Day 1 in China

(Dee's husband ShuShu. Kerri, and Dee)


Kerri had worked for half a year in China three years ago, and had left on bad terms with her employers after breaking her foot and flying home for treatment. Her good friend from that previous stint, Dee, picked us up in a court officer's police van. Dee was a friendly 26-year-old Chinese woman, both pretty and plain in the light blue dress she seemed to wear every third day. My middle school students would not have let this pass unnoticed. Dee commented immediately that Kerri had gotten fat, but said it so sweetly that Kerri just had to agree.

Our driver weaved in and out of highway traffic without much use of the blinker, during the 4-hour drive to Jinhua, and Kerri couldn't sleep for fear of death. Chinese signs had English near Shanghai, but this faded as we headed South. We drove by what looked like things I'd seen my mom protest against in the mighty 70's, and miles of high-rise apartment buildings.



A typhoon hit, which the windshield wipers couldn’t handle. We stopped at a roadside restaurant to flee the rain and Dee ordered us pyramids of sticky rice cooked in leaves, and soup. The urinal was a glass wall and trough with flowers behind it. Bad water makes it necessary to have soup and tea and to not swallow what falls in your mouth in the shower. I complimented Dee's looks, then the sticky rice, then her hometown of Jinhua. I wondered if a well-placed putdown might increase my credibility.

Arriving in Jinhua, Kerri pointed and said 'rickshaw’ but I never saw one. It was totally first-world. The older men were nerdy with tucked-in shirts, and pants pulled up too high, but young guys with attitudes rode mopeds. Kerri saw, and I heard, a guy spit a wad of phlegm on the rug in the lobby of our fancy hotel. He had called it up with such noisy gusto before spitting.

We wanted to sleep, but Dee, our sweet and efficient hostess, who had used her contacts to get us a swank hotel room for free and the police van as well, said, “Shall we meet them for dinner?” We got it that we had no choice but to thank them by going out to eat with them.



A man in a tucked-in polo shirt, showed up in a dark luxury Honda, with soft Chinese music. Mr. Hu spoke no English, and Dee said he was an important man in the court system. We went to a restaurant that had 'coffee' in the name, which meant 'Western' and struggled to make conversation when Dee stepped out for a phone call. Mr. Hu offered just me a cigarette, which I turned down, and I whispered to Kerri we would have to start at a later date our plan of asking people not to smoke around us. I imagined I'd never feel right doing it.

We ate noodle soup, and Mr Hu's wife--a judge--and their kid showed up, along with a balding doctor friend and his kid. It became clear the point was for the kids to get exposed to us, so as they translated slowly for their parents, we talked about school and what judges wear here--the same--and they asked if ours had “white hair” like the British. The doctor was nice and laughed after he said everything-his daughter whispered to me, “He likes to speak English” and I was thankful that he did, but mindful not to neglect our patron who didn't.

They asked if we wanted to go home to sleep early and I was surprised when Kerri said yes, wondering if that had been an offer we weren't meant to accept—they seemed surprised we were tired and we wondered whether they had ever experienced jetlag. When we got home, I made the bathroom uninhabitable for a while, and then lay down. I heard Kerri say, “Shit.” The heavy square red suitcase that I'd had to bump past a man at the airport baggage carousel to get for Kerri when she pointed it out, turned out not to be hers. The airport was 4 hours to the north in Shanghai, and we had someone else’s bag. Mishap#3. When we woke up in the morning, the problem remained.



(Here is how the local men cool themselves, rolling up their shirts to reveal their midriff like Britney Spears. Kerri yelled at me when I started doing it. She always wears black, and you can see the man in the photo seeming to stare in awe at her imposing Western bosom, stage right. I got yelled at for this photo too, but it was an accident. Below is me at the lake, trying the shirt cooling thing; it works, but then the sweat from your belly gets on the fold of your shorts at the groin and when you stand up, you appear to have peed yourself.)