“Welcome to our new friends”
Thursday, May 18th, 2006There were American students that came to visit yesterday, on a 3-week study tour of China, hosted by Myrrl and Rod. Students were all excited for me. “Christina!” they said. “Your homemates are coming to visit. Are you excited?” To be honest, not particularly. I didn’t feel like I had half as much to talk to these random college students (who were fulfilling a requirement to graduate) as with my students. The Chinese students took the American students outside the gate to give them a taste of Jiangyou and college life. But, to be honest, they didn’t seem that excited, just kind of whiny. When I was with them, there wasn’t much to say.
Myrrl (or Rod or someone) brought a cross-cultural communication book for our library called Encounters with Westerners written by this guy named Don Snow who’s like the Christian ESL China Expert. I was flipping through it and feeling depressed at the idea of anyone successfully communicating across culture. Even more dismal was a statistic about Chinese international students studying in a grad program in the United States. According to the (1998) article, these students said that after a year, 39% of them would say that they have no relationships or contacts with Americans. Another third said that they only had maybe 1 or 2 American friends. Sometimes I get sad about my lack of connections, despite all the people…but then I think that maybe this problem is mutual. Do we create this ourselves by not being proactive and assuming that people will seek each other out? Are there just unbridgeable divides? I know a lot of people that say that they’ve been here for a while and lack close friendships.
And yet, for some reason, I feel closest to the students. I don’t know why, but maybe because I still feel like a student myself. Because I’m still young and have no baby or family. Because they’re excited and more honest. And I also feel close to my ayi (auntie). Because I laugh and make jokes, and she laughs and makes jokes. Because she sits on my bed in the evenings and looks at my stuff and gives me advice (well, this sometimes grates). Because I feel like she’s comfortable, and it makes me comfortable, too.
What is a friend, anyway? A person you tell secrets to? A person you hang out with? A person who understands you? A person who just wants to be with you with nothing gained? How odd that it would be in China that I ask these questions first, if I try to figure out friendship. If I can be friends with people I’ve never told deep secrets of my life with. Those people that I pick pipa (kumquat) or watch TV with, are they friends? The people that banquet me, are they friends? People who I work with or spend time in the office with or at lunch, are they friends? The students that know more about me than I do about them, are they friends? Anyone have ideas about this–especially people with international experience, but really anyone? Who do you think are friends (as cheesy as that question sounds).
There are a few that I don’t have to question, and I’m grateful for that. And I’m also grateful for having to think about this in the first place, as strange as it may sound. I’m also grateful for the fact that I have many wonderful memories, just as many, interspersed among the hard ones. But the hard ones are there, as they always are in stretching situations.
Post later about watching people harvest wheat and rapeseed. It’s an amazing sight to see it done by hand before your eyes….
Christina