Christina in China

Four days and a bit less jet lag later, I got to board a plane from Beijing to Chengdu, the closest airport city to Jiangyou. This was my first experience with intra-China air travel, and it mostly went smoothly. Somehow I ended up with two bags and a carryon (what was allowed on my international flight), but the allowance for domestic flights is apparently less…40 whole kilograms less, so needless to say, I had oversize baggage charges. Kathi graciously helped me through the line, and I found my gate, only to discover that that gate was not the gate for Chengdu. In fact, I couldn’t see any gates that said Chengdu on them. This was 7:45, and my plane was set to leave at 8:00.

At about 7:53, I got up the nerve to talk to the man who was holding a ticket that looked like mine. “Ni qu Chengdu ma?” I asked. (“Are you going to Chengdu?”) “Yes,” he said back in English. “Your Chinese is very good.”

I will digress here. The Chinese are the most gracious people in the world to praise foreigners’ Chinese, no matter how awful it is. They are also the most modest people in the world, saying that their English is poor, despite the fact that their English is ten times better than my Chinese. End of digression.

The man, I learned, grew up in Jiangyou but was working in nearby Mianyang. He was carrying boxes of fruit, it looked like, and was trying to offer me a ride from Chengdu to Mianyang, where I could catch a bus to Jiangyou. Somehow, I couldn’t manage to make it clear that I had a ride. At 8:05, the word “CHENGDU” came up on one of the airport marquees. The nice man and I walked to the line and were told that this was the wrong Chengdu flight. At 8:07, another Chengdu flight appeared. We went through the gate and were shuttled via minibus to the plane. I think I actually got on the plane at about 8:20, and we took off at maybe 8:30 or so.

And thus begins my experience of being the only white girl in sight. The word for foreigner is laowai, which literally means “old foreigner.” Here I was, a laowai on a flight with maybe 200 Chinese, eating breakfast, which consisted of fruit, bread, and vegetables. During the flight, I watched the inflight movie, which basically looked like a Chinese tourism video, and read my Chinese book, trying to learn emergency phrases. One time in the flight, I got up the nerve to ask my neighbor, “Qing wen, ji dian zhong?” (“May I ask what time it is?”) He pointed at his watch.

It was a very odd experience, to say the least, to be sitting in a sea of voices speaking in a language I barely know. Occasionally, someone would say something funny, and everyone would laugh. I started to think that all these people were geniuses to be able to speak this language. For the uninitiated, Mandarin Chinese (putonghua) has four tones: the high tone, the rising tone, the rising and falling tone, and the falling tone. And if that wasn’t enough, of course, the Chinese use characters, which always make me think that you have to have a Ph.D. to read a newspaper. This is, of course, not true. It’s an amazing thing, though, language–how we can rattle off words without a thought, and these series of sounds, of stops, of voiced and unvoiced sounds, vowels and consonants and intonation, can carry almost any meaning that you want them to. On the plane to Chengdu, the fact that we can communicate with our vocal cords and our lips seemed like a miracle to me.

When we landed, Eunice was standing at the gate, waving. I had met Eunice once before, in Akron, PA, where I was doing MCC orientation. Eunice used to be a nurse in Lancaster, PA, before coming to China and staying for four years. She speaks good Chinese, sings, cooks, plays basketball, entertains student visitors practically every night of the week, and is basically a legend around here. But I digress again. Eunice, Dean Zhao (the dean of the foreign language department), and a driver were here to pick me up. Eunice was the only one who spoke English, so she was relegated to the job of being go-between/translator, which she didn’t seem to mind. We ate a big meal–fish and vegetables and lots of Sichuan spice. Sichuan cuisine is famous for being super-spicy. They grow a pepper here that they call lajiao and a pepper that they call huajiao. They’re by far the hottest peppers I’ve ever tasted. You don’t eat them, but they make everything you eat hot, so hot that your eyes water and your lips start to tingle and lose feeling. You eat rice to counteract the spiciness. I was still not good with my chopsticks, so Dean Zhao got me a fork, much to my sadness. But the food was wonderful: something that’s called xiao bai cai (a leafy green vegetable that literally means “little cabbages” but isn’t much like cabbages), soft doufu (tofu) and peanut soup, fish, some other meat. And then we did a little of the favorite Sichuan pastime of playing cards and drinking green tea during the after lunch nap hour, kind of a Chinese siesta. I forget the word.

During the three-hour car ride to Jiangyou, I talked to Eunice about the school, the students, things here in general. And I stared out the window, looking at the houses, at the farmers working in the rice fields, at the billboards, at the expressway. Such a contrast, to be driving on a modern road that would rival any interstate highway but beside brick houses with baked clay tile roofs, with farmers drying the rice for harvest a few hundred yards away from the expressway.

They had no host family yet, Eunice informed me. They were looking for a good family, a family that spoke pretty good putonghua. I could go ahead and stay in a teacher’s apartment at the school until they did, which was fine. The little apartment I’m living in has the CEE library in Jiangyou: three bookcases full of books about China, and Christian books, and classic & literary fiction, and young adult/kids books. Oh, there’s also a bedroom and a bathroom and a shower, but that’s less important. 🙂

So it was a long day, a strange day, but a good one. A day that finished with noodles at a noodle shop right outside the school gate, good noodles in a spicy soup, noodles that I watched the man pull and slice right beside our table.

It’s nice to be in home sweet home, even at a home I’ve never been to before.

Tags: Food, Jiangyou, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Jiangyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.