The Day I Traveled Halfway Around the World
Excerpts from my journal, just for you:
My mind is chaos -- in two hours I will board my flight for China. I sit at the JFK airport, across the table from a French woman who has shared a half of her tomato and mozzerella cheese salad. She is the second visitor I've had at my small round table. A few moments ago, a Chinese woman approached and asked if she could sit across from me and eat her ramen. She didn't ask in those words, exactly, because she didn't speak much English. I tried out the only three Chinese words I know: Ni hao (hello), and Xie xie (thank you). When I told her I was going to China, she informed me that our flight had moved from gate six to gate seven, and not much later she finished her ramen and taught me the Chinese word for "goodbye."
And now I'm sitting across from a French woman, who also does not speak much English, and we have quietly eaten our salad, only saying words every now and then. She has expressed to me that I can stay with her if I ever come to visit France, and she gave me her address, phone number, and e-mail. She has been to Beijing (where I am going), to Japan (where I was born), and she loves New York (where I am). She looked at me a moment ago and told me as much, while her eyes beamed. And then for awhile she rummaged through her purse, pulling out crumpled pieces of paper, her passport, a coin purse. She explained to me she could not find her phone.
"Oh no." I tried to make my face look as displeased as I could, and to be somewhat useful I offered to throw away her empty salad dish. When I returned, she was holding her phone in the air, smiling, and we both laid our hands on our chests and sighed -- the universal gesture, it seems, for expressing one's feeling of relief.
Then I discovered that she had been looking for her phone so that she could take a picture of me:
"Photo," she said as she pointed to the phone. "Please take a photo."
So I obeyed her gestures and stood by the window, where a jumbo jet would form the background, then sat down, then got up and moved the chair so that I faced the window, and finally smiled as she took the picture. She would sen it to me by e-mail, she said.
"My son," she went on, "she always asks me if I've found new friends. Now I can tell him..." She gestured toward me.
"Now you can tell him 'yes,'" I said.
She also produced a box of chocolate-covered hazelnuts from her purse, and instructed me to open it. I told her I loved chocolate, after I had taken two pieces, and we smiled at each other while we ate them. She waved her hand over the box just before she put it up, and after I took one chocolate, she waved again and said, "No -- many! Many!"
She has said Bon voyage now, and moved away with her cane.
I am grateful that someone reassured me, even moments before I boarded my plane, that no matter how limited my language skills, how uneducated my cultural knowledge, how unfamiliar with the landscape, the geography, I can still somehow connect with people whose background I know so little about.
I left within an hour after I said goodbye to my new French friend, flew thirteen hours to Beijing, waited four hours before boarding an hour flight to Zhengzhou, then was met by a Sias University employee who drove me thirty minutes to the campus at Xin Zheng.
"Firsts"
Many of the teachers at Sias, when they first come to China, keep a list of things they are doing for the first time. Here are some "firsts" for me after being in the country for almost five whole days now:
First time to...
1. ride on a two-story plane
2. put toilet paper in the trash can instead of flushing it (which must be done around here)
3. eat a little fish fried whole -- eyes, bones, and all. First time to eat several foods, in fact: rabbit, egg plant, steamed dumplings with vinegar, black mushrooms, and other things
4. attempt to speak Chinese
5. bargain (admittedly, the bargaining was done mostly by the company I was with, though for the products I was buying)
6. own a Chinese cell phone
7. see a mouse in my own apartment
8. take a trip with other Sias foreign faculty and students (we went to the Yellow River)
9. wake up at six in the morning for four days in a row (jet lag is not my friend)
10. help a Chinese student with an English paper
Cultural Observations
As I sat on the plane, a foreigner before I'd even left American soil, I noticed a few things that I wasn't used to seeing: many of the Chinese carried-on quite a bit more than I did. Though the airline official allowance is one carry-one and one personal item, the stewardess helped a man for nearly ten minutes as he filled an overhead bin with bags of merchandise he and his party had apparently bought while visiting New York. Many passengers spent considerable time placing their items in the overhead bins, and they all carried similar items: bags with brand names like Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton. My fellow travelers also seemed to have no problem getting within a hair's breadth of each other. While I stood aside to wait for one Chinese passenger to finish loading his carry-on luggage, the Chinese man in line behind me charged past me and stepped so close to the one obstructing the walkway that they were touching each other, and the impatient passenger stood just like that until space was created for him to move forward. And while on the subject of "touch," since arriving here I've seen that it's perfectly normal on campus for two girls to walk arm-in-arm or hold hands.
One cultural aspect I've noticed that I particularly enjoy is that few of the people at Sias and in Xin Zheng are quiet or shy. In many cases, students have approached me, introduced themselves to me, and asked me questions. During my first Chinese shopping experience, I entered what is known to the teachers here as the "Superman" store and was shouted at by a little boy of about six or seven. He kept repeating "hello," and offering me some of his snack, and was later scolded by his mother for slapping my rear end. I'll admit that slap made me jump two or three inches and probably made my face turn red. A similar occurrence happened later when I was walking down the street with another teacher, only this time the other teacher was the victim of a little Chinese friend's slap, not me. In any case, I'm excited to get to know the students here, and excited that even though I'm eager to get to know them, many of them will be less timid about talking with me than I am with them.
