The Peripatetic.

The crowds in Beijing

People were pushy in public: on buses, in the mall, subways and sidewalks.  They shoved their shoulders and their elbows into each other trying to squeeze their way out of the bus . . . only to take a slow stroll when finally out.  It was just that point of interaction, like crowds rushing out of a soccer stadium.  You could get killed, or at least have your left arm taken out by an instant mob headed for the door.

In private, people would give you their left arm.

My neighbor and my roommates were no exception.  In October 2007, I emailed something like this:

Walking on campus to lunch with teachers

Did I tell you my roommates rock? They’ll do anything to help you, any time, and they’re always nice. … They’ll be exhausted, but are never crabby, never short-tempered.  I feel terrible whenever I’m sarcastic.  And I’m careful what I say — if I say fruit is good, they’ll buy me a basket of it.  If I say the kitchen is dirty, they’ll clean it.  Instantly.  It’s unbelievable, but that’s not rare here.

A lot of people are simple hearted . . .  I can’t can’t explain it, but wow!  I need to become a better person, and fast, but I get exhausted and crabby and have horrible headaches sometimes, and I can’t be short-tempered because they’re too sweet!

It was not just my roommates.  It was also the students at the school who tutored me, who would stay extra hours or go out for walks or watch a movie, free of charge, just to keep a friend company.

The public face of school mostly consisted of sitting in a large, white and gray classroom with Korean and Japanese students and one professor at the front, asking us to read and repeat.  With ten to twenty students in class, there was little time to answer.

My first week of class, one of my teachers wrote a sentence in Mandarin, in characters, on the board. I told her it was my first week of class and I couldn’t read. She wrote below the characters in pinyin. I told her I never learned pinyin, either.  She tilted her head back and laughed, “You can’t even read pinyin?!”  She moved on with the lesson.  Every other student in that class had at least four months of study before setting foot in China.

Privately, my teachers sat with me at lunch, after class, and when they saw I didn’t have a winter coat, took me out shopping that weekend, helping me to practice my colors in the store.  When my mom and my brother came to visit, my teacher bought them gifts.

Later, the teacher who laughed at me in class moved to Beijing, where she invited me out with her husband.  They treated me to dinner, opened their home, showed me their numerous wedding albums, then walked me to the subway stop back.  All the while, they calmly ignored or gently corrected my Mandarin mistakes.

Neither here, nor there

With friends and befriended strangers, when I made mistakes — which was all day, every day — when I said something like “We’re going to eat ‘batteries’”  instead of eating “dessert” (“diàn chí” vs. “tián shí”) people would laugh in a way that made me happy to join in. I never felt ridiculed.

In a culture of encouragement, it was easy to immerse yourself.  By October, however, my one day a week of calls home proved too little to maintain a normal accent.

My English was getting worse and worse.  I met a girl who just arrived from California and asked me where I was from.  I told her “the States.” She then asked where my parents were from then what I was mixed with and why do I have an accent?
“I have an accent?! “
“Yes.”

I realized then that I was neither here nor there, speaking neither proper Chinese nor proper English any more, but I was surrounded people who — in private, not so much in public — would kindly assist in the transition between languages, sweet escorts through that funny stage of limbo.