Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China Page 12

  One night when Charles called me to find out where I was, I told him that I was in a cab on the way back to campus. He gave me a stern warning then,

  “Do not fall asleep in the cab.”

  I didn’t think much about this, but I assured him that I wouldn’t fall asleep. Later, when Margaret and I were heading to Shanghai for a weekend of shopping and, more importantly, eating, he took us to the train station and again he cautioned us,

  “Do not fall asleep on the train.”

  He looked so serious and concerned that I could only promise him that I wouldn’t fall asleep.

  The weekend in Shanghai turned out to be a whirlwind. We only got one and a half days there due to the train schedule. We left late in the afternoon on Friday and got to Shanghai at night. The train back to Wuhu was at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday. Saturday, our one full day there was rainy, so we made the best of our time by traveling to the top of the Radisson in downtown Shanghai, for a cloudy, but peaceful view of the city. After several tall chardonnays and bowls of mixed nuts, we found a Thai restaurant called Simply Thai for dinner. It was the most delicious meal we’d had in months with satayed beef, samosas and red curry chicken. I hadn’t had Thai food in nearly four months and the spicy curry tasted like home to me. We drank red wine with our dinner and then had margaritas and went dancing in what looked like a four-story Spanish style house nearby.

  We were incredibly hung over on Sunday morning after crawling into the hard single beds at our hotel at 2:00 a.m.

  So it wasn’t surprising when we missed that 6:00 a.m. fast train to Wuhu. Then we missed the 7:00 a.m. train to Nanjing. When we finally got going, we had to make a mad dash to get the last fast train from Shanghai to Nanjing. After we bought our new tickets, we had fifteen minutes to spare. We spent them at the nearby McDonalds drinking coffee and eating hash browns. The coffee tasted like rusty water and I could hardly choke down the hash brown because my head felt like someone had used it as a punching bag the night before.

  Hours of sucking down frozen drinks and dancing wildly flashed through my head. With her short brown hair sticking up in the back and her normally pink skin looking as white as new tube socks, Margaret looked just as bad as I felt.

  Keeping my head up as we waited for the train, I felt like my eyes had been held open all night and that I had eaten glass. Random intestinal pains threatened to double me over. We boarded the train. To my great surprise, it was very clean with blue pleather seats and tables between each row of seats facing each other. Margaret and I took our spots and immediately fell asleep. I had my fanny pack safety strapped around my stomach and under my shirt. As the train sped towards Nanjing, I slept restlessly, waking up and considering going to the bathroom to puke as I vowed over and over never to drink again.

  When we got off the train in Nanjing, we took a taxi to a bakery we had recently discovered that served veggie sandwiches on real baguettes and ice cream.

  On this day, I took one bite of my sandwich and ran to the tiny bathroom, which actually had a toilet, and vomited before having to turn around and go the other way. After ten minutes, I felt that I had fully purged my body of poison and I went back to the table to finish my sandwich and drink a Coke.

  By the time we got to the Nanjing bus station, I was ready for a nap. When Margaret and I boarded the bus, I heard the few men who were already aboard say “foreigner” and then “American” in Chinese. This was not a new experience for me. Margaret went to the middle of the bus to find her assigned seat. As I took my seat in the front, a short man that I assumed was the bus driver started pointing at the leaking vent above my head. He persisted, motioning that I move to a seat on the back of the bus, until I finally got up and followed him.

  With my belly full and my head swimming, I started to doze off in the spring sun. Being on a bus with no air conditioning, I started to feel like a microwave meal. After the train ride from Shanghai, I had taken off my fanny pack and put it in my purse, which was in the empty seat next to me. My backpack was on the floor between my feet.

  As I began to doze off I heard Charles’s voice in my head saying, “Do not fall asleep on the bus.” I snapped awake in time to see a man’s face two inches from mine. I screamed out. He was sitting on the row behind me, squeezed between the seats with his arm, elbow deep into my purse. With my heart racing, I grabbed my purse and jumped up. The man started miming that he was pulling the curtain in front of my window. I scolded him in English, shaking my finger at him. Then I picked up my backpack and headed towards the front of the bus.

  I sat down in the empty seat next to Margaret and rummaged through my bag, checking to make sure that I still had my passport, money and phone. My head was spinning as I sat back wondering what would have happened if Charles’s warning hadn’t woken me up. Then I remembered that my mp3 player was at the bottom of my backpack. I started searching and soon felt a tap on the shoulder. Another man was speaking to me. He pointed toward the seat I had been sitting in. I got up and walked back there and found my mp3 player under a napkin on the bus floor.

  When I got back to my seat, I fumbled in my purse, found my phone again and called Linda. After I explained the situation to her, I asked her if I should get the real bus driver to call the police. She said that if I had all of my things, I should not try to get the authorities involved. She said the men might be working with the driver or could be dangerous. As I talked to her on the phone and she tried to calm me down, four men, including the one who had his arm in my purse and the one that tapped my shoulder, got up, walked to the front of the bus and got the driver to pull over so they could get off. As they walked past me, the one who had tried to rob me caught my eye and said,

  “Sorry.”

  My anger was outdone by shock. I couldn’t believe that he knew that word in English. Most rural Chinese knew how to say “Hello” or “Bye bye,” but that was the extent of their English. And here was this rural burglar that knew how to apologize?

  I sat next to Margaret feeling violated and sick to my stomach. Just when I was starting to think that I knew how to get around China, it was made painfully clear to me that as a woman in a developing country, I needed to watch my back constantly and never fall asleep on the bus.

  EXPATS ON HOLIDAY

  It was a warm Friday afternoon when Margaret, Dianne and I met Linda for lunch at the one of the cafeterias on campus to kick off our spring break. This particular cafeteria was the most expensive one. Mostly teachers and school officials ate there. Linda treated us to lunch. Then she escorted us to Nanjing in a van driven by Mr. One. From there Margaret and I were going to Beijing to meet my sister Jennifer and her best friend Harold. Dianne was going to stay in Nanjing by herself for five days.

  Linda was riding along as an escort because all of China was on spring break and she hadn’t been able to reserve a room for the week in a hotel for Dianne. Linda was going to have to drive around to several hotels and check on their availability personally. We took the school van in case Linda couldn’t get a room for Dianne and they had to go back to Wuhu.

  I wondered what it would be like for 1.6 billion people to be on spring break together.

  Traffic was heavy as we drove for an hour and a half on the smoggy, bumpy highway between Wuhu and Nanjing. The lunch we ate was heavy. We had fish, tofu, rice, steamed vegetables and carrot juice. It wasn’t too different from our daily diet, but because we ate at the nicer cafeteria and Linda ordered our meal, it was much tastier than what we could manage on the street or in the students’ canteen. I ate a lot for a change and my full belly put me right to sleep during the warm van ride.

  After we got settled at the Nanjing Normal University hotel, where Linda had reserved our rooms for the night, Linda and Dianne went to figure out the hotel situation. Margaret and I went to look for a Mexican restaurant that Eilish and Jean had told us about. The three of us had come to Nanjing together once before. During that visit, we found a restaurant that served western food, but it wasn’t Mexican
food and that was all I had been able to think about since coming to China.

  Over the course of the last two months, we had been all over Wuhu and visited three other larger cities. In that time we learned that the Chinese did poor imitations of western foods that usually involved meat that wasn’t recognizable and pasta with tasteless sauce topped with a fried egg.

  We weren’t walking around Nanjing long before we found what we were looking for. The Mexican restaurant, Behind the Wall, was literally behind a wall. All we could see from the road was the small round sign hanging from a tree. Eilish and Jean had described it to us well, so we knew what to look for.

  (the sign of our oasis, a glorious restaurant with real black beans and margaritas!)

  As we walked back to get Dianne, we shopped at the street market near the entrance to Nanjing Normal University that opened in the late afternoon. On the side of the street opposite the entrance, a row of ten-foot wide stands was opening at dusk. The row curled around to another street and down one side of the university. There were stands that sold panty hose and toiletries, little black cloth shoes, silk shoes, Hello Kitty toys for children, beaded jewelry, fans, tapestries with scenes of China and all manner of Chinese tchotchkes.

  Margaret bargained for several tapestries with scenes of Chinese boathouses, landscapes and women in robes. The bargaining drew a crowd of five men around Margaret and seller. Her black bob of hair stood above theirs like the tallest mountain in a range. We had been to this stand before on our last trip to Nanjing. Margaret knew that she should start the bargaining by offering the man a little less than half his original price. She and the man used a pen and paper to write down their counteroffers. When Margaret had finally offered two thirds of the man’s price and been denied, we started to walk away. As expected, he called to us waving his hands in the air and sold her the tapestries.

  On our way to dinner, we took Dianne by the market and helped her bargain to buy her grandchildren small toy fans.

  When we got back to the restaurant, we walked up a flight of stairs and found a walled-off terrace where groups were sitting drinking cocktails. And no one glanced our way. For me, it was like walking out of a cave for the first time in months. I was blinking rapidly, unable to believe the amount of “foreigners” inside. The smell and look of the food was comforting, too. The atmosphere was lively with Mexican music playing over an amplifier. I felt like I could breathe easier and relax there.

  A small Chinese waitress that spoke English very well told us that we could sit anywhere we wanted. She didn’t seem the least bit interested in us. It was wonderful. We decided to stay outside because it was a warm night. We ordered a pitcher of frozen margaritas to celebrate our week of freedom.

  (Dianne, me and Margaret, sitting at Behind the Wall Café)

  Dianne was especially tired of her students’ lack of determination.

  “Awl the little buggers want to do is play games,” she said.

  She told us that on the few days she didn’t have a fun game planned the students wouldn’t try very hard. Then the class monitor would inevitably complain to Dianne that her teaching method was boring.

  We talked about college classes in the West and how ridiculous it was to expect a game during every class.

  Similarly, my students seemed to only be excited when I brought in pictures and magazines or planned an exercise that they could do with their classmates. They didn’t like to hear lectures or have to practice actually speaking English.

  Linda and the deans had told us how diligent the Chinese students were. We all agreed that our Chinese students seemed equally as lazy as Western ones. I wondered if it had something to do with us being at a small, rural teacher’s college, not an elite university.

  We swilled the pitcher of Margaritas as we ate quesadillas with actual black beans and chicken that really seemed to be chicken. Slightly tipsy, we made our way to a pub down the street that Eilish and Jean had also told us about. It was in a strip of shops in a cement building. The place didn’t look like anything special at all until we walked in and saw that the dark wooden tables, billiards, and a long, curved wooden bar with tall stools surrounding it. We found out from the male Chinese bartender that an Australian man ran the pub. Nearly all of the patrons were Aussies, too.

  When Dianne learned this, she started roaming the bar and introducing herself like the mayor of Nanjing. Margaret and I watched her in the mirrors that surrounded the bar as she met two young men playing pool and said cheers to a couple sitting at a tall booth. Margaret and I decided to stay bellied up to the bar. There we ordered two Coronas, a fabulous change from Tsing Tao, and met the friendly customers that sat around us.

  I was amazed at how nice people were in the big cities in China and especially Nanjing. I had never before gone into a bar and met most of the people in it. I guessed the fact that we all had the common bond of being expatriates was enough for anyone to strike up a conversation. Most of the other foreigners there were English teachers or businessmen working for a company that had stationed them in China.

  About an hour after we arrived, a man in a pink polo shirt, kaki shorts and dock shoes walked into the bar. He looked to be about fifty years old with thinning grey hair. I watched him for a few minutes thinking that he looked familiar until it dawned on me why. I finally said to Margaret, “That man in the pink shirt is from South Carolina.”

  “The man in the pink?” she asked. “I think I heard him talking and he sounds like he’s from England.”

  “Well he looks just like everyone I grew up with. I bet you a Corona he’s from South Carolina.”

  A few minutes later he was near me, ordering a beer.

  “Excuse me, but are you from South Carolina?” I asked.

  “I sure am. Where you from?”

  “I’m from Spartanburg, and the minute you walked in I knew you were a fellow South Carolinian. All my guy friends from home wear Polos and kakis.”

  He started laughing. “You know what? I’m from Anderson. I bet we know some people in common.”

  Turned out, he lived about an hour from where I grew up. Margaret ordered me that Corona.

  Margaret and I continued to chat up strangers throughout the night. We met a girl named Jessie who had been eating at Behind the Wall Café and lived about thirty minutes on the other side of Nanjing from Wuhu. She was very lonely at her little college. There was another foreign teacher with her who was Scottish, but after she turned him down for a date things had become awkward between them.

  Jessie told us she had the exact same frustrations with her students and China that we did. She told us that she was so sick of the Chinese asking her if she liked Chinese food that she had started telling them,

  “No, I don’t like the food. I only like Western food, so I’m starving here.”

  She said that she asked her students to write down English sentences. Jessie said she was amazed at the long and whimsical things they came up with like:

  Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.

  “These kids can hardly speak any English,” Jessie said. “So, I couldn’t understand it. Until I found the book of poetry they were copying these lines from.”

  The first week of school, Margaret had asked her students to write a Chinese song in English. Half of them had written out a song that was already sung in English, but was sung by a Chinese pop band. Margaret knew this and made the students redo the assignment. We couldn’t believe that these so called diligent students could be so sneaky.

  We had so much fun venting with Jessie that we promised to meet up with her again in the future. After she left, Margaret and I agreed that we couldn’t have made it in rural China as long as we had if we didn’t have Dianne and each other for support.

  Dianne checked in on us periodically and told us whom she’d met. She was going to return to Nanjing in two weeks to join a Hash House Harriers club – an international drinking and running club.
Dianne said many people in the Nanjing club were older and would walk instead of run, but that they would all be drinking.

  At midnight the three of us stumbled back to the hotel. We had to be up early the next morning to have a continental breakfast and start our vacations.

  The breakfast buffet was not good. It was the usual porridge, or rice in salt water, hot orange juice, noodles and sweet rolls. We took our plates and sat at one of the large round tables surrounding the buffet. There, a cute Chinese couple was already seated and said we could join them in English. The man and the woman seemed to be the same height and they looked alike to me. They both had cute smiles and sparkling brown eyes. They overhead us talking, and the wife said,

  “Hello. I am Katty. Are you American?”

  We introduced ourselves and learned that Katty, who I think was supposed to be called Kathy, was a University English teacher on vacation, like Linda. Her husband was a Chinese teacher, but he knew some English, too. They were ecstatic to have breakfast with us and practice their English. They were going to go to the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum. I remembered this name from history classes in high school, but the couple told us that Sun Yat Sen was the revolutionary Chinese leader that played a big role in overthrowing the last dynasty. At the end of our breakfast they asked Dianne to go along with them. She happily accepted. Dianne was glad to have Chinese people to spend time with that weren’t her students for a short time.

  Nanjing was a city with ten million people. Unlike Wuhu, a city of two million people, it actually felt like a real city. There were all sorts of restaurants, tourist attractions and a fair number of foreigners. I visited Nanjing four more times before I left China. Of all the cities I visited, I would have chosen to live in Nanjing if I had stayed longer because it had that very Chinese charm and historical spots and black beans.