I awoke early the next morning and laid still, my eyes glued to the white plaster ceiling above me. Thinking back on the previous day’s events, I tried to remind myself of where I was and how I had gotten there. Half of me had forgotten where I was.
Xiao Mei woke up an hour later, and we checked out of the hotel. She helped me call my boss from a public phone, and he arranged for someone from the school to pick me up. My boss didn’t know the area well, so I suggested that I wait for the driver at the closest recognizable landmark: a McDonald’s.
Xiao Mei and I had breakfast together in McDonald’s, further delaying my first taste of authentic Chinese food. We didn’t talk much, maybe because neither of us knew how to say goodbye to someone we had just met. So I reconfirmed her travel details.
“You’re sure you can get to the train station from here?” She said she could. Perhaps I was just asking for my own sake anyway.
She also needed reassurance. “When the person from your school arrives, what will you tell him…about me?”
“I’ll tell him that you helped me find this place, and that we had breakfast together,” I replied.
“Thank you,” she said, voice low, eyes downcast. We finished our meal in silence.
When my ride arrived, we parted without fanfare. I stepped into the car and waved goodbye as we drove away. She waved back and watched me drive off. As I left, I thought I recognized something in her eyes. Maybe longing. Maybe sadness at losing a new friend. Maybe fear, now that she was alone again. Or maybe it was nothing at all.
Once the car pulled away I found myself wishing for a moment that I had given her some way to contact me. A small part of me wanted to see her again. But I was also relieved that we had no way of reaching each other. It lent a comforting finality to our parting.
Maybe her story was true, maybe it wasn’t. As far as I know, she took the money I gave her and returned to begging, perhaps at the very same spot in the airport where I met her. Was it all just a scam? It’s not important to me.
She was a young girl in a desperate situation, hungry enough to beg for a meal, and scared enough to go to a hotel for the night with someone she didn’t know. Like millions of Chinese, she came to Shenzhen to hitch a ride on the city’s economic boom, to create a better life for herself and her family. But unlike the millions of Chinese who have been swept up and carried along in this boom, she is one who has fallen through the cracks. We had spent a night together, united in a common struggle to navigate a city that was new and foreign to both of us. Will the next person to help her be more demanding than I was? How far will she fall before someone else lifts her up?
I sat in the car in silence.
“Who was that?” the driver asked me.
I’ll never really know.
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