Tag: expat life

The Welcome back to China but not for good post

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I didn’t resist the idea of doing an “I’m back” post so much as I resisted making a big deal of it. Just as it doesn’t matter that so-and-so is leaving China, it’s not too important that so-and-so is coming back. If you think about it, that’s what we do. We come, we leave. We come back.

And we write about it.

Sometimes we produce interesting, original content while other times we produce irelevant bullshit for our 500-post a day RSS fuckfeeds. What we have in common is an interest in China, and a desire to share our interest with others.

Returned expat can’t shut up about China? Well, what of it? The big problem with readjusting to life in America is that not many people understand you. You can talk about the wonderful things you saw, the great experiences you had, you can try to make them understand, but without a common base, more often than not the people you’re talking to aren’t listening. They’re doing what most people do.

Waiting for their turn to talk.

Other though, others have questions. Wait, you actually lived over there? Get ready to be considered an expert. Yes, I can speak some Chinese. No, I am not fluent. Yes, you can eat dog and cat but you have to go to special places to do it, and no, everyone doesn’t do it all the time.

My students asked me, “Why do you come to China?”

My coworkers asked me, “Why did you go to China?”

And people now ask me, “Why did you come back?”

I’ll try to answer: my wife’s parents run a store in a small town. Her father gets up early to join the others in the farmer’s market, selling vegetables and meat. Her mother runs the store until he gets back, around lunchtime. Her mother will do manual labor; working all day, for maybe, 100 RMB.

Now, a couple weeks ago I tried to buy coffee. No real coffee here, it’s back to that gourmet Nescafe in a can. We went up to the cashier and I had my 100 RMB bill out, ready to pay.

My mother-in-law came over and handed the cashier a smaller bill. She said, “Take mine. You don’t have to give back so much change.”

Not a good answer. I wasn’t good at any of those questions, and not much has changed. Let’s leave it at this: I came back.

And I wrote about it.

An “I’m back post then? No. More like an attempt to summarize in a few hundred words what would take thousands. So let’s stick with seven:

It feels fucking great to be back.

The Leaky Air Conditioner

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Little Red King
Deleted Scene: The Leaky Air Conditioner

This is a deleted scene from Little Red King. It occurred near the beginning of the book, and is pretty much word-for-word something that happened to me.

John is a French major who has come to Wuhan, China, to teach English for a year. In his first days, he is jet-lagged, having stomach troubles, and comparing what he’s seen so far to his semester abroad in France.

Part of it was amusement, part of it was expressing some thoughts I hold about language learning. I never belittle anyone’s attempts at a foreign language, and I can’t stand the pieces of shit who do. There’s nothing more damaging to someone trying to speak a foreign language than ridicule, whether it’s foreigners learning Chinese, Chinese learning English, or in my experience, Americans learning French.

Unedited from the first draft.

**

John was in bed. Staring up at the ceiling. Thirteen hours. He was thirteen hours ahead. What was his mother doing now? How about Sandra? In class? Working probably. She started her first job soon. How about the rest? In class too? Or killing time in the library between coffee and study? He had seen a Starbucks on the ride in from the airport but it was across town and it was too far and what if there was no place to get coffee this was the land of tea after all and what if–

These thoughts put him to sleep.

The pounding woke him up.

A shirtless foreigner pale sparing his upper arms and neck opened the door to an old Chinese man with a beard, wearing moccasins that looked to share his age. The man uttered something. The sounds indistinguishable in meaning for John from a bird’s morning cry. John then uttered something back. The sounds indistinguishable for the man too and he said something else, held up a finger, and went downstairs.

John closed the door. Another knock came.

This time it was a young man who greeted him in English.

“Hello! How do you do?”

“I’m fine,” John grogged. “How about you?”

“Yes. My father says the water, it falls from your…” He drew a square in the air.

“Oh.”

“May I please come in to see it?”

“Sure.” John stepped aisde and cast his arm out. “Come on in.”

The young man strode across the foyer and through the bedroom. He stepped out on to the balcony, John still in the foyer. Swaying. The young man saw something and waved John over.

John went.

“This is the water,” said the young man. Eyes awake many an eon followed the invisible line his finger drew. Water was indeed leaking, dripping steadily from John’s air conditioner to theirs and announcing its arrival a dull, hollow thud. There was a silence as the young man stared straight at John, expecting something, but the problem was, John didn’t know what. So he just said the first thing that popped in his head.

“What are you going to do?”

“Yes.”

Perhaps the young man hadn’t been waiting. He was thinking, John realized. Rehearsing, even. Drawing up and revising his words, words he now spoke to John.

“I wonder could you shut down your AC.”

John wiped his arm and stepped back inside. Under the cold air, he said, “I’m sorry. But I don’t think I can.”

“Yes.”

Again that look of concentration. The supreme effort it took to speak a foreign language to that language’s native speaker. The fear. The fear of failure, of making a mistake, a mistake that the native speaker would then pounce on. Jesus, no wonder so many people were quite in his French classes. There were fucking graduate students who just sat there except when called upon, and no wonder. The higher up you went, the more the pressure. The higher the expectations, and God knew the expectations you held for yourself beat the expectations others held for you any time. God only knew what expectations this guy held for himself and what the penalty for failure was.

“My father come up here and fix it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He left. His father came up and gave a short ni hao with a wave and a laugh and John managed to return the wave but nothing else as the old man moved on past him to the balcony. He stood where his son had and reached down and twisted a pipe. The leaking stopped. He turned, said something and then headed to the door. John followed and when the old man disappeared down the stairs, the young man appeared up them.

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“It is fixed. Okay?”

“Okay. Good.”

“May I have your name please.”

“I’m John.”

“Excuse me?”

He cleared his throat. “Sorry. My name is John.”

“John. So common name.” He said this with a big, bright smile. “My English name is Matthew. It is very nice to meet you.”

John returned the smile as best he could. They said goodbye and John closed the door. He drew the curtains shut and went back to bed. He had been tired before but after their visit he wasn’t too tired and wasn’t this just like France where on his first day he’d short-circuited the room, oh that room, that terrible room they shoved him in it —

John took another trip. To the land of dreams. Memories of France carried him there.

A knock brought him back.

He opened the door. The old man was standing there.

“Ni hao!”

With a tool in his hand.