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

  I never drove in China. When Margaret and I saw the cheap prices of mopeds at the Century Mart in Wuhu, we considered buying one together and using it to drive back and forth from town (okay, Pizza Hut) to school. We saw so many Chinese people doubling up on vehicles, which were not meant for more than one person, that for a moment it seemed like a good idea. Then, as we rode the bus back to school that afternoon and saw two cars smash into each other we knew we wouldn’t drive in China. With hoards of people on bikes, motorcycles and mopeds everywhere you turned, it was too harem scarem. And the two-wheeled vehicles in China were the worst – they swarmed the streets with no regard for traffic lights, signs or pedestrians.

  On a few visits to Nanjing, a city of ten million that was an hour and a half east of Wuhu, Margaret and I bumped into a seventy year-old male teacher from England, named Jim, who loved driving his baby blue moped around the city. He wasn’t scared to drive around China and would put his matching blue helmet on and speed off to his next destination, which was usually a bar.

  After meeting Jim, we reconsidered buying a moped since they were so cheap and we were sick of riding the buses and being stared at. Then the next day, we took a van ride to the airport. Our van collided with a motorcycle that was passing on our left side. The two passengers, who did not have helmets on, popped off of the bike and onto the pavement like toys carelessly thrown down by a child.

  The driver of our van got out and picked up the motorcycle. It appeared that since we weren’t going very fast, neither one of the riders were badly hurt. A calm conversation took place and the driver got back in the van and we drove off. That was it! There was no apparent blame, no screaming and cursing and no one got even slightly upset. No insurance papers were exchanged and no police officers showed up. As amazingly civil as that interaction was, we decided against motoring with the bumper cars in China.

  (a post-wreck crowd in Nanjing)

  SIX MEN AND A BABY

  After being in China for a month, I realized that all the student interactions, audio tapes and books in the world were not going to help me learn the language that I needed day to day, the desperate Chinese. Prewritten cards that Linda wrote out for me could only get me so far. Ultimately, I found I needed to clarify what was on the card or my plans had changed and I needed, desperately, to ask for something else.

  So far, I had learned to say, “Hello. I am American, You are Chinese. I can speak a little Chinese. Are you well? Thank you.” I needed to learn how to say, “I don’t want that. I want that. No! I want another. Where is the toilet? Take me to Anhui Normal University. Thank you so much. You have a beautiful baby.”

  I finally asked Linda to tutor me and we set up weekly appointment time. At our first meeting, I found out what I should have already suspected – Linda was a college professor. I needed a preschool teacher to help me learn Chinese. Linda would speak a rapid-fire Chinese sentence like, “I am not well, please help me.” Then she would tell me what it meant, and then she would tell me three other ways to say it in a matter of minutes.

  I finally learned useful things from Linda after I asked her to write the first sentence in pinyin, which is the system for transliterating Chinese ideograms into the Roman alphabet. After she wrote each sentence out, I would write the meaning below the sentence and my own phonetic pronunciation above it. Soon I had a fairly good arsenal of desperate Chinese in a notebook that I took with me everywhere. When traveling with Margaret and Dianne, I frequently directed the cab driver when the cards we were carrying were of no help. Even then I would have to say the sentence five times and five different guttural ways until the confused looking cabby would repeat it back to me using the correct tones.

  Often, when I was walking in the halls between classes I heard rooms full of students at the school taking Mandarin lessons. Mandarin is the dialect of Beijing. Many of the school’s students had grown up learning the dialect of their region and they couldn’t understand what another student from another region was saying. In China, this is nothing like a Brit and an American talking and not understanding each other. It’s like a Japanese and a Russian trying to communicate and not understanding a single word the other is saying. I couldn’t imagine being at a college and not being able to communicate at all with my roommates, especially if they grew up just a few hours away from me.

  To fix this problem, the school enforced a strict policy that required all students to speak only Mandarin on campus. This allowed the students to communicate with each other and to learn from the teachers who were instructing in Mandarin. I would hear these classes chanting sentences and words over and again to get the tones right. I wondered if I needed to be in a class like that in order to learn Chinese.

  Soon, I started using this technique in my own classes by having my students chant difficult English words over and over,

  “Usually. Usually. Usually.”

  “How. How. How.”

  The Chinese tend to speak using the back of their throats, whereas we speak using our mouths, lips and the tips of our tongues. I was fairly certain that my students needed to develop different mouth and vocal muscles in order to speak intelligible English. I needed to do the same to speak Chinese.

  Each week, Linda came by my apartment for my Chinese lesson. Soon we started to have tea and snacks and would each have a small amount of time to practice our second language with each other. While her English was very good, she still wanted to practice it often with native English speakers. She hadn’t learned much slang and was curious about colloquial English. Our sessions would start with me asking about a few pointed phrases I wanted to work into my repertoire. I’d ask how to say sentences like:

  “You have a beautiful baby.”

  “I would like another cappuccino.”

  “I need a size large shirt.”

  Then she would ask me how to say certain things or what colloquial words she had read meant.

  “Lina, what does ‘flipped out’ mean?”

  At the end of our time together, we would chat about China and America. It was during these conversations that I got some of the best insights into Chinese culture. Linda was a very honest person, but she was also Chinese. Because of that, she would try to keep certain ugly aspects of her culture from me.

  When I asked her about some lovely houseboats that I had seen floating on a small lake near the school she told me,

  “Maybe they are restaurants.”

  I told Linda that Margaret, Dianne and I wanted to take her out for a special appreciation dinner for all she had done for us. She had helped us setup our apartments, written notes for us and made sure that we had everything we needed when we traveled, not to mention answering our many phone calls when we were in sticky situations. After telling Linda this, I asked if we could take her to one of these adorable-looking floating restaurants. Her response was strange,

  “Umm. Maybe they are for lovers.”

  “Oh, like if George came here, he and I would go there?” I asked.

  “Umm. Yes,” she said.

  I later found out from Eilish, a teacher from the downtown Aston Learning Center, that those floating restaurants did not serve food. She told me they served women. They were whorehouses.

  On other subjects, Linda was more candid with me. When I asked her what she thought about the One Child Policy, she told me that it was hard to accept. She had one daughter, but she did want more children. She said that if she had another child, she and her husband would be fined and she would lose her job. It would have crippled her lifestyle, so she could not have another child. While she felt that this was unfair, she said that she understood there was no better option for population control in an already overcrowded country.

  Linda made it seem to me that having another child in China was allowed, but that it had harsh penalties. Later, when Margaret and I discussed this with Helen and Eva over a dinner downtown, we found their description of the penalty to be very different.

  They were glad to speak openly
with us about the matter. They told us all about what happened when women who lived in rural areas tried to have more babies. They said that it was common that these women would run away and try to have their children in secret, but if the government found out what they were doing, they would send local authorities to hold their family members hostage or torture them until the woman finally succumbed to, in some cases, a late term abortion.

  They also told us that it was still very common for boys to be prized over girls and for girl babies to be given away or “thrown out.” The Chinese saying they told us was,

  “Boys are like gold. Girls are like water in a basin; after a while you pour it out.”

  Helen and Eva said this saying also explained how the Chinese family was structured. In traditional Chinese culture, the woman went to join the man’s family after marriage and was no longer considered a part of her own family. They said not all Chinese families believed this in modern society, but it was still an attitude that drove many Chinese families, especially in rural areas, to get rid of their daughters, so they could have sons that would take care of them and remain a part of their family.

  They went on to tell us that, traditionally, the men in China were responsible for the financial burden of a wedding. They had to provide a house and pay off the woman’s family. They said that with the One Child Policy, this tradition was changing. Now, the children were starting to take care of four parents because they were both only children. When I learned from Helen and Eva that most Chinese children go back home to live with and take care of their parents after college, I asked my classes for a show of hands of who wanted to go back home and live with their parents after college. Three fourths of the students in each class raised their hands.

  Because of the One Child Policy and the tradition of males being valued above females there was said to be six men to every one woman in China in 2006.

  I know women in America who would kill for those odds.

  When I learned this and started to notice the mass amounts of men in Wuhu and other cities, I kept thinking to myself that no matter how much of an ugly dog a girl might be, when she became a woman she was going to have a pretty good pick of a husband one day. On the flip side, I wondered what would happen to a culture overrun with men. Homosexuality, according to my students, wasn’t allowed in China and the women all needed to be wives and not prostitutes one day, so what were all those men full of sexual frustration going to do with themselves in the future? Wage war? Start gangs? I couldn’t imagine them all giving up on the manly pleasures in life and acting like eunuchs or resorting to polyandry.

  I also couldn’t imagine being able to only have one child. On the other hand, what would it be like to have six husbands to take care of it?

  THE ULTIMATE REWARD

  Over the course of the semester, I started to love my weekly routine. I worked four days a week. On Tuesdays, I shopped and got a $2 manicure/pedicure down a small shopping street away from the bustle of downtown Wuhu. On Friday afternoons, I usually went to the bathhouse with Dianne. On many weekends, Margaret and I, and sometimes Dianne, traveled to a new city.

  Each week, I spent a certain amount of time prepping for class, copying handouts and figuring out the next week’s lessons. I loved the freedom that autonomous teaching afforded me. I worked hard at my job and although the students probably didn’t understand a third of the things I said, they were definitely hearing English regularly and understanding more and more of what I was trying to get across.

  I used props to show my students what a Western table setting looks like and so they could hold a fork and knife and feel them in their hands (almost all for the first time). I printed the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for a politics and history lesson to show them that politics could be cool. I played the movie Born on the Fourth of July to show how American culture had changed over the years. When we discussed holidays, I had them do group exercises like building a story using specific words like: kiss, mistletoe, tree, religious and jealous. I tried anything I could think of to keep their attention and keep them learning.

  I liked teaching, but mostly I enjoyed getting to know the students individually and that only took place after class. Sometimes I had one or a group of students come to my apartment. Other times, I met them on campus for a snack, a meal or just a chat.

  Teaching 360 students, it was impossible to get to know them all. I had them make identification cards with little pictures of themselves and information like their names in pinyin and English, their favorite books, their favorite foods and their dream jobs. Their responses were fascinating. Their favorite foods were usually dumplings, fish or vegetables.

  I used these as flash cards and learned as many names as I could, but I only got to really know about twenty of my students.

  I had to force myself to spend time with them outside of class because it was tough to be with a non-fluent English speaker for over an hour after a day of teaching and chatting on campus. Speakers of broken English and can only understand part of what you say, but they are so desperate to communicate. I would feel completely worn out after that amount of time with the students.

  One afternoon, I did a crossword puzzle with a student for two hours. Afterwards, I was so exhausted I had to take a nap. When I heard knocking on my door later in the day, I knew it was students who had found out where my apartment was, so I ignored them. Some had been coming by randomly for a few weeks at that point. At first, I loved their visits, but when they interrupted my me-time, I had to ignore them.

  Margaret and I found that, together, it was easier for us to deal with a group of students. That way, we could work off of one another and spread our attention around to the different students. When we were sick of this, we could turn and talk amongst ourselves for a minute.

  Dianne didn’t have a problem spending large amounts of time with broken-English speakers. She had breakfast, lunch and dinner almost every weekday with students, usually in the school’s canteen and on many weekends she scheduled shopping trips or outings in town with them.

  Margaret and I rarely ate in the canteen because the food was so salty and unappetizing, even the rice was cold and hard, and we certainly couldn’t spend an entire day shopping with students.

  One of the first group trips with students that Margaret and I took, after our first picnic, was to eat hotpot, which is Chinese fondue, with six of our sophomores; Mavis, Angela, Zenobia, Snow, Henrietta and Ivy.

  (the hotpot crew)

  The group met us outside of the school at 5:00 p.m. and took us on the bus. When we got off downtown, a student on both sides of us took hold of our arms and pulled us towards the hotpot restaurant on the walking street, telling us repeatedly to “Take care” and hold our purses tight so we wouldn’t be robbed. Clearly they didn’t realize that we frequented downtown Wuhu on our own.

  The students told us that hotpot was a favorite meal for groups and for students because it was pretty cheap.

  We made a pit stop at the Century Mart to pick up some orange juice, which was the orange flavored water I’d become familiar with, green tea juice and plain water to have with the meal. The restaurant was below ground in a long hall with large round and square tables. We picked a round table with a hole in the center of it. As usual, Margaret and I were a main attraction in the place. We could see people around the restaurant poking each other and craning their necks to see us. We sat next to each other and the students got to work ordering plastic cups for our drinks and various foods.

  The hole in the table was where the hotpot was placed. Two waitresses brought over a pot that had a partition in the middle of it. On one side, they put hot liquid that looked clear. On the other side, they put the same hot liquid and added in gobs of spices. The students told us that we could cook our food in the plain or the spicy side. We sat and drank juice and the students told us about their favorite foods and whether or not they liked plain or spicy dishes. After twenty minutes the conversation hadn’t g
otten much more complex than that and soon Margaret and I were talking to each other and they were speaking high volume Chinese.

  (Margaret and two students eating hotpot)

  Then the food started to arrive. Tofu, or bean curd, in the form of sticks, strips and chunks was served along with doughy rolls, potatoes and mushrooms. With our chopsticks, we picked up the different foods and put them in either the plain or spicy side of the pot.

  I picked up a tofu stick and cooked it in the spicy side. I could feel my eyes water as I chewed it.

  Soon plates of cow intestines, goose blood and lamb shavings arrived. These were the protein delicacies of the meal. We put these in a deep spoon so they wouldn’t dissolve away in the pot and held them in the boiling water until they were cooked seconds later. After the students described how delicious the goose blood was and how they had fought over it as children, I felt I had to try some. I decided it tasted like spicy Jell-O and was not worth contracting Avian Flu.

  Throughout the semester, Margaret and I kept going out to dinner with Helen and Eva. They were the easiest students to talk to. Of all our students, they seemed like the ones that could benefit the most from spending time with us. Helen and Margaret bonded over their interest in business school. Margaret was applying to go the next semester and Helen was hoping that she would pass the test to be able to apply to business school. Eva and I bonded over talking about relationships. She wanted to know how I could leave George and talked at length about not being able to find a suitable boyfriend – one that suited her and her parents. After one of our first nights out eating dinner at a coffee house, Eva wrote me this email: