Lanzhou is the capital of Gansu province, in the northwest of the country. In those parts, the population is thinned out a bit and even though it's the capital, there's none of the cosmopolitan, booming feel that some of the East Coast cities have. It is relatively nearby to Xi'an, where I'd been in February with Dad, so I expected it to sort of feel like that. But it smelled and looked much different than Xi'an had. Xi'an smelled like incense and meat and felt like history, and Lanzhou smelled like dusty buses and felt like...family. Luke says the whole province and all the people in it are overwhelmingly tacky, hehe, because it's so inland. He says he doesn't like it - I think he prefers his other hometown of Dalian - but I can tell he appreciates parts of it, and was anxious to show me everything he cares about. The scenery on the drive from the airport to Luke's house reminded me of Arizona. It was sandy and mountainous - shocking, coming from the muggy jungle city of Guangzhou. It was so dry that I had to keep stuff on my lips at all times and felt thirsty constantly. The dryness felt so good to me, though. There were markedly more Muslim people than I'm used to seeing, more wide faces with high cheekbones, but it didn't feel like a Muslim place rather than a Chinese place. It was still just a Chinese city, downtown areas with KFCs and blaring advertisements, people clamoring onto rickety buses, restaurants with waitresses wearing their hair done in buns and bows. The city wouldn't be very attractive for a normal tourist, unless you were trying to get to the real West to Urumqi or Kashgar and needed a stepping stone.
But I wasn't there to be a normal tourist!
I was there to spend a week with a real Chinese boy and his real apartment and real family. Is it cliche to emphasize the realness of this situation? Yes perhaps. But does that make it less cool? ^^
I had met Luke's mom once, briefly, in a dining hall at the beginning of the second semester, before I had any idea this would happen with Luke. She had come to make Luke stay at school, after he decided he wanted to leave the program. I don't remember what I was wearing or what I said or what she said or anything. But when we landed at the airport, she gave me a big hug and held my hand as we walked to the car. Luke whispered, Damn, isn't my mom hot?! I agreed that she was. She is tall and solid-looking, but not broad, and with slim little shoulders, and the slight chubbiness that Luke has. She always tied her hair back in a barrette and would wear stilettos with flattering, put-together outfits that made me feel like a hippie American mess. And she even sauntered a little - a mannerism I'd seen so rarely in China.
Their home was on the fourth (fifth?) floor of an apartment building in a huge complex of apartment buildings. Seems that this is really the only option in a Chinese city. I couldn't believe that his mom would go up and down those stairs every day, but I guess that's why they're not obese. When we walked in the door I was surprised by how small the place was - minuscule, by Americans' spoiled standards. It was adorable in a way that I wasn't expecting; flowered wallpaper, frilly things on tablecloths, pink and yellow stuffed elephants in the living room, red cabinets in the kitchen and a big blown-up picture of Luke as the chubbiest baby ever photoshopped into a beach scene. That description sounds like it would be tacky, but it wasn't tacky. It was like, feminine and a little retro, with some silliness thrown in. Oh, and SUPER CLEAN. Like the cleanest space you've ever seen. And I saw why Luke didn't mind sleeping on flowered sheets at school - the decor of his room paid no attention to the male inhabitant and included pink cartoon pillow cases, a lace throw over the piano, and kiddie stuffed animals everywhere. When I bring this up with Luke, he totally doesn't understand my problem with the situation.
I can't believe you sleep on girly sheets and pillowcases.
So? These aren't girly.
You must just not care about what your room looks like.
Of course I care! I care about how things look!
There is a purple elephant sitting on your piano.
But I LIKE purple elephants!
We just have a totally different sense of aesthetics. But I think I can appreciate the Chinese viewpoint.
The front door opened into a small room that acted as entryway and dining room. Off this was the small and tubless bathroom, kitchen, living room with a long couch, TV, and chaise, mom's room with a balcony for the laundry, and Luke's room with a big whole-wall window. There's no reason three people (when Luke was growing up his dad lived there, too) need any more space than that, but it would certainly be hard to find privacy in that apartment. I mean, if I'm at my mom's house and there's a phone call for her, I have to call down into the basement, up into the bedrooms, out the front door, and out the side door to the back yard before I find her. In that space all you'd need is your normal speaking voice. I don't know why I'm obsessing over this. It's just, I think most Americans couldn't even imagine raising a family in a "house" so small. Americans with one baby move into new houses all the time because "there just isn't enough space" in the old one - "we're just outgrowing it." Why does this disgust me?
Whatever, anyway the minute I got in Mama Li went into mother-host mode. Wash your hands and feet. Here are your slippers. What can I get you to drink? Make yourself at home. Put all your things in Luke's room. Hang your clothes in his wardrobe so they don't wrinkle. Feel free to use my vanity mirror.
She made us breakfast every morning - homemade bread from a pink breadmaker, ham slices, a fried egg, and warm milk with sugar (so comforting! I told her that was exactly what my mom would make me for breakfast) - and kept stealing my clothes from Luke's room and washing them, and made the bed every morning, and bought our return tickets for us, and fussed with my appearance for me, and complained when we got home too late, drunk, and was the mommiest mom I could imagine. But at the same time, she was totally relaxed and cool about this foreign person in her house. She was so warm to me, and worried about what I would and wouldn't want to eat, and made efforts to engage me in conversation, and asked me to call her Mama instead of the usual "Auntie," and told me repeatedly how I should return to Lanzhou, and treated me like...normal. Like, she took me in and treated me fabulously without even checking for strength of character or politeness or anything. She didn't even give me a few days to prove myself as worthy before she started treating me like family. She told Luke that he and I could sleep together in his room, which was unexpected. And then the first night, when we were getting ready for bed, Luke was in the dining room and came into the bedroom looking baffled, and said, "Ma just told me that she wants us to shower together. She says I have to take care of you in the shower." LOL. So she was obviously cool with the modern relationship that her precious son is having with this god-knows-who American girl. I don't know why I assumed she would be traditional or stodgy or something. But my parents would be uncomfortable with me showering with a boyfriend in their house! So, the home situation was overall pleasant and reassuring. I was almost embarrassed by how comfortable I felt, actually. Mama Li hung around in her housedress, occasionally sitting on the floor, Luke talked loudly on his cell phone wearing only teddy bear-themed pajama pants, I wore one of Mama's nighties after she became concerned that the one I brought wasn't airy enough, and every night after Mom went to bed, Luke and I tired ourselves out, quietly, in the bed he had slept in his whole life.
We also spent two nights in a row eating at the apartment where his aunt, uncle, and cousin lived. The first night, grandma was there, too. I LOVED this grannie. She reminded me of my Grandma Tilley, Nina, but maybe any really old, fuzzy-haired, squeaky-voiced nice grannie would. We were introduced and I said, "Ni hao, nai nai," and she was excited, naturally, and we sat on the couch together trying to chat for a while. Oh, you understand Chinese! Hey everybody, this girl understands Chinese! Just a little, grandma. Ooooohh! Heeehehehe how great!
These family members were totally cool and normal, too. They sat around making dumplings, drinking tea, chatting about me in front of me. I don't know what they would talk about if I wasn't there to provide so many topics of conversation! I could participate sometimes but mostly just tried to listen and enlisted cousin "Jake," who wasn't yet sick of translating, to help me out sometimes. Their apartment was bigger and more modern than Luke's, with sparser decor and a little rooftop garden.
These evenings were pleasant also but as I reminded Luke later, good thing I'm pretty self-sufficient and have the confidence to handle myself in such situations with NO HELP FROM YOU! Normally when you bring a friend to a family gathering, even when that friend speaks the same language as the family, you're supposed to sit nearby and hold the friend's hand and facilitate conversation, you know? You're not really babying me much, you know?
He has fun babying me in other situations, but I guess here he could sense that I didn't need it and with his family being so warm, why would I? So, with all that said about the surprising ease with with I fit into these situations, the whole thing was still really freakin' tough. It's like experiencing a whole new level of feeling left out, to sit in a room full of people talking about American eating habits but not quite be able to follow the details. It's a whole new level of stress, to have someone look at you and ask a question, that you know you would understand if they'd only repeat it much more slowly. Or to catch on that the topic has moved to American universities and have something to contribute but miss the chance to do so while you're trying to formulate a grammatically feasible sentence in your head. Or to be expected to take the first taste of a dish that comes to the table and know that your chopstick skills are not up to handling that thing. Or to strain and strain and try to listen in slow motion, try to hear every syllable, only to lose focus for an instant, and therefore lose the point of the whole thing. Or to understand every single word in a sentence except for the most important one, and therefore be unable to respond. Or to get tired of listening, eventually, and ask your translating partner what has been said, to which he replies, Oh, nothing, she just said to work hard. Or to be brought to a bar to hang out with "a friend," only to find three male friends, who want to drink and smoke and play quiz-the-foreigner, only you yourself are not expected to drink or smoke, and you eventually feel too drained to fuck with the language thing, and have to feel guilty about obnoxiously relying on Luke to translate simple things. Or to hear something not so nice being said about you or your country, and have to decide whether to feign obliviousness or speak up and take the chance that you've misunderstood. Meet-the-parents-meets-homestay-culture-shock.
Luke gets it in the sense that he knows how difficult it is to express oneself in a foreign language. But he doesn't get actually how much of my energy went into making that week a success. Those people loved me, which is partly because they are warm and kind, but partly because I am capable and thoughtful and strong. A less secure person would have buckled under that shit. I suppose I don't need his acknowledgment of this if I have my own. He would acknowledge it if I didn't make a good impression, though. Haha. You're welcome, sweetie.
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