Holding My Breath

Zhi is a nice young man with a friendly smile and a refreshingly honest way of speaking. He isn't a student of mine, but we got to know each other through a university club and instantly bonded over a shared liking of cats, travel, and the fact that we both come from cities known for their air pollution. Zhi is from an industrial center in the north of China, and I am from Riverside, in Southern California's infamous smog belt. We are comparing notes on our respective hometowns right now, and so far Zhi is winning, if you can call it that.

"We're famous for our particulate matter," Zhi tells me. "Most cities have high particulate matter in their air, but ours is the very small kind that is most dangerous. You can't see it."

"You could see ours," I tell him, embarrassed that I can't remember our town's exact air quality index. Zhi remembers the air quality index of his city and can quote it on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. This week it's 489, which is more than 20 times over the acceptable WHO maximum standard of 20. On days when people set off fireworks, it reaches a level that is right off the charts.

"What kind of particulate matter does your hometown have?" Zhi wants to know. He is a science student, and these things matter to him.

I am a rather unscientific person and this question makes me squirm. "I'm not sure. But it was very bad."

Zhi nods. "My city has small particulate matter--" He frowns and picks up a pen and starts writing a complicated equation that goes on and on (< 2.5µ is all I can remember).

"Very small," Zhi adds superfluously.

I feel irritated with myself for not being able to describe the consistency and composition of Riverside's smog, as if I'm letting our side down somehow. "I don't know if our particulate matter was that small, but because of our smog, you couldn't see much of anything," I explain, pointing to a building close by. "For instance, that building would be hard to see if we were in my hometown."

Zhi wrinkles his forehead. "That building would be impossible to see in my hometown."

"When we were kids, we couldn't run on bad days," I say. "They made us stay inside because the air was so bad. One boy even died after running half a mile on a smoggy day."

Zhi nods. "Some people die in my school too."

"You mean this happened in your school recently?" Zhi's tenses are a little shaky sometimes.

"Yes--recently, also before."

My own face mask is hanging over the arm of my chair. Zhi points to it now, a look of astonishment on his face.

"Why do you have this? Do you need it?"

"I brought it just in case," I say, feeling like an utter wimp. Today the air quality index in our city is only 65, just over three times the maximum limit.

Zhi picks my mask up and examines it. He does not look impressed.

"My mother, father have disposable respirator, N-95 and P-100, change filter every day, wear every day."  He regards mine with amusement. "This one like scarf. Not good."  

At this, I give up. Zhi's hometown has worse air pollution than Riverside ever did. We spend the rest of our time discussing effective clean air filters and alternative energy.  

               

Miss Polite

It is seven o'clock in the morning and I am waiting for the bus. It is raining and cold, and I have been standing at the stop for a good fifteen minutes, chilling myself, and getting sprayed with gutter-water by cars, trucks, and e-bikes that whiz past. At last the bus arrives and, to my delight, stops right in front of me--almost a first. I step forward as the doors wheeze open, but before I can get on, a couple of students beat me to it, one of them so enthusiastic about getting out of the rain that she almost puts my eye out with her umbrella. One after the other, the students pile onto the bus ahead of me, talking non-stop as they completely ignore me. I am the last one on, and sadly, there are now no more seats. I stand all the way to the university and ponder the differences in manners between cultures.

---

It is five o'clock in the evening and my last student has left. It has been an especially long and grueling day as I've been seeing students for private tutorials in my office and giving them advice about their various compositions since early in the morning, and I worked right through my lunch break to accommodate a student who needed to be squeezed in between appointments. I'm dying to see what there is of the sky; and I need a brisk walk, a cup of tea, and something to eat. But more than anything else, I just need a break. I've seen so much head-achingly bad English, I feel like whooping and hollering to finally have reached this point of no more students.  Just as I start to lock my office door, however, a girl appears from nowhere, clutching a composition. My heart sinks, but I stand my ground. "I'm all done," I tell her. "I'll be back at nine o'clock tomorrow morning."

The girl's eyes widen and her mouth drops open. "But I have appointment!"

"Not at five o'clock, surely."

"Nooo!" the girl wails. "At four I come here!"

"And did you knock on the door?"

"No, you are busy so I wait."

I stare at this girl in dismay. "Didn't you see the sign?"  I point to it. IF YOU HAVE AN APPOINTMENT, PLEASE KNOCK ON THE DOOR AND ANNOUNCE YOURSELF.  It is accompanied, for good measure, by the equivalent in my shaky Chinese. I put this sign up because too many of my students were waiting outside, twiddling their thumbs while I talked to their classmates, instead of letting me know they were there. This way, the students who have appointments with me can stay a little longer if they need extra help--and I don't end up twiddling my own thumbs waiting for no-shows.

The girl shakes her head. "I see, but you are busy so I wait."

"Well you shouldn't have waited if you had an appointment! If you have an appointment, it's perfectly fine to expect whoever you are meeting to stop what they're doing and see you!"  My voice sounds obnoxiously strident, but I want to be outside, on my way home. I want to be smelling the roses and feeling the bracing air on my face, not quibbling with this girl about appointment protocol.

"But you are talking," the girl points out. "To other student."

"Only because you didn't knock," I say. "If you'd knocked, I'd have known you were there. I'd have told her that I had an appointment and she would have left."

The girl stares back at me. "But I cannot do that!"

"Why in the world not?"

"Because-- that is mispolite!"

An hour later, I am waiting at the bus stop again. When the bus arrives, once again, a throng of students pushes past me as though I am not there. Once again, I am the last one on the bus.

All the way home, I ponder the differences in manners between cultures.

Missing Our Girls

I am standing in a mall, waiting for my husband, when I see them: a woman about my age and her grown-up daughter. They are window shopping, their arms linked, and they are deep in amicable conversation. The daughter--she has to be the woman's daughter; they have the same high forehead and wide-spaced eyes--is about four months pregnant, The expression on her mother's face makes me want to cry. She is obviously so happy to be with her daughter, and so proud.

They stop in front of a window display of clothing for toddlers and admire the tiny coats, sweaters and shoes. The daughter laughs and points at a stuffed zebra the size of a panda. 

Suddenly I miss my daughters! My husband and I have missed them ever since we arrived here, in late summer, but at this moment, seeing this woman and her daughter together, I miss them so much I can hardly stand it.

Earlier, I looked for presents to give my girls for Christmas. I browsed through trays of carved hair ornaments, rows of sweaters on plastic hangers, stacks of tee shirts I thought they might like. I found so many things I thought would please them, but I stopped myself from actually buying them. I want to see my girls trying these things on--see them wearing the sweaters, frowning at themselves in the mirror--Do you think this is my color? Would a smaller size be better? I want to drink coffee with them afterwards, take them out for lunch, try on lipsticks and perfume with them that we have no intention of buying.

We are generally happy here, my husband and I. We are doing interesting and demanding jobs; we are struggling to learn Chinese, which is as engrossing as it is frustrating; and we are gradually getting to know this country. But being away from our daughters is so hard!

My husband rejoins me and we take the elevator to the basement. There, we walk past a huge play area where children tumble about on brightly-colored mats and climb plastic honeycombs. One kid is bawling his head off, kicking the floor. His exasperated mother watches him, arms crossed over her chest, a look of irritated resignation on her face. Ever so often, she bawls out something that he is making too much noise to hear.

"Been there," my husband murmurs as we watch the struggling toddler, and I automatically echo, "Done that."  We continue walking, but the toddler's screams are still perfectly audible from quite a distance.

And yes, we feel a little bit better. But we still miss our girls.

The Triumph Of Tomatoes

There is a greengrocer's near our apartment. It is a small shop along a busy road, run by a bustling, no-nonsense middle-aged woman wearing an apron. Up until last night, my husband and I have pointed, gestured, and sometimes drawn air pictures of what we want to buy, always to the amused reaction of the greengrocer. Once in a while, we have tried to use Chinese--to the even more amused reaction of the greengrocer.

But last night, a small breakthrough occurred. I went into the shop as usual, picked out the produce I wanted -- apples and pears -- and then I stopped and frowned, unable to see any tomatoes. And I really wanted tomatoes.

"What are you waiting for?" my husband asked, anxious to get home.

"Hang on while I get some tomatoes," I said. He shook his head. "I think you're going to be disappointed." He gestured around us. "Do you see any tomatoes?"

I approached the greengrocer, my heart pounding. "Xihonshi yomeiyo?" I managed to squeal, working hard to get my tones right. At first she just stared at me, then she asked me to repeat it.

I said it again more slowly and she said ah! For a second I couldn't believe she had actually understood. Then she walked over to a box of pears and lifted it up. Underneath were tomatoes. Glossy little ruby-red tomatoes with tiny green tops.

We went home and ate them, along with the apples and pears I bought, which were very sweet. But the tomatoes were sweeter still.

Cracking the Code

Learning how to speak Mandarin, it turns out, is not easy.

Decades ago when I first moved to Japan, I must have gone through the same agony, but however frustrating it was then, I can't believe it was anything like this. In China, I have been in a number of 'situations'. Times when being able to communicate with the people around me was hugely important, but woefully beyond my capabilities. Like when I forgot to weigh a few pieces of fruit at the supermarket and my husband had to run back to do this, aggravating a man behind me who turned red-faced with rage and began to rant. I knew what he must be saying: What happened? How could you possibly have forgotten to weigh your fruit? How dare you keep me waiting? Again and again he seemed to be demanding an explanation which I was, of course, unable to give him. Or, on another occasion, when I tried desperately to tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go, having rehearsed it at least a dozen times--to find that he still could not understand me. Or when I answered the phone in our office and could not tell the obviously agitated woman on the other end that a colleague was away from her desk. I could manage "not here now, five minutes," but that just didn't cut it.

My frustration at this lack has a lot to do with the Great Expectations I came here with: I thought that given my ability to read some Chinese, learning to speak might be easier for me. But I was wrong--so wrong! Despite the fact that I spent decades in Japan learning how to write kanji, or Chinese characters, learning to read in China is a whole new ball of wax. Characters have been greatly modified here, and the ones I'm familiar with have often been changed beyond recognition. Even simple ones like push, pull, east, and car were mysteries to me at first. Days of the week, pronouns, verbs, nouns--all were woefully mystifying. Then there's the pronunciation. The vowels make me want to weep--no clear, easy-to-follow a-i-u-e-o like there is in Japanese; certain Chinese vowels change with certain consonants, and I can never remember which. And the tones are murder.

But lately, I have been having breakthroughs. Tiny ones, it is true, but breakthroughs nevertheless.

Breakthrough 1:  My husband and I are buying persimmons from a man who is selling them from a cart. As we pack them into a bag, the man, assuming that we don't know how to eat them, indicates that they must be peeled first. I take a pen from the counter and scrawl on a piece of newspaper in Chinese: In my country we also have persimmons. I like them very much. He reads this out loud and nods slowly, then gives me a broad grin. Eureka! He understands!  

Breakthrough 2: I am with a Japanese friend, applying for a courtesy card at a local department store. The woman asks my Japanese friend to fill in my address for me, but I shake my head and write my address in Chinese in the space provided. The woman reads it and looks up at me with a hint of respect in her eyes: Oh, she says, you can write Chinese. And eureka! I understand her!

Breakthrough 3: We arrive home from work to find a handwritten note in Chinese on our front door. It has been scrawled in haste and it takes me ages to work through, but with the help of a Chinese-Japanese dictionary and my husband's character-recognition software,  I finally piece it out: I am your upstairs neighbor. Recently my toilet pipes have been blocked. I need to gain access to your apartment in order to fix the pipes. I came today, but you were not home. Can you please phone me to let me know when you will be home so that we can unblock our pipes? Thank you very much. By the time I've worked this out, my husband has already photographed the note and texted it to our real estate agent. She texts back the following message: Your neighbor needs to get into your apartment because her toilet is blocked and she needs to fix it. Sweet hallelujah! I was right!

I'm thrilled with these tiny breakthroughs. So thrilled that the idea of perfect strangers showing up on our one day off to tear up our floorboards and fiddle with the pipes to unclog a blocked toilet hardly gives me a moment's pause.

Duck Eggs

I'm fairly open-minded when it comes to food. Although I'm not crazy about offal, I've eaten a lot of things other people might turn their noses up at. Fermented fish guts, for instance (shiokara in Japanese),  raw onions, inago, or fried grasshoppers (by mistake, but they weren't that bad), and my mother's infamous peanut butter and mustard sandwiches.

So the other day, when I got home from shopping and discovered that we'd bought duck eggs instead of the usual hens' eggs, I wasn't upset. I told myself that duck eggs would be just as tasty in egg salad sandwiches, perhaps even better. As I popped the eggs into boiling water, I marveled at how different they were from conventional eggs: larger, sturdier, and oilier, somehow. It wasn't until I broke one open that I discovered just what we'd bought: preserved duck eggs, the color of dark chocolate.

Unlike chocolate, however, the eggs smelled strongly of sulfur and were intensely salty. They weren't anything I wanted to make lunch with.

I gave up on making egg salad sandwiches, packed the eggs into a bag, and took them to work.  I put them on a counter in the office, wrote Bought by mistake, free to a good home on a piece of paper, and pasted it to the carton.

"Why are you giving these away?" a colleague asked incredulously when she saw the eggs. I explained what had happened.

"I hate to waste things," I said. "And we couldn't possibly finish them ourselves, not even if we had weeks." I grimaced. "And they're not going to last weeks, are they?"

"Yes they will-- they'll keep forever!"

This shouldn't have surprised me--'preserved eggs' must be like other preserved things, after all--but it did. "Really?"

"Absolutely. Just keep them until you need them. Then slice them into wedges and serve them with some pickled ginger." She nodded approvingly. "Delicious!"

In fact, one of my writing pals had said the same thing. Try them with pickled ginger, they're great. And yet at the time, this advice was hard for me to take in. Because I hadn't want pickled eggs when I bought them; I'd wanted eggs for egg salad sandwiches.

Expectations are everything, especially when it comes to food. Years ago, when I lived in Japan, I dropped a clove of raw garlic while I was cooking. I searched everywhere for it, but finally gave up, thinking it must have fallen behind the stove. A few hours later, I was eating sweetened popcorn when I bit down on the clove of garlic. Although I'm a huge fan of raw garlic, on this occasion, it was hardly a welcome treat. My mouth had been expecting carmelized popcorn, not a big clove of raw garlic.

Now, free from my dreams of egg salad sandwiches, I saw the duck eggs in a different light. Not as disappointments that couldn't be mixed with mayonnaise and white pepper, but as potentially tasty appetizers. I could picture them sliced onto a bed of thinly-sliced cucumbers with a garnish of pickled ginger and spring onions, or tossed like anchovies with cold noodles and sesame oil. My mouth even started to water.

Those duck eggs are sitting on my shelves, waiting for their chance. They won't go to waste. Besides, there's always April Fools Day. 

China Snapshots

I'm actually a better-than-average photographer. You'll just have to take my word for that, because I can't offer you any proof, not now. Every time I see something worth photographing here in China--which, when I am outside, is every other minute--by the time I've got my camera ready, it's gone. And besides, you have to keep your wits sharp when you're out and about here. No walking around and staring up at skyscrapers; no goggling at over-loaded rickshaws driven by tiny, weather-worn grandmothers; no swerving around to look back at the entire family of four perched on an electric bike, shopping piled high on the back. In the two seconds it takes to point and focus, you could be flattened by half a dozen cars driving at top speed. California gets a lot of flack for letting its drivers turn right on red lights, but at least there you have to come to a complete stop first, and other cars and pedestrians get right of way. In China, not only do you not have to come to a complete stop, you don't have to stop at all. In fact, you don't even have to slow down. Crossing a street here demands your full attention as does walking along the sidewalk, where you may compete for right-of-way with electric bicycles, motorcycles, bicycles, and even cars. Believe me: I have lost hundreds of incredible, National Geographic-worthy shots, and it is only because I value my own life over art. It is agonizing to have lost so many wonderful photo opportunities, though, so tonight, on my way home from work, I decided to write my photos instead.

I took all of these word photos at six thirty in the evening, in a crowded alley between two narrow rows of  restaurants and bars. In China, there is a lovely custom: people go out in the evening and fill the parks and public spaces, where they chat, play games, dance, do martial arts, parade grandchildren, and generally hang out in the cool of the evening.

Photo 1:  A little boy dressed in a white shirt and blue trousers is sitting all by himself at a table, frowning at a pad of paper. He is chewing on a pencil, his face screwed up in concentration, his  features as serious as a six-year-old's can possibly be. It is obvious that he doesn't see anybody around him--all his attention is focused on the pad of paper. Suddenly his eyes widen and his mouth opens. He grins and pounds his fists on the table, then jumps up and cries out, at the top of his lungs, waving the pad of paper about. He has solved his puzzle! None of the adults around him pay him the least bit of notice.

Photo 2:  Three seconds away from the little boy, six college-age girls in short skirts and tight blouses sit together around a small round table. They are all holding mobile phones, and although their mouths are slightly slack -- they all have eerily similar expressions -- their thumbs are working hard. They take no notice of anybody around them.

Photo 3:  Next to the girls, three middle-aged men sit on park benches, smoking. Two of them have their white T-shirts hiked up so that everything but the tops of their shoulders is exposed. Half-smoked cigarettes hang from their mouths. Believe me, this cannot be described as an attractive look, and it is odd that only middle-aged men here feel the need to bare their chests. The men barely look up as we pass.

Photo 4:  As we turn the corner past the men, two more college-age girls come towards us. One girl is dressed normally, but her companion is eye-popping in a hot pink Minnie Mouse-style short taffeta skirt, fishnet stockings, five-inch heels of some glitzy silver-and-white material, a strapless silver top that seems to defy the laws of gravity, and what looks like half a pound of make-up. As they sashay past, I do my best not to stare, but it's tough. The girls don't seem to notice us, though.

Photo 5:  Around the corner there is a small public square where a CD player is blasting out music. It is so similar to the folk songs you hear in Japan during the summer festivals that I stop, filled with nostalgia. A dozen middle-aged women are dancing together, synchronizing their movements, their arms lifted high one moment, then swooping down in graceful arcs. They strut and dip and turn; they move backwards and forwards and sideways, and it is obvious how much they are enjoying themselves, how happy they are. We stop to watch them and they keep dancing, showing not the tiniest trace of embarrassment. My admiration is complete. One of them flashes me a broad smile, but they keep dancing.

My camera stays in my backpack all the way home.