Culture Clash 2005, Julie Steimle [free novels TXT] 📗

of bread. Only the door and window showed that the place had life. I went in, listening to the clanging of the bell as I stepped inside. Most booths were empty. Even the upper stand where they had performers come at night was bare. One of my friends knew a cellist and a keyboard artist, and had finagled them to perform there before their big Christmas concert at the city’s performance hall downtown. They actually dragged me up to sing Christmas carols while they had played in the café. It was more than a little embarrassing with all the English language students from all the local colleges staring up at me as I attempted to sing without my voice cracking. I certainly wasn’t a professional. And it wasn’t the same as singing folk songs for my students to illustrate a point in class. Students tended to forgive their foreign teachers somewhat.

But at lunchtime only a few people came in, mostly to purchase food that they would have a great difficulty finding and buying at a reasonable price. I usually traveled across town from one bus station to another to get there. The only other foreign food options we had were KFC and McDonalds—but anyone with sense would get sick of fast food after the first month. Even Pizza Hut did not offer what I was looking for. Besides, if I wanted to order pizza, I would have gotten it from the Pizza Box, which delivered where Pizza Hut had yet to do so in China. The Pizza Box pizza also tasted better, especially the one called the Mongolian Horde.

I walked to the counter, looking up at my options just as my friend Lisa came in. She was Chinese, local of the area though not the city. Her English was impeccable and she was now studying Korean and French. Funny though, she was an art major that had studied at the college I taught at. Not my student, but a friend of a friend.

“Hi!” She waved to me as she approached. Lisa didn’t really like American food, but she did like some of the soups and sandwiches they sold here. Her friend also owned the store.

“Hi.” I looked back at the menu. “What are you going to order?”

“Oh, I already ate,” she said.

I smiled. She probably did. The last time she and I ate out together, I took her to try pizza for the first time. She wanted chopsticks, but the waitress gave her a fork instead, telling her we did not eat pizza with chopsticks. She also had wanted to order a large pan of pizza, but luckily I insisted that we buy one personal pan, just in case she didn’t like it and I had to eat the whole thing. She didn’t like it. However, the way Chinese people express their dislike when they feel you were trying to be hospitable is to pretend to like it and then pretend to be full. I told her then that she didn’t have to like it. She sighed with relief and let me eat the rest.

Most Chinese people don’t like cheese.

I feel the same way about tofu.

Lisa had tried to get me to eat tofu so many times. I just couldn’t stomach it. However, the difference between Americans and Chinese is that Americans don’t go around pretending they like something they really don’t like. Face saving really is an Asian custom. It took a while for Lisa to get used to that with me. I also had to learn how to tactfully let her know I wouldn’t eat another piece of tofu even if it were the last thing to eat on the earth.

So we stared up at the menu as I at last ordered a sandwich and a smoothie. I was really in the mood for that anyway.

“So, are you going to buy it?” Lisa asked, tilting her head at me with a smile.

There was a book on sale in the store that I had been adoring for the past month. I’m not usually an impulsive buyer, but I do latch onto some things and think about them a while before getting it.

“Yeah.”

It was a book on Chinese dragons. I love dragons. Wrote a paper on dragons once in a Myth course in college because I was so obsessed about them.

The store sold other things. Paintings, Chinese calligraphy, and even bibles. It was a Christian bookshop besides a café. Despite what most westerners believe about China, it is actually rather free when it comes to religion. A Chinese citizen can choose whatever faith he wanted, just as long as it did not infringe on politics or the safety of others. Perhaps that was why the Fa Lu Gong group was getting so much flack. The last I read in the China Daily, one of their devotees tried to catch SARS and spread it, attempting to break into a hospital with infected patients. Of course, the China Daily is politically skewed.

I suppose most of the arguments against China came from Mao’s era. There were times I really wished my family back home understood that time goes on in the world, and Mao died along with much of the old communist ways. I knew it, especially when I haggled with local merchants on a daily basis to buy shoes and eggs, also watching Wal-Mart moving in just up Weijin Lu and its competitor Carrefore out on Baidi Lu, full of business. Besides that, religion was alive and well. Catholic mass was held in a church downtown near the main shopping district, there was a large Christian organization my friend belonged to that also ran several charity organizations, and several of my Muslim students invited me to dinner in their own specialized cafeteria. Buddhism was still in practice besides. On nearly every Buddhist holiday the locals would be out burning ghost money on the street. The ash piles alone took some weaving in and out around when I walk from the bus stop to home. Trampling on someone else’s religion wasn’t a good idea.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” I asked as we walked to our booth. When my lunch was ready, they would bring it to me.

Lisa sat across from me. She had changed her mind and ordered a smoothie. “I heard that you were planning on going back to the U.S.. Is that true?”

I nodded. “Yes. I’ll be leaving once the term is over.”

She stared at me with questioning eyes. “But why are you leaving? Don’t you like it here?”

I hated the pollution. My sinus infection was not completely going away. I was getting sick all the time now, and I was also tired of my friends sending me to hokey foot massagers claiming that three massages could get rid of bronchitis. He hadn’t and I had to go on an I.V. anyway. But I didn’t hate living there. I knew I would miss it.

“No, it’s not that.”

My students asked me all the time if I missed my family. I hadn’t. I liked living where I was, and my family was like some distant dream. Besides, I had not gone home during Christmas or Thanksgiving or summer the entire time I was off at college. I had to work my tail off just to get through without putting myself into debt with a loan. I was scot-free, debt free and, basically free to roam. I wasn’t going home for that.

“I just feel it is time to go back,” I said.

Lisa gave me a skeptical look. I wondered mildly what was going on in her head. She wasn’t exactly a forthcoming individual.

“Is something wrong at home. I talked with your boss, and she thinks that you have a family emergency calling you back.”

I smirked. That was why boss was living in China and not in England with her husband, or so that was how the rumor went. “No. No family emergency. It is just time.”

I think my friend gave up trying to understand me. She gave a small shrug and accepted the smoothie from the waitress.

“So, what do you have planned for today?” I asked her.

She smiled at me. “Tennis. Then I go to my English class.”

Lisa still studied English with an American teacher. She uses it for the company she works for, mostly dealing with foreign businessmen. I reminded me of a former conversation we had about her teacher catching her cheating on an assignment. At the time Lisa had not comprehended that what she was doing was cheating. After all, the Chinese educational system is a lot different from that in the US. Her teacher had asked them to write sentences with their vocabulary words, but Lisa had copied her sentences from a dictionary and turned those in. Of course her teacher rejected them, but I had to explain to Lisa why, and that had led to an argument. After all, her teacher said it was Chinese culture to cheat and that made Lisa feel insulted.

I can’t exactly blame her. The Chinese were taught to learn from the masters. Copy the masters. Copying was considered learning. It took a bit to explain that her teacher didn’t want copied sentences but sentences from Lisa’s own brain. I think eventually it sunk in.

Not that blatant cheating wasn’t also rampant in my classes. It was a question that had been weighing heavily on my mind since I had caught many of my students copying each other’s homework, including a research paper with the names whited out and then photocopied. I mean, how stupid did they think I was?
We went and sat down in the booth after we paid for our lunch, me taking another book off the shelf. I’ve been skimming Yell-o Girls

recently. I had just finished The Kitchen God’s Wife

. One of these days I’d like to read an upbeat story about China than all these negative gripy kinds of stories. I was so depressed after reading The Kitchen God’s Wife

. Honestly, it makes life look like this grueling ordeal. I prefer to think that we are to live in the pursuit of happiness, that it is the object of our existence.

I noticed a framed calligraphy hanging on display for sale near by then pointed it out to Lisa. “What does that say?”

She turned around and glanced at it. “Oh. It says ‘hope’.”

I lifted my eyebrows. It looked nice.

“Are you thinking of buying it?”

I nodded.

Lisa gave it another look then said, “I can do that. I can paint one for you.”

She was an art major. I was sure she could, but I didn’t want to put her out. Guanxi was a big thing in China. Gifts and favors were part of relationships, but that also meant owing people afterward. It was another thing I really didn’t like. Friendships with strings attached bothered me.

“No, that’s ok,” I said.

“But I can do it, and it won’t cost you anything.” Lisa didn’t look too happy that I was putting her off.

I felt immediately uncomfortable. Between a two tight places, I really didn’t want her to make one for me. I was also picky about end results. I saw what I wanted and I did not want to be obliged to accept a gift that might not even turn out how I wanted. “No, really, that’s ok. I just want that one.”