Christina in China

This weekend, Julie, a friend from Chongqing and CEE pastoral care person came to visit. I’m sure it was memorable for her because she got to have rice porridge at my host family’s house this morning and take pictures of people in my uncle’s pedicab, the new kind of pedicab with tassels and little tiny red lantern replicas and a Li Bai poem. It’s just on the edge between tacky and kind of cool. My auntie thought it was amazing that Julie, at 57, was wearing a red skirt. This is apparently not something Chinese women do.

Yesterday, I said in my little pleading tone, “Can I go with you?” when my auntie went out to prepare the rice fields. There she was, knee deep in mud, digging ditches in the flooded paddy, irrigating. “You don’t do this in the U.S. Why do you want to learn?” she asked me. “It’s interesting,” I said, echoing my students.

I got a viewing of Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs (literally “Snow White and the Seven Small Short Men”) in Chinese, along with my second lesson of the weekend on how to make paper flowers. (The first was with my students on Friday, paper roses before watching Memoirs of a Geisha.)

And today, in church, I learned the word “repentance” in the sermon about Zacchaeus. I semi-taught numbers and colors in the English class.

Ms. Yang (the aggressive chorister who was aggressive again this week) invited me to her friend’s house, where she made a bunch of statements about how Americans always eat steak. When I said I only ate steak like once every two months, she looked at me skeptically and then said five minutes later about how Americans always eat steak and raw vegetables, never cooked ones. Every time I tried to open my mouth to answer the questions people were asking her about me, she completed my sentences and wouldn’t listen when I tried to correct. The most frustrating part was when she started talking negatively about my host family, whom I love, who listen to my pieced-together sentences with infinitely more patience, who say that Americans and Chinese are the same, just look different. “For Americans, time is money,” Ms. Yang told her friend as she was explaining how I had to go do work. And from that point on, I just tried to figure out how not to cry until I got to Palm Springs Coffee with those quizzes I never have graded.

Yesterday evening, when my auntie, uncle, and I were all home, we sat in the kitchen with the hanging light bulb burning and cracked peanuts to eat. “If you have any problems staying here, you can tell us,” they said. “You’ve been here a month.” They asked my birthday and laughed when they said they could buy me a cake. “Too sweet,” my auntie said. And I tried to explain to them about how some foreigners would do gestures when they couldn’t speak Chinese. They laughed, I laughed, and the light in the kitchen was yellow and warm.

It’s warm here, and the face-washing towels now dry by evening when we use them again. As I went to the bathroom, I heard my auntie tell my uncle, “She’s fun.”

Tags: China, Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 5:00 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.