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

  We were given yellow flowers to pin to our chests and were herded to the front of the line of solemn students. Then, I saw that a small Chinese man, standing a few feet away from the procession, was video taping the funeral. Several others were taking pictures of the mourners. These men would get right up on a group of mourners and focus in. Fortunately, the eyes of Neville, Danielle and Michelle seemed to be glazed over in mourning.

  Our small group moved forward toward a section of the building. Each section of this funeral home had two glass walls in the front and back with a concrete wall dividing it from the next identical section. I looked in and saw Dianne was encased in a glass coffin. She had a bandage on her head and bright flowers placed all over and around her.

  As the officials made speeches, another funeral party was lining up directly to our left. When Michelle started to read the family eulogy, I only heard the first few words before wailing began from the other funeral party. People were hollering and clinging to each other as they entered the glass parlor to view the deceased they had come to mourn. The wailing was so loud and continuous that I missed almost every word Michelle said.

  I could feel the anger churning in my stomach. Why couldn’t they wait fifteen goddamn minutes to start that hollering? What was wrong with these people that they couldn’t plan that out? Then I remembered the man holding the video camera and I wondered if he was catching me on tape looking distracted and angry while the Chinese thought I should be concentrating on the upcoming wailing.

  After Michelle spoke, another official said some words that I couldn’t hear over the piercing screams filling the air. Then the glass doors leading to the coffin were opened, horns started blaring from behind the building and the crowd of Chinese people with us started wailing as loud as they could, almost as if to outdo the group beside us, as we processed around Dianne. I didn’t cry that morning. Anger blocked my tears.

  Seeing Dianne lying in a glass coffin, I thought how pointless the whole thing was. That wasn’t even Dianne in there. She was gone. She had been gone since the past Wednesday. And the way the Chinese people were crying and wailing seemed like such an act to me. After everyone finished viewing the remains, the wailing stopped as suddenly as it had started. Then we all left that concrete and glass hellhole.

  The cameraman followed us to the van and filmed as we drove away, capturing every grimace until the last second. Afterwards, Danielle and Neville flew back to Australia and the rest of us went to lunch. On the way something funny happened and Michelle, Margaret and I laughed. I can’t remember what it was but I feel sure we were laughing over some cultural strangeness.

  I was walking next to Linda a moment later and I looked at her and said,

  “We needed to laugh, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have heard that it is okay for you to laugh so soon. The family and I discussed this earlier. We are not allowed to laugh at these times.”

  “Really? When do you get to?”

  “Not for a long time. It would not look right.”

  It seemed to me that the Chinese were very concerned about appearances when it came to death, hence the wailing. Not that they weren’t immensely saddened. One of my students, a boy named Daly, came to my apartment days later and asked me what had happened to Dianne. When I told him she had died, his face turned bright red and his eyes filled with tears that spilled down his smooth cheeks. He and Dianne had met by accident in the downtown one day and had become supper buddies over the last three months. I thought how very few young men in America who were twenty years old would react like he had over the death of a woman they had known such a short time.

  It wasn’t that I thought the Chinese didn’t feel sadness just like we do, but it seemed to me that their culture had such rigid rules for how to physically display mourning. We have a structure surrounding death too, of course; bringing food to someone’s house, having a wake or a funeral or wearing black, but it was so bizarre and jarring to hear this unnatural wailing and see pictures being taken and video cameras recording a funeral.

  When I got back to my apartment that day, I was emotionally worn out. I felt like I’d been drained of every good feeling I’d ever had. In that moment I had an overwhelming sense of hatred for Chinese culture. I was so sick of being in China. I felt I hated the Chinese – I hated how they ate and what they ate and how they were so damn pushy. I hated how they acted like they knew everything. I couldn’t stand the sight of them. I just wanted to leave and never come back.

  Obviously, China wasn’t the place for me. China wasn’t my answer after all. I just wanted to curl up in the bed and go to sleep until I could leave China and get back to my easy little life in America.

  Wandering aimlessly seemed better than being miserable. As I was thinking all of these things, I heard a light knock at the door. I opened it and saw Charles standing there. He looked more gaunt than usual – his lean silhouette in my doorway was slumped and pitiful. But I didn’t want to deal with him.

  “Hi, Charles.”

  “Dina is gone.”

  Although I knew he had been at the funeral, I couldn’t tell if he was making a statement or asking a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  He didn’t say anything else after that and we stood in silence not looking into each others eyes.

  “Come on in, Charles. Can I get you some tea?”

  “I will make it,” he said.

  Charles shuffled into the kitchen and boiled water, making tea and preparing a pot and two small cups on a serving tray. He worked without talking as I stood in the kitchen doorway. My tear ducts were still not dry and I could feel them welling up again as I watched him prepare the tea.

  We drank and I couldn’t speak. He seemed stupefied and sat silently for some time. In the days prior to her death, Charles had been so sure that Dianne would live and had told me so several times. I couldn’t understand then how he could hear everything the doctors and teachers were talking about in Chinese and still not understand that Dianne was dying. I guessed he refused to believe it.

  “If Dina did not get sick we would be in my hometown enjoying the delicious foods with my family,” he said. “Now, Dina will not come.”

  “No.”

  “I can see you three foreign teachers walking together, Dina behind you trying to catch up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How time flies,” he said.

  As he spoke, I could feel the tears running down my face.

  As much as I thought I hated China and the Chinese, I cared for Charles – pesky, pushy, lovable Charles. And I couldn’t leave now even though I was so heartsick. I knew I would stay in China and stick out the semester. After all, Charles was the real China, not the cameras and the strange cultural peccadilloes. Charles was China, the good, the bad, and as much as I had resisted it, I loved him.

  A GOOD MAN

  The day after Dianne’s funeral, Charles called Margaret and me on the phone to check up on us. He called us every day after that. At first, his visits to our apartments were sporadic. He would just pop by in the morning on his way to class or in the afternoon when they were over. Then his visits became nightly. We started planning for him to come by and would get treats to share or ask that he go to dinner with us. He would take us to a certain vendor in the nearby village and order me lotus on a stick with spicy sauce the way I liked it and order fried rice for Margaret without meat.

  Only a week after Dianne’s death, Charles started asking again when we would visit his hometown. Right after Dianne died, we had told him that we wouldn’t be able to find the time. In truth, we were too shaken up by the experience to imagine a weekend in an even smaller Chinese town that was sure to lack Western food or any semblance of comfort that we needed. But Charles persisted. He wanted to go home and he wanted to take us with him.

  “Maybe you will find what you are looking for in my hometown,” he would say when I asked where to buy a certain kind of Chinese painting
.

  “The food in my hometown is more delicious,” he would say after we ate on the food street.

  Charles became so precious to us that there was no way we could deny his repeated requests to visit his hometown. He had saved me from another desperate life decision – to leave China and never look back – and I owed him the trip. For the second time we made plans to go to his hometown, Chizhou.

  In the meantime, he kept coming by our apartments at night and watching DVDs with us. Movies were our main source of entertainment during the week because there was no nightlife in Wuhu – Da Men, the one bar had already closed down – and we could only meet with the Aston teachers when they had a rare night or afternoons off.

  Margaret and I took turns buying bootleg DVDs at the different stands in town. They usually cost about 8 Yuan or $1. Sometimes we got cheaper ones for 6 Yuan, but then we ran the risk of getting the really bad quality DVDs or those dubbed half in Russian instead of English.

  During those last weeks we were in Wuhu, we watched more movies with Charles than I’d ever seen in my life. His favorite movie was Rocky. It had been my favorite movie growing up and I felt like I was passing a torch when we watched it together. He got excited at all the right moments and was always pulling for Rocky. Then, just before the big fight with Apollo Creed, Rocky bent down on one knee in his oversized silk robe with his hood over his head. Rocky’s head was bent over clasped hands. As Charles and I watched this powerful moment together he turned to me with bright eyes and said,

  “Yes. Praying. A good man.”

  Charles was so excited and it made so much sense to him. As far as I knew he was an atheist like most of the Chinese, yet he appreciated religion and what it meant in this movie. Many things about Charles surprised me and gave me glimpses into humankind.

  On a hot spring day, Margaret and Charles and I waited for the bus to Chizhou. While we were waiting, Charles ran off to get us a snack. He came back with three pea-flavored popsicles.

  After two and a half hours on a crowded bus, we arrived in Charles’s hometown. His father was at the bus station waiting for us. He was several inches shorter than Charles and well dressed, wearing a white buttoned down shirt with rolled sleeves and black pants. Charles said that his father didn’t speak much English. Smiling and nodding, his father then told Charles to tell us that we were welcome in his home and welcomed to China. We tried to thank him profusely for his kindness, but Charles would only translate a simple ‘thank you’ for us.

  (Charles and his father in front of their home in Chizhou)

  Charles’s father caught a cab for us and five minutes later we were dropped off in front of a large hospital. Charles told us that his mother was a staff member at this hospital and his father was a driver for a hospital administrator. Their family lived in the staff housing just behind the hospital. As we took our backpacks and walked toward their apartment, I could see people turning to look at us, pointing and shouting.

  The staff housing was flat-roofed cement condominiums. We got to Charles’s house and his mother was standing outside waiting for us. She was a few inches shorter than his father, wearing a floral top and khaki pants. She was speaking rapid Chinese to her husband and her son as she ushered us into the house.

  When we got to the door, Margaret and I were given plastic footies to put on over our shoes. As Charles opened the door, we saw Mimi, Charles’s small white dog, growling. After telling us not to pet the dog, Charles laughed and pushed Mimi back as we entered. Charles had already shown me pictures of Mimi and told me so much about her that I assumed she would be a wonderful loving dog. She was not. She was a vicious little thing. Like a lion tamer, Charles kept Mimi away from our exposed ankles by using the bottom of a chair to shove her away from us.

  (Mimi, Charles’s dog)

  While Charles kept Mimi at bay, Margaret and I were instructed to sit on the family’s couch. Then we were plied with apples and watermelon to eat. Charles’s family was so generous to us.

  Their home looked like others we’d seen in China. The main items in the house were the two beds, one in each bedroom, and a couch and a small table with three chairs in the living room. Above the table, a large poster of Mao was hung. There were no other pictures or items on the walls.

  A while later, Charles, his mother and father, Margaret and I, left the apartment and walked downtown for dinner. The hospital was not far from the downtown, which enclosed a beautiful lake. Compared to Wuhu, Chizhou was very small, but the willow trees and benches surrounding the lake gave it a quaint feel.

  We met a friend of Charles’s father for dinner at the entrance of a building that was three stories tall. When we entered the building a hostess escorted our group up two flights of stairs. We were seated at a large round table with another Lazy Susan in the middle. The staff served us pumpkin soup, mushrooms, tofu, pork and fried rice and noodles. Charles’s father insisted that we drink a lot of wine during the meal. His wife did not drink any.

  The dinner was one of the best I had in China. I wondered if it was very expensive, but Charles refused to let us help pay. He would not hear of it or ask his father about it.

  Afterward, we met up with Charles’s grandmother and grandfather on his father’s side. They looked a lot like his mother and father except that they were a generation older and in great condition as far as I could tell.

  When we met the grandparents, they clasped our hands and smiled to greet us, but they did not speak any English. We said a few Chinese sentences to them and they seemed delighted that we were learning the language. Then we all walked to the hotel that Margaret and I were going to stay in. When we got inside, I couldn’t believe how nice it was. It was much fancier than the hotels we had been staying in when we traveled. It had plush carpeting and the room we stayed in had a comfortable mattress and nice wooden furniture.

  After seeing Charles’s family apartment, I couldn’t bear for them to pay for our accommodations. Margaret and I begged Charles to let us pay for the room. Again, he refused to hear this or to relay the message to his father. He would only say what an honor it was to have us in his hometown and how welcome we were.

  The next morning Charles took us to see his high school. We learned that most of the students stayed overnight at this primary and secondary school, so there were school buildings and dormitories on the school’s campus. I couldn’t have imagined being away from my parents, but living in the same city, as a child.

  We met Charles’s English teacher and she asked us to meet her class. Since the high school students had the same teacher all day long, this was her one and only class and she had been teaching them for several years. We walked into the classroom and saw that the teacher had laid out two chairs at the front of the room for Margaret and me. Charles failed to mention that we were going to be interviewed by this class.

  We sat and the teacher introduced us to the giggling high school students. Then she told them they could ask us questions. To my surprise, they could speak better English than many of my college students. They started with the usual, “Do you like Chinese food?”

  Although I’d come to realize that I liked Chinese American food in greasy restaurants that also served diet coke and fortune cookies, I gave the usual answer, “I love it.”

  Then, they asked if we liked living in China, if we could use chopsticks and they finally got around to asking if we would sing for them. Charles told the class that I would sing. Next thing I knew, I had an eraser in my hand and I was singing the crowd pleasing “I Will Survive.”

  After the high school visit, we went to see Charles’s grandparents at their house. They had worked for the university in town so their small apartment was in the staff quarters beside the university. His grandparents’ apartment complex was cement and looked just the same as his parent’s from the outside. On the inside, however, there were dirt floors instead of the linoleum. The appliances and conditions also seemed much older. The one thing that this apartment had in common with his p
arents’ was that there was a large, old poster of Mao over the kitchen table. It was the only thing hanging on the walls. The grandfather showed it to us with pride. Then he told us, through Charles, about the days when he served in Mao’s army and he showed us his army identification papers. He had fought in the Second World War.

  That day, Margaret, Charles and I went to lunch at the same restaurant we had gone to the night before. We met Charles’s mother and father there and we had a similar meal to the one from the night before. I wondered if this was the best restaurant in town. Margaret and I discussed this and wanted to do something for the family in return.

  On the way to get our things, Margaret and I tried to buy them a basket of fruit from a street vendor. Then, Charles’s father saw what we were doing and forbid us to buy it. He told us that by teaching his son English, we were giving them all the repayment they could ever want. Going to Chizhou and seeing how the Chinese lived and treated guests was the best thing I ever did in China.

  (me, Charles, Margaret and Charles’s parents and paternal grandparents in the hotel lobby)

  THE MIRAGE

  I loved seeing where Charles grew up and meeting his family, but two days and very little spoken English later, I was ready to be back in my apartment.

  The day we left Chizhou, it was so hot outside my clothes stuck to me before I could even wiggle them on. Charles’s family wanted us to stay another night when they heard that the bus didn’t have air conditioning, but Margaret’s birthday was the next day and we were determined to make it to civilization and a Chexican, or Chinese-Mexican, meal at Behind the Wall Café in Nanjing by then. We were also tired of being looked at and not being able to communicate. And when we asked Charles to translate a long sentence of Chinese for us, he would usually just say, “Xie xie,” which means ‘Thank you’ in Chinese.