The Longest First Night in China: Part 7. Umbrellas

Xiao Mei and I walked about a block before finding a sufficiently cheap hotel. We checked in, and I dragged my suitcase up the five flights of stairs, with Xiao Mei doing her best to shove the suitcase from the bottom and helping me to count off the stairs as we climbed.

Once inside our hotel room, I sat on my bed and she on hers, and we tried to make conversation to bridge the chasm between us.

I told her I had seen many girls carrying umbrellas on a cloudless day. Why? The answer came back: Chinese girls want to have white skin. She pointed to her own arms, which were tanned dark brown,

“You see, very ugly. But this,” she said, pointing to my substantially whiter arm, “this is very pretty.”

This was news to me. “But look,” I protested, pointing to my limbs. “These white arms, this pale face – in America people think I am ill!” She giggled, one hand covering her mouth, the other waving away this silly idea.

“No, seriously,” I persisted. “Being this white looks unhealthy. Friends tell me I should see a doctor. But see,” I pointed to her dark brown arm. “All white women in America want to look like this. You hide under an umbrella, but women in America sit outside to darken their skin to look like you.”

She found the idea of pale women in a far-away land lying outside for hours at a time to bake their skin ridiculous, just as I found it strange that she and her compatriots shuffled around under umbrellas on clear days to escape tanning.

“Women here want white skin, women there want dark skin,” I began.

“Maybe they are in the wrong country,” she concluded. I was going to suggest that women are just impossible to satisfy, wherever you go, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Sure,” I nodded in agreement.

When we ran out of things to talk about, Xiao Mei began looking through my suitcase. I had been hefting it around all day, perhaps she wanted to know what made it so heavy. Several electronic devices caught her eye, and she pulled each item out one by one: digital camera, MP3 player, even my electric toothbrush. As she examined each in turn, she asked how much it had cost in the U.S. Embarrassed by this physical evidence of the disparity in our living standards, I explained away the prices, “You can get it cheaper in China!”

She was also very interested in the handful of books stuffed in my suitcase. I tried to explain to her what they were about, but they were all about China, and I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain many details beyond that. She looked through each one and paused at the pictures, asking where the scene was from, who was in the picture, what the caption said. Flipping through the pages of a history book, she stopped at a picture of Chinese peasants harvesting wheat with long scythes.

“Have you ever done this?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “Have you?” She nodded affirmative. Another piece of the puzzle of her life fell into place. If she came from a farming family, then finding a manufacturing job in the textile industry would be a step up for her after all. This may also explain why she was embarrassed about her dark skin. Perhaps she had tanned while working in fields, and thus the color of her body itself was a visible indicator of her social status.

Next, she pulled from my suitcase a disorganized stack of papers with wrinkled edges – readings from the Chinese course I had taken over the summer. Her eyes lit up in recognition at the sight of Chinese characters. Flipping through the pages, she paused on one sheet of notebook paper covered with my attempts at Chinese characters. Skimming the paper, she flashed me an approving smile and said, “It is very good,” in the reassuring tone an adult uses to encourage a young child who has finally produced something legible.

She then turned to a typed page, an excerpt from a Chinese news article my teacher had given to the class. Underlining the sentence with her finger as she went, she began to read aloud.

The words came slowly and with great difficulty. She struggled to recognize and pronounce many characters, and others she skipped entirely. She was barely literate. What to make of this 19 year-old girl who can hardly read? Yet another clue about the life that has left her improperly educated and dimmed her prospects for advancement to anything better.

Without ceremony, I leaned over and put the 400元on her bed, mumbling, “For your trip tomorrow.” She bowed in acceptance, but I didn’t see.

After retiring to our separate beds and turning off the lights, we talked for a little while longer. But without the body language that had allowed us to bridge many of the gaps in my vocabulary earlier in the night, conversation was difficult, and in the end futile.

Finally, to my relief, silence fell upon the room like a blanket. I had enjoyed the opportunity to practice my Chinese with Xiao Mei, but I was utterly exhausted. My brain was reeling from being forced to take in and spit out Chinese all day, and I relished my first opportunity to rest.

It is always difficult for me to fall asleep the first time I’m in a new place. Everything new is a distraction, and my mind struggles to fill in the gaps left by the unfamiliar. Each vehicle in the wave of traffic outside carried a distinct sound that set it apart from its counterpart in the U.S. The sheets and the pillow and the very air of the hotel room smelled different than those at home. The stiff board that served as my mattress in the hotel could have been used as a door or a table back home.

Every word and scrap of conversation that I had heard throughout the day swam in my ears, overlapping, overwhelming my senses. Looking over at the other bed, I was genuinely surprised to be reminded that there was another person in the room. Xiao Mei’s presence was an anchor that kept me grounded in the present and reminded of where I was. With numerous, formless thoughts clouding my head, I lay still, and gradually the room around me began lolling in a grand circle. I closed my eyes, and the room continued to spin.