1st Week in China

(The Mall)


When I complained to Kerri that my laptop took longer to start up than hers because of all the data I'd transferred onto it, she said, “You have to some shit get rid of.” I agreed, noting that our English was already deserting us.

The written language I'd committed myself to learning was beautiful here, and I liked that writing a word--a character-- could be art. The closest we came to that was the "LOVE" sculpture from the 60's, with the sideways O.



The beds had no give when you kneeled on them, however, in our four-star hotel with a neon top like all the mini-skyscrapers here in Jinhua. I like a firm bed, but I woke up with my right arm dead after sleeping on my side, and feared permanent paralysis. I had to struggle to move the desk to get the Ethernet plug into the wall, and Kerri called me “Muscles McGee” which made me feel good. This was wise on her part, considering we'd have 8 hours the next morning of round trip borrowing of a car to get her suitcase and return whoever's this was that she'd taken.

When I returned to bed I was a little freaked out to see my shape preserved under the comforter where I’d been lying on my side. Simply arranging the comforter as though I were under it, made it look as if I were under it, but I couldn't think of a use for this, beyond scaring Kerri, which I resolved to do. If a stiff comforter was all that was needed, people wasted time when they put pillows and such under blankets to fool their parents or gaolers into thinking they were still there. It must have been all the tea that kept my thoughts from letting me sleep: for example, who was that a-hole at Ellis Island that changed everybody's name? Was he the worst hire ever or what?

I learned a few things about food the next day at dinner with Dee's friends and family: pigeon is good--ground up on a piece of lettuce, frog is bad, hot soy milk is bland. Been in China almost a week, and haven't had much rice. At dinner with a bunch of businessmen, it was my turn to eat the live shrimp soaked in dark vinegar. As I corralled it toward my mouth, it jumped off of my chopsticks and sprayed my face in vinegar with its whipping tail. I bit it and killed it but got almost no meat out of the shell. Everyone laughed supportively. “If America is so powerful, why doesn't it have its own language?” asked the smooth old dad as I wiped vinegar from my shirt. Only thing in English he'd said all day, but he was my favorite.

Shushu was Dee’s husband with the dumpling face and watery eyes. I liked him too, and we agreed we’d be brothers, though he sat around the house wearing only a purple speedo, like his smooth father-in-law, who wore gray undies. He asked at the dinner table how much money I made back in the States, and how much here in our job as 'foreign experts.' I low-balled it, to not rub it in their face, while Kerri rounded up. She knew them better. Shushu said maybe we were "too old to dance," since Kerri usually got hurt. I reminded my new little brother that he was just a year younger.


(Singing "I Believe I Can Fly")


Shushu made me join a group of musicians outside the restaurant, and play some Chinese violin. They pretended to think I was Chinese because I managed to make four bad notes and not break the 2-string instrument. Shushu drove on the wrong side of the yellow lines until traffic approached. There were seatbelts, but once again, nowhere to plug them in. We went for full-body massages, which I thought was a great idea. Dee said her father was afraid to have a woman touch him. I said I was afraid to not have a woman touch me, Dee translated it, and a moment later her family laughed. I didn't mean it homophobically, and grew concerned they liked the comment for the wrong reasons.

A picture of Donald Sutherland in a bathrobe with full white beard and long hair, surrounded by Chinese massage gals, was on the stairway of the massage place. I hoped it wouldn't be too rough. Turns out they only did feet and arms. We left. There were a ton of foot massage places, but K couldn't do that with her sprained ankle. At a second place, there was the same Donald Sutherland picture.

My gal kept looking at the guy massaging Kerri for ideas. She stuck her fingers in my ears, and tugged on them hard--how Edison went deaf. I was open to new techniques, but it was not very sensuous the way she assaulted me. Mostly I was trying to avoid getting injured. I asked her to slow down but her training could not be defeated. No trust was established, so I tensed up every area on my body she visited, was ticklish as a result, and giggled. Everything that felt good, she passed by, skipping my sore muscles and instead shaking my knees, and going so fast that I wanted to kick her in the head. Dee got rubbed and scraped with a hot ox bone and had purple bruises all up and down her back, visible above the neckline; she felt she needed to let out her cold, and said the bruises would heal in a few weeks. That I respected. I realized I’d seen other women in the streets with this condition, and wondered whether they were beaten at home.

When we left, I was in a bad mood from the woman sticking her fingers in my ears. Did they treat Donald Sutherland like that? Reflectors on the bikes at night would be a good idea, as we nearly widowed someone. Back at the hotel, a man yelled into his cellphone in the tiny elevator with us. I yelled, "Hi Doll!" to Kerri, and she yelled back, to send the message for him to quiet down. He looked at me. I was in no mood. Not all aspects of a culture are good, to paraphrase Claude Levi-Strauss. I felt that the focus here on education and family was right, everyone was in good shape, the food was great and the people had personality, but 5000 years and that's the best massage you can offer? Why did they think the only way to get people to feel anything dramatic was to pound away? I recalled an ex of such ancestry who had felt this way about all things amorous. Kerri called from the bathroom, "What's with the toilet paper dispenser that doesn't let you tear it, and only gets in the way?" I went to sleep grumpy, missing my own country, where things more easily made sense to me.


(They call foreigners "lao wai", which means "long nose", and not without reason.)

The next morning at the hotel, I went to work out in the gym and I only had spandex boxer briefs and a shortsleeve button-down left to wear, which I hoped would not be scandalous. I had to walk by the administrative offices and people in suits to find the gym because I couldn't read the signs. I thought I'd be alone at last, but a young woman who worked at the hotel came in, and told me to put more weight on the machine. I said, “Okay” and lifted it, and another woman came in and the two of them clapped. They added more, but it was too much for me. “Tai duo le,” I said. They said, “Ohh,” disappointed. They set me up on the treadmill, arguing with each other about what was the right speed. I was self-conscious about my tight undies, but I sprinted. The culture gap was seeming more funny than upsetting this morning. They got me tea and finally left. Hot liquids while working out would not have been my first choice. Again, I had no idea how to get back to our room, and ended up walking through the crowded lobby without my knickers. (This is a guy at the beach, not me, but it's how I looked.)


At lunch, the wife of a Communist Party higher-up was very nice and told us in good English about a trip to the States, but Kerri didn't trust her because she’d known things about Kerri she shouldn't have, during Kerri’s previous stint in China. Whenever anyone asked how I knew the pathetic few sentences of Chinese I knew, I'd been saying my stepmother got me interested and taught me a little, which took some explaining. Eventually they would get it out of me that she was my father's third wife. When the Communist Party lady asked me the same question about learning Chinese, Dee cut in and said I was a good student and wrote everything down. I followed her lead and revealed nothing more.

However, I was able to access an article on Yahoo critical of China for allowing an entire village to sink into toxic sludge, so the censors were not up to snuff. I just couldn't open the article my friend emailed me about a funeral in China where they hired strippers, nor anything else from the BBC, which must have done something to piss them off. In our hotel room, we watched the only channel in English, CCTV9, which had long documentaries about local innovations in watermelon-cultivation and ingenious engineers who dealt with the problem of unstable silt by bombing it all away, set to nice music.