Saturday, October 07, 2006

The Longest First Night in China: Part 5. An Indecent Proposal

No money, nowhere to stay, no way home. Her problems were stacked higher than mine. Yet I couldn’t shake the impression that judging her by appearance alone, I easily could have seen her as hailing from a well-off family that could afford to buy her trendy clothes. Maybe the clothes here really are that cheap, I pondered. Perhaps even the beggars can afford fake name brand items.

“Can you help me buy a ticket home?”

“How much?” I asked, skeptical at this fresh demand for more money.

“It’s about 400 .”

“That’s a lot of money.”

At my request, she broke down the price for me, giving me the cost and the length of time required for each leg of her journey: a train and then a bus to her home town.

Four hundred yuan seemed awfully steep, and I didn’t want to continue my string of mistakes by being almost completely wiped out in a scam on the first night.

But she struck me as sincere. When asking for the money, she had leaned forward and lowered her voice, seemingly ashamed to be caught she was in such dire straits. At this point, I had already engaged her so much, that even if her story was a complete fabrication, I couldn’t just leave her in the lurch now.

“Ok,” I said. “Where do we go to buy the tickets?”

“We can’t today, they are closed. I will have to buy them tomorrow.” I didn’t want to just hand her 400 only to find myself back where I started.

So I made her a counter offer.

“Look, you don’t have anywhere to stay tonight, and you can’t buy your tickets until tomorrow. I don’t know how to find my school. Even if I find it, it will be closed, and there will be no way for me to find my apartment.” I struggled to conceal my nervousness as I prepared to deliver the kicker.

“So, if you want, and I don’t want to scare you, but if you want, we could rent a hotel room tonight. Tomorrow you can go to your train, and I can find my school.”

She didn’t like that idea one bit. She pulled her head back and scowled at me.

“Nothing bad!” I protested. “Nothing bad! Two beds! We don’t do anything!” She had me repeat some of those details for confirmation, but still she didn’t seem keen on the idea.

I don’t think mine was a very polite proposition in any language or culture. And my broken Chinese certainly didn’t lend it any elegance. But I thought this was a good plan, one that would leave both of us better off. I could give her a safe place to stay tonight and a ticket home, and she could help me find that safe place and get me to my school the next day.

“I want to help you,” I continued, painfully conscious of just how slimy my proposal sounded. “So I will help you buy the ticket today if you want. But you don’t have anywhere to go tonight, right? So why don’t we get a hotel room, and tomorrow we will leave. Or if you want, I can just give you the money for the ticket tonight.”

“I would rather you give me the money tonight,” was her unenthusiastic response. It certainly wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, as I genuinely needed her help getting to a hotel near the school, and especially to prevent being ripped off at every other turn.

After a little more prodding, and further confirmation that we would definitely have two separate beds, she relented. “Maybe it will be better,” she said, “because my train is in Baoan district where you need to go. So we can get a hotel there, and tomorrow we will both be close to where we need to be.”

I was relieved to discover that she was definitely not a prostitute (that kind of revulsion can’t be feigned) but nervous nonetheless about the awkward situation we now found ourselves in.

“Great,” I smiled. “Let’s go.” We walked outside, through the same exit where we had met the money changer, though he was nowhere to be seen now. On the way out, I asked for her name.

“Xiao Mei.”

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