No. 2

Date: Sept. 16, 2015

Status: Listening to the streets of Yangzhou 

              It’s nine o’clock in the morning, Thursday September sixteenth in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. Back in the States, I was a night owl, unable to accomplish anything before noon. In China, I am a morning person, awake and alert an hour before my seven-thirty alarm, ready to read a book, check my phone, cook breakfast, wash dishes. Maybe it’s just the lingering jet lag or maybe it’s the streets’ constant honking and screeching that crescendos to its daytime volume around six-thirty each morning.

              On Monday afternoon, my flight arrived in Shanghai, and Mr. Chi was faithfully waiting for me, holding a sign with my name. I made eye contact, smiled, and nodded, and we were on our way. Then Mr. Chi got a call on his smartphone. After a couple minutes of conversing in Chinese, Mr. Chi handed the phone to me. An unfamiliar male voice brushed with Southern twang met my ears.
              “Hi, Michelle? Welcome to China!”
              “Ah, yes, thanks, who is this?”
              “Oh, it’s David.”
              David! I had emailed David, the downtown school manager of Yangzhou’s Shane English School, while I was in the States. But I hadn’t thought to ask where he was from—whether he was American, British, Australian, Canadian…or perhaps a Chinese man using an English name as so many of the Chinese at the English school do. But here on the phone was a voice out of Dallas, Texas—a place now far away, a place I’ve never been to—yet it is a place that is a part of my home. Mei guo. America.
              David explained that he was in Shanghai that day doing business at the American embassy. He said Mr. Chi would drive me around until he was done, and then we’d all go to Yangzhou together. What a relief it would be to have an English-speaker in the car for the two or three hour car ride. I handed back the phone.
              As Mr. Chi drove, I realized that even a blind person could see the difference between driving in America and driving in China. In a passenger seat in the States, you can close your eyes and imagine that you are in a little fishing boat that is floating gently across a lake in Wisconsin, “Up North,” where we Wisconsinites go when we need a break from the steady, serene pace of our lives so we can take up a slow, sleepy pace. But if you are riding in a passenger seat in China, you may as well close your eyes and imagine that you are in a tiny motorboat, capable of white-knuckled swerves. You may imagine that this motorboat is speeding down a river, dodging sprays of water that approximate the location of rocks. To fill out the experience, you may imagine that there is a disjointed chorus of geese all around you, each goose honking at a different pitch and rhythm.

Are those bricks of some sort?
What is holding them there?

              Now open your eyes and the reality is much more frightening. You are narrowly missing trucks with great bundles of goods precariously knotted to them. You are honking at pedestrians who wait between well-marked lanes that are merely a suggestion. You are berated with a honk when you go to the only place you can go in that moment because it is also the only place the honking car could have gone in that moment—but somehow the white water rapids flow on, all remaining in the river, however rough the path may be.

              Mr. Chi stopped the car on what I had previously thought of as a sidewalk. Soon a taxi pulled up nearby, and two people got out: a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and small, dark-framed glasses; and a youthful Chinese woman with rounded, smiling cheeks and glasses echoing the same shape. They got into the back of Mr. Chi’s car. The man was David, and the woman was his new wife, Cindy, who manages the teachers at the school. 
              As we drove, the small talk gave way to observations of cultural differences. I pointed out yet another truck with a huge load perched on its bed, covered in tarps and blankets and tied down with a web of surprisingly thin rope.
              “Yeah, that wouldn’t fly in America,” said David. “I think it’d be illegal.”
              Cindy gaped. “Really?” she said, pronouncing her R with a flick of the tongue, rather than a growled American R.

Precarious bundles are not
limited to four-wheeled vehicles.

              The two Americans nodded knowingly. In that moment, I had to wonder at what freedom could mean. In America, the place that boasts freedom, truck drivers are not free to carry their load as they like. But perhaps pedestrians are free to walk without fear that they’ll be smothered by a load lost due to a loose knot. I thought to myself, “I only just stepped off the plane hours ago. Does the crazy begin that soon?” But I didn’t feel crazy. More than anything, I felt a more open-ended than I had felt when I stepped out of Mom’s minivan in Milwaukee. I felt like everything I knew was written in pencil, and someone had just rubbed out the period at the end of the definition of “freedom.”

              
              That night I stayed at a hotel.
              “Don’t drink the tap water,” said David. “Boil it first. Boil some right away so it can cool off by morning. The Chinese always drink hot water.”
              I nodded. “Ok.”
              David and Cindy left. Exhausted, I flung myself onto the bed and just about had the wind knocked out of me. The bed had as much give as a thawing steak. I pried up the corner of the sheet and saw that the Chinese had merged the concepts of “mattress” and “box spring.” Spread over this monstrosity was a thin mattress topper that the hotel chain had chosen for their foreign guests in order to indicate that sleeping on the bed would be a better choice than the faux hardwood floor.
              I sighed and quickly fell asleep, hoping that my Chinese apartment would have a bed that yielded to me.

              The next morning, a Chinese man called Frank picked me up in his car with his wife. When I wasn’t fearing for my life, I tried to watch for landmarks in the city. Soon Frank pulled up to a huge apartment building and told me to follow him into the building. Up, up, up we went. Frank found the door he wanted and knocked. There was loud music coming from behind the door. Frank knocked again. Soon the door was opened by a young woman with wet hair. We entered her modest home, which was decorated girlishly and had probably been even more kawaii before she started packing.
              The apartment itself was exactly what I had expected of my future living quarters, though much cleaner and brighter. There was a kitchen smaller than many American pantries, a bathroom of a similar size, and a bedroom/living area that could barely contain the girl’s bed and desk. The bonus was that there was also a narrow balcony area with a wash machine stowed away in the corner.
              I listened to Frank and his wife question the current occupant in Chinese without translating anything for me. Seemingly unimpressed, Frank led the way back to his car.
              “What did you think of the apartment?” asked Frank. He sounded like he might have learned English from a British teacher.
              “It was good,” I said.
              “Good?” said Frank. “Really? Why good?”
              I was taken aback. Good doesn’t need a reason in America. Good is nothing. Good is polite.
              “Ah, well, it was…clean,” I stammered. “And…um…”
              “No why!” said Frank triumphantly. “You have no why!” He laughed. “I thought it was too small. And too far away from school. Second apartment is bigger and closer to school.”
              And that’s the story of how I got a two-bedroom apartment with a dining area, a three-seat couch, space for an entertainment system, and a balcony with enough room to grow plants and hang my clothes to dry. Because when I said good, I had no why.

Among the possessions left behind by the previous tenant
are two framed butterfly prints and a microphone.

              So now I’m sitting in the guest room, which has a spacious desk for me to spread out…you know, all those office things that fit in my one checked bag, one carry-on bag, and one personal item.
              Five stories below me, there is a different pitch for every car, truck, e-bike. As a small town girl, I say it’s not good. Bu hao. Why? I have why. Because it’s too loud to take a nap. Because it adds stress to my consciousness. Because it makes concentration difficult.
              Not good is okay here. Good is more special. Don’t say good unless you mean it. Not good is normal. It won’t hurt you. You deal with it like you deal with the puddles of urine in the street; just try not to think about it too much.