eyes, I had no chance of any blending.

  I scanned the crowd of dark haired strangers standing just behind a rope and spotted Linda. Holding a white placard with my name neatly scrawled on it in thick black letters, she looked just like her picture. She was a slim 5’3” with the firm frame of an athlete, complete with short, thick hands. Wearing a beige winter coat, she stood stick straight. Her long black hair was parted down the middle and surrounded her smooth toffee-colored face. As soon as I laid eyes on Linda Wu I knew I could trust her to not sell me into white slavery. So that was good.

  She spoke to me slowly, as if she didn’t want to make a mistake. And she sounded the slightest bit British when she greeted me saying, “Leanna, you are just as beautiful as your picture!”

  I had never looked worse.

  Excited to be safely in the hands of my new co-workers, I instinctively leaned in to hug Linda. I could see her eyes bulge as we shared the stiffest hug of my life. It felt like squeezing a corpse. Realizing that I must have made a social faux pas, I immediately pulled back, started laughing nervously and said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “It is okay,” she said quickly. “I have done this before with the former American teacher. He was a man, so at first I felt strange, but now I quite like to embrace.”

  So, the Chinese don’t hug. And I’m a very huggy person. In the South, we usually hug and kiss hello to everyone - sisters, brothers, parents, in-laws, friends, ministers, ball players…the list goes on. Since I was in love with George, I had been prepared not to kiss anyone for a while, but I wondered how long I could go without hugging folks.

  Linda introduced me to the rest of the Wuhu welcoming team. Tao was a school administrator. She stood 5’1” tall and wore a lipstick red pea coat and black pants. She looked to be in her twenties. Mr. One (I never knew how to spell his name, but it sounded like the number to me) had a huge grin on his face. Linda told me that he was the school driver. He wore an old, tan leather, bomber jacket. Mr. One was just a little taller than me at 5’6”. He and Tao didn’t speak a lick of English other than “Hello.” We smiled and said a lot of hellos that first night.

  We all waited together for Margaret, the other American teacher from Philadelphia, to arrive. Even though I’d only spoken to her once on the phone before leaving for China, I was glad to know that she’d be coming. I’ve never liked being alone much. I’d just left five roommates behind in Atlanta. With Margaret coming, I knew for sure that I’d have one person to share the experience with.

  During the thirty minutes we waited in the airport, my three new Chinese companions fussed over me as if they were heirs to my fortune. They all wanted to carry my bags, find a place for me to rest, get me a drink of water or show me to the restroom. They also made sure at least one of them had a hand on my arm at all times so they could drag me along with them. I felt like a protected toddler being hauled through the airport. The whole time they were speaking rapid staccato Chinese to each other. Occasionally, they would pause to look at me, standing there wishing I knew what they had said. Then, they would start to laugh and say, “Hello.”

  When Margaret rounded the corner in the Shanghai airport and found Linda holding a placard with her name on it, the fussing over her began. The Chinese definitely know how to treat a guest.

  Margaret had a short bob of black, shiny hair and thin bangs over her icy blue eyes and skin that was whiter than mine. At 5’8”, Margaret’s head was higher than almost everyone else around. She looked like a professional volleyball player that had come to visit China. I was a little disappointed that Margaret had black hair. I assumed that she would blend in better than I could in Wuhu. How wrong I was.

  Maybe it was because I was still dazed from the medication I’d taken on the plane or because it was dark, but that first night, as Mr. One drove us in the school van to our hotel, I could have been in any big city in America. There were bright lights, tall buildings and hoards of people in the streets, but these were all things I’d seen before. Entering the hotel, I heard the clerks speaking Chinese to Linda and the other guests speaking Chinese to each other. But I’d already lived in Manhattan – you can go anywhere there and hear a whole building full of people speaking Chinese. I kept saying to myself, You’re in China. You’re in Shanghai right now. But nothing seemed very different to me. Not yet.

  THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

  The next morning, Linda woke us up with a phone call about breakfast. Margaret and I headed down to the banquet room to eat and rode a rickety elevator with a man smoking a cigarette. He puffed a white cloud right into the backs of our heads.

  In the large, open, hotel banquet room that could have been any banquet room in America except for the chopsticks offered with the plates instead of forks, we had our first taste of real Chinese food with Linda, Tao and Mr. One.

  On long tables covered in white linen, there were vats of porridge (which is salty rice in water). There were small, well-greased egg rolls that didn’t taste the slightest bit similar to those sold at the food court in the malls I’d been to in America. I saw various fried foods like rice, noodles and even breads (which were unexpectedly sweet). There was also steaming hot, watery orange juice that was actually the color orange, but had no notable fruit in it. Fascinated in an I-wish-this-was-pancakes-and-bacon kind of way, I chose an egg roll, some
sweet bread and the hot orange water.

  While Margaret and I ate slowly with the wooden chopsticks, Linda turned to us and asked, “What do you think of real Chinese food so far?”

  I thought it was okay, so I said, “I love it.”

  I often exaggerate – I’m a Southerner, after all. Margaret agreed that she liked the breakfast. Then Linda told us, “Liking Chinese food is the key to enjoying life in China.”

  She meant it as an optimistic prophecy, but it felt more like a foreboding omen. I usually only ate American Chinese food about once every six months at home. Contemplating eating these Chinese Chinese foods three times a day for the next five months, I understood how the astronauts must feel the first time they bust open a pouch of powdered food while traveling in space. It was food, but it was damn different and I would be eating a lot of it.

  After breakfast, we toured around Shanghai. I had pictured it as a village with huts and a few skyscrapers sprinkled here and there. In my mind, there were men running while pulling rickshaws along the road as workers wearing triangular hats carried loads of the day’s harvested rice. Admittedly, it was the Hollywood version of Shanghai in the past, but I couldn’t shake the image and was almost shocked when I didn’t see a single rickshaw that first day much less a triangular straw hat. Wasn’t I in China for Christ sakes? I did, however, see a bazillion bicycles swarming the roads.