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

  I worked lunch shifts as the cashier and food runner. I came home with perpetually brown fingernails from making thousands of gallons of sweet tea. At the end of that first summer, I was so sick of the smell of that food I didn’t want to eat there again until I came home for the holidays two months later.

  Most of the members of the two owning families worked there at some point in their lives as cashier, cook, salad chopper, butcher or all of the above. Maybe there are harder workers in Spartanburg than those two Greek families, but when you have the tasks of cutting onions, butchering meat and frying chicken livers six out of seven days of your life, you’re working pretty damn hard as far as I could tell. I came to live in awe of the workers at The Spice and, for that matter, anyone who worked in a restaurant or at a blue-collar job for a living. It’s damn hard work that is sometimes smelly, usually monotonous and often thankless and you get to deal with people bellowing for more ketchup, more tea or quicker service all day long.

  While I lived in Wuhu, I watched a family of three that worked on the food street right outside of the entrance to the school. The mother, the father and their daughter were all short, thin and dark-skinned, just like most of the class in China that worked outdoors for a living.

  Wanting to be as independent as possible in China, I started walking around by myself and trying to order my own food as soon as I could. Of course, all of the students at the school wanted to help me and practice their English with me, but through my Chinese lessons with Linda and my language tapes I had gotten some of the ordering and bargaining basics down. I could say, “I want that, that, and that. Thank you.” It was enough to get some grub.

  I met this particular little family the first time I went outside of the school by myself to order food. I walked along the small food street past the stand selling miscellaneous meat on sticks that simmered on flat grills as a man tended to them with his bare hands. I went passed the stand serving cold noodles and tofu, the station that served meat in pockets of dough, and an old lady selling sweet potatoes cooking on a metal drum before I got to where the family was setup.

  Their small stand, the size of a hotdog cart, was shaded by a cloth awning with tattered edges rippling in the wind and holes sprinkled throughout that allowed bits of sun to poke through. The family served dumplings and boiled noodles in soup every day of the week all year long from that stand.

  A few feet from the family’s stand, the mother was working a great big wok that rested on a large freestanding burner on top of a butane tank. The mother wielded the long handle of the wok with her bare hands, which were thick, square and blackened, probably from lighting the torch on the tank when the wind blew the flame out. She cooked either fried rice or fried noodles there all day long and well into the evening.

  That first visit, I stood in front of the mother, waiting behind two girls. It was my turn to order when another girl came and stood beside me. When I started to speak, the girl shouted rapidly to the mother. The mother started preparing the girl’s order. Shocked, I remembered that no one in China stands in lines. It was socially acceptable to cut-in. The next time another girl tried to order before me, I shook my hand at her, took a step to get in front of her and said “I want that and that” in Chinese. I pointed to emphasize what I wanted. Nodding her head quickly, the mother started to prepare my meal.

  I ordered fried rice with eggs and bok choy. I watched in awe as she quickly dipped her ladle into a bucket beside her and scooped a large cupful of oil up and sloshed it into the sizzling wok. Then, she cracked two eggs with one hand and beat them into the boiling oil with the other. Afterward, she opened a large covered pot on the other side of her feet and dipped two scoops full of already cooked, white rice and threw them in with the eggs. After she added what I thought must be soy sauce because of its dark brown color, she added salt and a red powder. Then, she flipped the mixture in the huge wok with one shake of her strong arm. She worked it with ease like she was wielding a small frying pan instead of the thick cauldron that I was sure I couldn’t lift with two hands, much less toss around, and I was a good foot and a half taller than this woman. The rice smelled delicious. She worked at a rapid pace, pressing and mixing it to get it just right. She only stopped to push her short, straight black hair out from her eyes with the back of her hand.

  I guessed she was around forty years old. She was thin and had a cute square face that looked good with her hair cropped straight across at her chin. I could see that with a little makeup and some clothes that weren’t food-stained and worn she would have been a very attractive woman.

  When she determined that the fried rice was ready, she called her daughter over to bring a bowl and chopsticks.

  After handing her mother the bowl, the daughter walked over to me and said the price of the meal. I couldn’t believe how cheap my lunch was. It cost only one Yuan and a half, which was about eighteen cents. It was the most expensive dish the family served. I couldn’t imagine how they lived off of these earnings.

  The daughter, with her long black ponytail, dingy jacket and pants that hung on her small frame, appeared to be about fifteen years old. She looked just like her mother, except her face was chubbier, smooth and not as dark since she worked under the covered stand. After the daughter took a moment to show me what coins to pay with, she went back to her station.

  I sat down at a small table with a bench that the family had set up nearby and watched the daughter as she worked, robotically serving boiled noodles and dumplings under the little hut to the college students that came by. I couldn’t help but think that she had probably never been to school a day in her life because her family couldn’t afford it. School wasn’t free at any level in China.

  I wondered it if was hard for her to serve these students, who were nearly her age and getting their college education. Did she care? Did she daydream of a better life where she didn’t have to slave over a boiling hot pot of dumplings and noodles every day along side her parents?

  The father looked very old. He had salt and pepper hair peeking out from under his tattered winter cap. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt with pants that he fastened high up with a belt. His job was to clean and collect the used bowls that were on the tables and benches that surrounded their section of the food street and to remove the trash that was carelessly strewn on the tables after people ate.

  They were the hardest working family in China as far as I could tell. I was sure that they didn’t own a car or have a nice apartment. And I knew that they never took vacations – they were working on the food street every day that I lived in China starting at the crack of dawn and closing down around 11pm. I saw them as I rode downtown to shop during the week and as I boarded buses to leave Wuhu on the weekends. If their efforts had been replicated in America, at a restaurant like the The Spice, they would have at least been able to have a car, a nice apartment and a vacation every now and then. They could have had all of those things and their daughter could have gone to school.

  Thinking about this family as I watched them work, I couldn’t help but feel like a pampered princess. My life was so easy, so fortunate. I was living in a country far from home, making a generous living, traveling where I pleased and shopping when I wanted. I have never felt so lucky to be an American.

  Seeing this family struggle, I thought of those who struggled to make America the land of opportunity. I thought of the unions and protests and laws that give Americans such a good life. I’m not sure I knew what it meant to be a patriot until I lived in China. I wasn’t going to go home and get an American flag tattoo on my lower back or anything, but I realized for certain that I loved my country, that I was proud of it. And I was starting to really appreciate the Chinese.

  THE DOORS

  In all the weeks I’d been in China, I hadn’t seen anything resembling a bar. When Margaret and Dianne and I went out to eat downtown by ourselves, we noticed that the restaurants closed early and everyone seemed to just go home. We had assumed that there was
no nightlife in China.

  Da Men was tucked away on a back road off of the main walking street, almost like it was supposed to be hidden. We were told it was the only bar in town.

  After a month, I had only seen one other person that I definitely knew was a foreigner in Wuhu. She was a girl and she was white skinned, but she was with a group of Chinese people. When I tried to catch her eye, she quickly looked away and crossed the street. After that I had given up on meeting other Westerners in Wuhu.

  One day Margaret came back from town with big news. She’d met an Irish girl in town who knew of a bar we could go to. The girl worked for the Aston Learning Center (Aston) downtown and she wanted us to hangout with her and her coworkers.

  The next night, we had our first adventure out on the town in Wuhu. We met up with the Irish girl, Eilish, and her coworkers at Da Men, which meant The Doors. When we walked into the bar, Eilish immediately threw her arms out and hugged me. I hadn’t been hugged in weeks. It felt just like home to me when she did this without thinking about it.

  Eilish (who stood around 5’11”) told lively stories of dancing in night clubs in other cities in China and banging her elbows into the foreheads of the Chinese men that were dancing nearby.

  Eilish ordered up a round of Tsing Tao (said Ching Dow) for us to drink and then she introduced us to her coworkers.

  Paul, who was English, was one of those men who had a good shaped head, which was fortunate since he was completely bald. He was a thirty-something computer programmer. When he decided he needed a life change, he took a year off of work to come and teach English while studying Mandarin. In England, he once had a Chinese girlfriend and she had taught him some Chinese and inspired him to learn more.

  Then there was Jean, the fifty-four-year-old Scottish artist turned English teacher, who wanted to see some of the world while she had the chance. She had been married before, but she said that after living her whole life in Scotland she felt that she was missing out on traveling and seeing the world and because she was single she wanted to take advantage of her life. I could understand how she felt. At 5’6,” she had pale skin and a short bob of brown hair. She drank strong whiskey, traveled around China staying at hostels by herself, and said things like, “That’s fucking great!” with a thick Scottish brogue. I immediately liked her.

  The other English teacher with Aston was a Chinese guy named Brian, who was from Wuhu. He was the best Chinese conversationalist I’d met yet. He knew English so well he could crack jokes.

  An hour later, Pavolina, a part-time teacher with Aston, joined us. She was a native of the Czech Republic, teaching English in China as a distraction while her husband worked at a nearby German auto plant that made Chery cars (said Cherry).

  Pavolina had been a practicing lawyer in the Czech Republic and said she was going stir crazy, so she decided to teach English to pass the time. Over six feet, Pavolina was arguably the tallest person in Wuhu. She looked like she could be on the Swedish Olympic volleyball team. She had light blonde hair, high check bones and a prominent nose. She spoke nearly fluent Mandarin after only a year in China. She also spoke impeccable English with a slight Irish accent from hanging out with Eilish.

  Da Men was small and dark. Red lamps gave the inside a soft light and a cozy feel. We all sat on wooden chairs around a long wooden table near the bar. There was a second floor with more tables and chairs and a bathroom.

  We started with a first round of Tsing Tao. I sat next to Eilish at one end of the table. Margaret was on my left chatting with Paul. Eilish told me that she had a boyfriend back in Ireland and then she asked me,

  “So, you’ve got a boyfriend at home then?”

  “Yeah. We actually just met four months before I came here,” I said.

  “How’s that goin’ for ya?” she asked.

  “It’s tough,” I said. “He doesn’t understand what I’m going through and it’s hard to talk on the phone early in the morning and late at night.”

  “Do ye love him?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Then ye’ve got to call him all the time and tell him everything, all the borin’ details of yer day.”

  Eilish went on to tell me that she’d left her boyfriend for a year when she moved to Australia. She said that she had started to feel like he didn’t know what her life was like there. Then she stopped calling him as much and telling him what was going on in her life. They grew apart and eventually broke up. Then when she went back to Ireland they’d gotten back together.

  “It was much harder gettin’ back togeder dan breakin’ up,” she said.

  She said that she loved him, but she wanted to see the world while she was still young, so she’d taken the teaching job at Aston. She and her boyfriend had vowed to make it work this time.

  “I call him every day and tell him every disgustin’ detail,” she said.

  I had been feeling more and more that George didn’t understand my life and that he didn’t know me anymore. After talking to Eilish, I resolved to give our relationship the best chance possible and to call him everyday and tell him every detail down to the squat pot adventure of the day.

  Soon the bar owner, Eric, came over to our table. Eric had the permed hair that I’d seen on so many men in China and he was wearing square, black, fashionable glasses with no lenses. Jean, who had a lot to drink by then, kept grabbing them from him, putting them on her face and poking her fingers through the holes.

  The night out with these foreigners had me feeling normal for the first time in China. We talked about the things in China that we thought hilarious and what frustrated us. Eilish, in particular, was able to bring up things that had been bothering me that I hadn’t thought to verbalize yet. She talked about how the Chinese will ask a stranger how much something costs or how much money someone makes. Then they would often tell you that you’d paid too much.

  Eilish, Paul, Jean and Pavolina warned us about the hard lessons that they’d already had to learn. They told us that we had to bargain over everything we bought and never accept face value for anything that wasn’t sold in Walmart or a department store. They said that it was standard Chinese practice to act like a price was hard and fast and then for the Chinese seller to initially refuse a lower price. They said the trick to bargaining was to always offer one third of the original price. Then, when that was vehemently refused, we should offer half the seller’s price. When that was refused, we should start to walk away. They said that most times the sellers would accept our second price or come back with a little higher price. They explained that offering what we considered fair and never bargaining with the storeowner was rude and they would not accept this kind of dealing. It was part of Chinese culture to go back and forth, haggling over the price.

  Eilish complained about being stared at everywhere she went.

  “I want to say to them, ‘For fuck sake, what do ya want?’”

  She had been in China several weeks longer than we had. She said that she had started to turn on her heels and stare back at people, but that had not kept them from staring right back at her. She had hoped to embarrass them, but since staring wasn’t rude in Chinese culture, they weren’t ashamed and instead were excited that they were looking into the eyes of a foreigner. I was starting to feel the same way about being stared at and followed around in stores. One woman had even put her hands on my belly as soon as I walked in a store. I didn’t even want to guess why.

  Feeling like I was constantly being stalked wore me out. The fascination that I had with being watched like a celebrity had quickly going away. I wondered if that’s how it was for famous people. First, they loved the attention and the recognition and then they wanted to punch the cameraman. I was beginning to want to punch the Chinese and scream obscenities at them, too.

  We all complained about the incessant spitting. Jean told us that she secretly believed that the Chinese only did it when Westerners were around. She thought that they waited until she was around to start spitting and that
they did it at her most of the time. She believed that it was a national campaign to gross out Westerners.

  Our new friends gave us a list of local foods they liked and places to go that had Chinese food that was palatable or English menus with foods more similar to what we were used to. They warned us that the pastries that looked like donuts were actually salty and that pastries that looked like braided hair tasted like donuts. Eilish and Jean had found a new favorite Chinese treat that they told us about.

  “Have ya seen the drinks wit the little balls like on the bottom of the cup?” Eilish asked us.

  “No,” we responded

  “They’re called Pearl Milk and they’re brilliant,” she said.

  “They really are lovely,” Jean declared. “Eilish and I are gonna open up a chain o’ Pearl Milk stores at home.”

  I tried the Pearl Milk later and found it was a kind of tea with dairy and a sweet flavor. It came hot or cold in a tinfoil covered cup with a wide thick straw. But the pearl parts of Pearl milk were tapioca balls that were visible at the bottom of the cup. Not knowing what to expect, I sucked up a pearl through my straw. The first time I tried hot Pearl Milk, I thought it was nasty. The jelly balls that popped into my mouth were gummy and a little bit sweet.

  The Aston teachers told us about their recent trip to Nanjing. There, they had found a fabulous Mexican restaurant, Behind the Wall Café. After eating there, they had gone to a dance club, where there were lots of foreigners. Best of all, almost no one stared at them in Nanjing. Margaret and I couldn’t wait to go there. We wanted to go with them the next time they went, but because our days off were different, we couldn’t travel together. Still, we made a pact to meet up regularly and vent about China and discuss the things we’d learned. We also wanted them to show us more of these restaurants with edible food.

  After meeting these people and feeling like I had a support group in town, I thought that I could live in China indefinitely. If I could feel this good in a foreign country, I felt I could travel to new cities, meet new people and not need to go home ever again. I also needed to be able to go to a bar every now and again and have a beer. For me, no matter the country, the necessities are friends and bars.