I'll Show You

There are some things I don't like. I didn't particularly like it last night when the cook's assistant snickered and stared at me the whole time I ate three mantou (little steamed buns), a fried dough stick, and a fried egg, the unfortunate result of my attempt to order a vegetable dish from a cook who speaks only Chongqinghua. Mind you, what unifies "Chinese" for a billion plus people is Hanzi, the single system of written characters, not Putongua, king of the many spoken dialects. I can't read menus written in Hanzi, I can't speak Chongqinghua, and my Putonghua (Mandarin, the language of government and business) is still poor. I'm not alone. Even some of my students at the very selective Xi Nan Daxue fret that they might fail their exams in Putonghua--that is, if they grew up speaking any of a dozen other dialects.  Sometimes a husband and a wife speak to each other in Putonghua, rather than the dialects of their native provinces because their dialects are mutually unintelligible. But I ramble. The cook's assistant really didn't have to laugh at me because I cannot read Hanzi or understand Chongqinghua.

I didn't like it today when the crowd in the train station pressed so hard on all sides of me that I would have been carried forward without losing my place if I had found a way to lift my feet off the ground.

I don't like standing in line. There is no sense of turn-taking whatsover, not in that train station, not in Yong Hui, not in any of the other grocery stores where I have to wait in line to have my vegetables, tofu, and peanuts weighed. I might wait patiently, but if I actually appear to be patient, arms will be thrust ahead of me and the shop girl will accept whatever the most aggressive housewife thrusts under her nose. There is no standard of fair play when standing in line.

But lest you think Chinese people are unfriendly, think again. It's true that you're more likely to be greeted by blank stares than smiles on the street. The public can seem distant, unfriendly. But what does a smile from a stranger mean? If a Chinese person means to be friendly, it will be expressed with more than a smile.

Just today--just in the last twenty-four hours--I encountered over a half dozen people who went out of their way to help me. There was the student on Bus 558, the doctor in the cavernous waiting room of the train station, the eighteen-year old who admittedly opened his conversation by asking how old I was, the translator who joined me at a little table for jiaozi (dumplings) and the graduate student who offered her library card who was sitting at the next table, the girls at the north gate who went looking for a wifi cafe on my behalf, and girls by the east gate who actually found one--and then thundered down the street to get me when they thought they had given me the wrong directions. These are just today's encounters, but I've had scores of others. For instance, within the past week I stopped in front of the optician at the local market and handed him not one, but two pair of glasses, one with a broken bow, the other with wobbly bows needing tightening. He told me he'd need ten minutes but, when I returned to pick up and pay for my glasses, he refused even the most nominal payment. Instead, he just wanted to hear about Meiguo and to wish me well.

Although I'm not ignorant of "guanxi"--networking and working the old boys' club for mutual benefit--I'm stunned by the degree to which people go out of their way for me, sometimes leaving no trace of who they are and no way for me to reciprocate if I want to and no way for them to seek favors, even if that had been their hidden motive.  All of these encounters occurred today, but I encounter similar acts of kindness regularly.  If a Chinese person means to be friendly, it seems to me,  it will be expressed with much more than a smile.