That nagging sense of guilt
Friday, December 23rd, 2005Tonight I’m nursing a cold. I’ve popped a couple Day Quil (the last two I have) and have been drinking hot water and blowing my nose a lot. Several people are getting colds. I think Eunice gave me hers, because she has a fever today. (Tangent: Ever explained the phrase “gave someone a cold” to a non-native English speaker? It’s pretty funny.) It’s partly because of the weather, which has been shifting strangely between so-cold-you-can-see-your-breath and so-warm-you-can-take-off-your-coat.
I also attribute the cold partly to the fact that my house is cold. Even as I type this, I feel like a whiner. My house is not that cold. It’s about 46 degrees Fahrenheit, and every time students come in, they remark on the warmth of my little library room. Cold is relative. So, for that matter, is little–my little library room is not that much smaller than students’ dorm rooms, which house eight or so students on bunk beds.
At MCC orientation, they warned us about it, and recently I haven’t been able to shake it: that nagging sense of guilt. Two weeks ago, Josh called me for our weekly (or so) phone call, and we ended up talking about being white and rich and privileged. I sent my mom an email about this, and she asked if there was some hidden money that she didn’t know about. We don’t, after all, think we’re rich.
* * * * *
The church in Jiangyou is over a hundred years old. As winter draws near, the church gets colder, since it has no heat. I’m not even sure it has doors. It’s made of concrete and wood beams and stands down a little alley off the old street in Zhong Ba. The old street, with its pig heads on slabs, fish swimming around in shallow tanks, live chickens and ducks in cages, doufu and noodles and vegetables of every kind, chestnuts roasting in barrels over hot coals, and women embroidering shoe insoles, is one of my favorite places to walk down, although I always feel conspicious. The church is packed with hard wooden pews, and you usually have to walk on one of the concrete ledges along the side to get to a pew on the farthest side of the church.
Inside the church, there is a light that looks like it might have been nice years ago. Out of five or so bulbs, there are two still burning. Otherwise, people see from the light that streams in from the doors or the spaces between the clay roof tiles, the bare light bulbs that hang from the ceiling, or the light from the platform. For decorations, the church has a few plastic flowers hanging from the wooden beams, which are also draped with what looks like Christmas tinsel. There is an out of tune piano, a pulpit, a out-of-place picture of a clipper ship, and a large framed piece of paper with the Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments in complex Chinese characters. On the right wall, there are red wooden characters that talk about loving country and church. There is also a list of people’s names that have donated money for the new church that is to be built.
The church has no hymnals provided. Everyone buys his or her own or looks off the person beside them. In the back sit a lot of old ladies, who I’m not sure understand a lot of the sermon. When we pray together, Eunice prays for the old ladies and men who are illiterate and can’t read their Bibles.
It was about a month after I started going to the Jiangyou church before I figured out the offering. There is no collection, only a wooden box by the door, where everyone puts in their money before they leave.
* * * * *
One day at lunch, Hugh tells a story. A few years ago, he was doing a Halloween lesson in one of his oral or culture classes. For the sake of being interactive, he brought in a roll of toilet paper, to throw around the class and demonstrate the pranks that people do on Halloween.
“I threw the paper up in the air,” he says, “thinking that we’d be picking it up from the corners of the room and from the rafters for weeks. But as soon as I threw it, the entire roll of toilet paper was gone, snatched up, torn into little pieces and put into purses to use as napkins or tissues later.”
* * * * *
Petrel, one of the sophomores with an excellent vocabulary, explains to me about sleeve covers and washing one’s clothes. Many of the students here wear sleeve covers: pieces of fabric cinched at the end with elastic that they put over their coats or their sweaters to keep the sleeves from getting dirty while they are writing or, especially, eating.
“If you wear sleeve covers,” Petrel says, “you only have to wash your clotheses once a week.”
I imagine some of my friends saying a collective “ewwww” at this, but one day, as I watch the students from my window, I understand. They are outside the dormitory building, washing the clothes by hand at a sink. The air is cold; you can see your breath. But they use cold water and roll their sleeves up, scrubbing their clothes with a bar of laundry soap on a washboard. They get chillblains in the winter, not frostbite but some sort of viral infection from the damp cold, from getting wet and not getting dry enough again.
Petrel and her family rent an apartment in Chengdu. They used to be farmers but now live in the city. But Petrel tells me one day that she has three winter outfits. It would be too much trouble to have much more than that, she tells me. After all, how would you decide what to wear every morning?
I explain that people in the U.S. change their clothes every day and that they think you’re strange if you wear the same shirt two days in a row. Petrel and her friend laugh. Preposterous, they think.
They look at my Harry Potter book and say that they’d like to buy one, but it’s too expensive. I tell them that they are about $20 in the U.S. Their eyes lose focus as they multiply by eight in their head and come up with 160 yuan. “Wow,” they say. I try to alleviate the situation by telling them that eating out in the U.S. costs about 8 or 9 bucks, but this doesn’t seem to help the matter.
* * * * *
In China, I live in a little, dark apartment. It has two bedrooms–one with a bed, one with a computer and three bookcases–the library. I have a refrigerator, a wok, a toaster oven, a microwave, and a washing machine. In the bathroom, kind of dirty, with a grime in the corners that won’t go away, I have a sink that won’t spit out water with any sort of pressure and a bathtub, a broken shower head, and a hot water heater that will give me 20 minutes of hot water. I have a couple chairs, four little sofa chairs, a water cooler, a TV, and a DVD player. In the toilet room, I have a Western-style toilet. I have three heaters, only one of which works.
In the U.S., people would turn up their noses. After all, some people said that my brother’s really nice apartment was crappy and that he shouldn’t live there. But here, I have a nicer apartment than almost anyone, with appliances that many people don’t have.
“Students feel more at home in your apartment than they do in mine,” Eunice says.
I ask her why, and she says, “Because it’s kind of cold and ugly and small. They can identify more with it than with my apartment now.”
And I agree with her. It is kind of cold and ugly and small. But we huddle in together, eat guazi, and laugh, and somehow, we find ourselves warm again.
* * * * *
Every time students come to my home, they immediately go for the photo albums on my coffee table. I have pictures of my family, my friends, Houghton, West Virginia, travels to various places. Eunice speculates that it’s a nervous mechanism; many of them are not quite at ease at my house, speaking English with me, and want something to do with their hands. But I’ve visited the apartment of one of the other, wealthier, teachers at the school, and the photo album gazing was a pretty central activity that day, too.
I put the pictures there in hopes that this would be common ground. Look, here’s my family. I have family, just like you, friends, just like you, a hometown, just like you. But recently, I’ve been thinking that it just exaggerates the differences.
A few weeks ago, my mother sent me a letter, along with a picture of me with Rachel Ingraham, a friend from college, when Rachel visited me in West Virginia. We’re standing on the porch of my house, wearing scarves in our hair, spaghetti-strap tank tops, knee-length skirts, sandals. At first, I hesitated putting it out. I’ve tended to err towards modesty here, since a bunch of people have stereotypes that all Americans are like people in the movies, that Americans are “open.” “Open,” as the students use it, can mean anything from open to new ideas to open about sleeping with anyone and everyone. So I thought twice about putting out the picture, lest a bunch of students in Sichuan would think that Rachel and I were “open.”
“Who is this?” they ask first. I used to tell them the word “classmate,” but Rachel wasn’t my “classmate” in the Chinese sense. So I tell them that she was my “schoolmate,” one of those English words that only exist in China.
They nod. The next question, I haven’t anticipated. “Wha,” says Future in the same breathy, astonished tone that all of them use when they’re surprised. Waa (my version–I don’t think pinyin actually exists for Sichuanhua) is the first part of the expression wassay, which is basically the Chinese wow. “What is this building?”
My house has always seemed normal to me, but as I look at it, I see what she’s surprised at. The white columns and railings on the front of the porch, the red speckled brick and tidy blue vinyl siding, the pond in front, the lawn and landscaping in the front, the white wooden deck chairs on the front. I picture the houses along every road in Sichuan–the houses with bathroom tile architecture, bricks, concrete, or sometimes very basic mud brick tiles.
“This is my house,” I tell Future.
They all huddle in, eager to see. “It’s so graceful,” Future says. “Can I say graceful for a house?”
“Elegant might be better.”
“Yes,” she says. “Very elegant.” I look in her eyes to try to figure out if there’s sadness there, but there doesn’t seem to be any. Sometimes I can glimpse a bit of an emotion that looks more like wistfulness than sadness. She just looks happy now, happy to be looking at the picture.
Sister is another sophomore. She wears a constant ponytail, speaks English with neat but clipped pronunciation, and has a slightly squared face. She has circles under her eyes often. She is a good girl, I would say to Chinese friends, a girl that is sweet and studies hard and is proud of things like her hometown Lanzhong’s famous pickled vegetables. “If you had a foreign boyfriend, you could marry him and have a house like that,” she says to Future.
Future pauses for a moment. “That’s okay. I just want to find someone I love and have a family and live in Yibin.”
Sister looks a bit askance at her, and now Future does have a wistful look, but I know that the look isn’t because of America but because of Yibin. She misses there, misses her family, misses the spicy Yibin ranmian rice noodles and the Chang Jiang.
And this is what makes me write this blog entry, what helps me during my time here. My students, who navigate the world of the countryside and city, the rice and rapeseed fields and the supermarkets, the funerals where people stay up all night with the deceased and the pop music that sounds just like Britney Spears in Chinese. They study hard and work hard and take care of each other, and these students, the best ones, are fluent in a foreign language in a way that I alternately envy and admire. Although they learn English, they have their own language and their own dialect that we foreigners have to learn or perish here. I don’t feel sorry for them because they don’t really feel sorry for themselves. I don’t feel sorry for them because in many ways, their ways of doing things make more sense than mine do. Especially here.
The resilience and distinctiveness and uniqueness that they have keeps me from any kind of pity for them. And the fact that what many of them want is not another America. It is their own way.
Christina