This story is rather a curious one, because the source of how these events came to unfold is rather peculiar and not something I do often.
Now not long after the Hanyu Qiao Competition
reached its end, this event happened. I think what was really cool about it was
that it happened before I could even stop and think, “Okay, the competition’s
over, now what? I guess life’s going to be back to the normal slow-paced life
again.” It may have only been just a few days after the competition was over,
and I had just gotten a few moments to breathe. To be perfectly honest, that
week (maybe even those couple weeks) were not very nice for me. I had been
dealing with a few not-so-nice Chinese people and that very day when I had gone
to lunch, the entire time these two Chinese boys decided to “practice their
English” and say provoking remarks to me, some of which I won’t actually
mention in this blog. Yes indeed, because this type of situation had happened
quite often that week, I was not having a very good opinion of Chinese people.
And that lunch encounter may very well have been the straw that broke the
camel’s back had not something happened when I went to dinner that same day.
I went to Salvador’s, the local Mexican restaurant,
for dinner that day. I went by myself because I wanted to eat alone. I didn’t
want to talk to anybody, and I was upset. But as I’m sitting there waiting for
my food, I see this one Chinese girl walk up the stairs and look around, and
the quickly walk back down. But I didn’t think much of it and ultimately went
back to minding my own business, whatever I was doing. Next thing I know, not
long after my food arrives, the girl is back with another boy and they come up
to me and ask if they could sit down. So I’m just there thinking they just want
to share the table because there were no other spots (I don’t know why I thought
that, people don’t do that…it was an individual table, not one of those long
tables where you could possibly fit more than one party at). So I say, “Yeah,
okay.” So with big smiles on their faces, they start making small talk with me
and I’m like answering their questions and thinking in my mind, “I just want to
eat dinner alone.”
Then the girl tells me that the boy is her co-worker
and that they work for a company which arranges weddings, sets up the
itineraries, buys the flowers, decorates the rooms, arranges catering, sells
wedding dresses, etc. The girl’s name was Min Dan and the boy’s name was Xiao
Zhi, she was 23 years old and he was 21. And she tells me that their company is
having their 10th anniversary party in a couple of weeks and she
asks if I would show up. So I’m like confused, and so I ask her what I have to
do. She says I just have to greet people and say welcome to the party. This
didn’t seem difficult to me, and even though they were strangers, it really is
a regular thing (at least in Kunming) for Chinese to be asking foreigners to
help them out with something or teach English, or appear at something. So…I
said, okay. She then to thank me she invited me that night to go to KTV with
the rest of her co-workers to meet them all. I was a little hesitant about
this, but I kind of just held my breath and went, hoping for the best.
Going over to the KTV place, I got to meet all of
her co-workers. I was really surprised because they were all really nice, not
like the sketchy people I’d meet on the street sometimes, and certainly not
like the people I had been encountering those past couple weeks. They
acknowledged that I was a foreigner, but they didn’t use stereotypes of
foreigners and stuff, which was really nice. They treated me like a friend, not
like a stranger, which was exactly what I needed right then. And ultimately,
through talking back and forth with the people there, they gained my respect
and I gained theirs. It was the first time I had been the only foreigner in a
group of Chinese people who didn’t speak English (except for a few sentences
and phrases). That made me slightly nervous, but soon enough I gained more
confidence. But I really see that night as a triumph on my part, because it was
the first time I was able to break through the invisible wall (the wall that
divides Chinese and foreigners) into the Chinese community.
Considering those first two months, I thought
breaking that wall was impossible. Both sides of the wall are very busy and so
if you want to break through you have to REALLY want it. In addition, if you’re
going to cross over, whether you’re on one side or the other, your foreign
language skills has to be adequate, in my opinion. If you’re not able to
communicate the general idea of what you want to say in the other language, you
won’t be able to cross over because most people on the other side will not be
able to meet you half-way. Some can, most can’t. So I was lucky to have finally
reached that level of speaking Chinese. When I went to Shanghai, I hadn’t
reached that level, and it was a problem…because even there I was lucky to meet
foreign students and even some Chinese students, but wasn’t able to become good
friends with those who didn’t speak a good amount of English because I couldn’t
meet them half-way and vice-versa. It’s too bad, because they really were some
great people.
But now I can. Now I have good friends here, some
who don’t speak a word of English and others who speak very little (not enough
to communicate) on, and we have still become good friends because FINALLY I can
communicate much of what I want to say, and if I can’t communicate it in the
right words or grammar, I can use other words that I know to explain what I
mean. In fact, I learned this in school last term at CMU, it is actually a very
good and beneficial language skill (actually I’d say it was a necessary
language skill) to be able to find a way to communicate your message through
other means if you don’t know how to actually SAY it correctly. For example, I
don’t know how to say “President” (I need to look that up now, actually)...but
I do know how to say “the person who leads a country, who has the most power.”
So when I say that to my friends, they can understand.
But anyway, I eventually left the KTV place and as I
was leaving I even got a hug from one of Min Dan’s co-workers. Min Dan then
asked me to come over to their wedding company on the weekend so I could get
prepared for the anniversary party. But I will explain all of that in the next
entry.
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