Most Chinese People

We were approaching one of the Departures desks at the Guangzhou airport, where we had just landed to catch a connecting flight to our final destination, Xi’an, when a powerful sound of the kind we’d never heard before at any airport hit our eardrums.  The high-pitched, forceful, richly modulated howl of some apparently wild and profoundly upset creature kept growing louder till it almost threw us back in bewilderment and fright.  We had just spent our first ten minutes in China on our first-ever trip to that country, eagerly expecting for it to start opening its sesames to us in ways we may or may not have anticipated.  The opening line, however, proved deafening.

The source of the sonic blast was a middle-aged woman of solid peasant build that gave the idiom “down to earth” tangible physical context.  The woman was dressed conservatively and agitated beyond comprehension.  She was yelling in Cantonese — mercifully, not at us — in a voice empowered and amplified by many generations of her ancestors who successfully communicated with each other across miles-wide fields of rice for many centuries predating the invention of the cell phone.  The sheer volume of her voice was a marvel of the realized human potential.  She was apparently having an argument with a luggage check-in clerk over an oversized suitcase of hers.  The clerk, who seemed unperturbed and neither offended nor moved by what was transpiring, kept making her own case, in a normal voice that could be guessed at from the fact her lips were moving, but couldn’t be heard, drowned out by her client’s yelling.

I noticed that, except for me and my son, the only non-Chinese passengers en route to Xi’an from that particular location at that particular moment, no one else was paying the argument much attention beyond a curious glance and a shrug as travelers and employees went about their own business.  Cautiously, we proceeded to wait behind the screaming woman — we were next in line.  A minute later, some kind of an agreement must have been arrived at, for the screaming stopped.  The woman checked in her troublesome suitcase, got a calming pat on the arm from a fellow traveler, snorted out an indignant puff of air from her still-flared nostrils like a proud horse, and left.  I placed my own suitcase on the scales and offered the clerk our passports and tickets.

“In the US, she would have been arrested,” Paul said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“In all likelihood, ” I replied.  “But I doubt anyone would dare get emotional like that at a US airport to begin with, so we can’t know for sure.”

“Here, they don’t seem to care, do they?”

“I guess not…  not in any law-enforcing manner, at least…  they don’t seem to think that being upset and loud about it is a crime,” I ventured.  I didn’t know anything with any certainty, of course, I was merely registering my very first impression.

“You overrate,” the clerk told me sternly.

“Excuse me?..”

“Overrate, you three kirograms overrate.”

“Oh…  overweight?  You think so?  It’s these pants…  they are wide because I wanted something loose and comfortable for the flight…  no wait, you mean the suitcase?..  Right…  of course.  But…  it wasn’t overweight when I checked it in in Los Angeles.  You think it could have gained three kilograms in transition?  But how?..”

“Ros Angereres?”

“Yup.”

“No overrate,” the clerk said, as illogically as I hoped she would, and without further ado accepted our luggage.  The first sesame cracked with surprising ease, we proceeded on our way.

***

Dr. Xi’s five pharmacy assistants were all working simultaneously filling in the doctor’s prescription for Paul’s herbal medicine.  The formula they were creating in front of our eyes — three identical batches each supplying one day’s dose — was complex, and both the number and the amounts of its ingredients were positively huge — I had never seen a TCM doctor prescribe anywhere near as much of anything in New York or California.  After a while I lost count of the various herbs being shoveled with expert speed onto three steadily growing mounds.  I also gave up trying to identify them beyond four or five I recognized from my own studies.  That is, until ingredients started appearing I could not mistake for anything else even if I’d rather.

“A crab?..  Why am I being medicated with seafood?” Paul wondered aloud.

A few small, brittle, desiccated crabs were finger-crushed into smaller pieces before being added to the formula, and new goodies kept arriving — twigs, seeds, roots, flowers, pieces of bone —

“Bone?  What kind of animal is that?”

“That’s fossilized bone.”

“No way!  A dinosaur?..”

“Maybe…”

The five pharmacy assistants — young, fit, fast, apparently confident and hopefully competent — kept working.  The prudent among them were wearing surgical masks to protect them, not from the germs — clinical assistants who worked directly with patients didn’t wear any — but from the fine dust of their healing trade which, with incessant exposure as they handled hundreds of dried, crushed, powdered, pollen-filled or otherwise potentially airborne medicinals, could and occasionally would cause much sneezing.

Chunky pieces of something suspiciously resembling cut-up fragments of an old bicycle tire fell out of one of the shovels and got equally distributed between the three piles.

“Well, and this is…” Paul picked up one of the pieces and quickly dropped it back.  “This is a piece of a snake.  A dried snake,” he said firmly so as to prevent any possible attempts to deny the obvious.  “I hoped it wouldn’t come to dried snakes.  But now that it did…  Well, I still hope it stops there… ’cause I know sometimes they use…  they use…  Noooooo!”  My son recoiled in horror as another shovel delivered a generous helping of beetles, rather large and obnoxiously plump despite their desiccated state.

“God has an inordinate fondness for beetles,” I offered unconvincingly, citing a famous biologist’s response to a journalist who asked him what he had learned about god in a lifetime of studying live creatures.

***

It was a hot Monday night in the second half of May, made hotter still by dozens of tabletop grills in active use by many people cooking and eating their dinners in the middle of Mingde Men Xintai, “our” street for the next six weeks.  Every evening the street gets chaotically strewn with tables and chairs which some local restaurants put outside, smack into a rather dense traffic of pedestrians, for their regular sunset-to-midnight dining-out — really “out” — occasion.  I was on my first solo hunting-gathering expedition, looking for a hot meal to go.  I wasn’t at all sure I would be able to procure it without an interpreter.  I had been badly humbled years earlier, when I first arrived in the US and discovered that people in New York didn’t understand my English, nor I theirs.  That frightening state of affairs — knowing a certain language I was told was English while learning it, which its native speakers refused to use or recognize as such — lasted for two weeks, and then somehow subsided.  However, now things were much worse.  Not only was I dealing with Mandarin Chinese now, but the two-week mark I hoped would produce a miracle of sudden comprehension, the way it did before with English, was nowhere near reached yet.  That evening in Xi’an, on top of being linguistically intimidated and colloquially incapacitated, I was beastly hungry.

We had eaten in the middle of the street just the day before, and Patrick and Misa, both fluent in Chinese and comfortably at home in Xi’an, made it easy for the paper-thin strips of spicy marinated beef, round slices of potatoes, rings of onions and peppers, bowls of rice, bottles of beer, cups of tea and whatever else one might think of sampling on a gastronomical outing in the streets of Xi’an, to appear on our table, around its nifty little grill, without me having to lift a finger…  I mean, the middle of the tongue…   so as to articulate “xiexie.”  Now that I was alone, I wasn’t sure I would be able to pronounce the few crucial Mandarin words just so as to be understood and have my shopping bag filled with what Paul and I had decided we had the munchies for.

I was getting hungrier by the minute as rich smells, sizzling sounds, and lip-smacking sights were closing in on me with every indecisive step I took.  I beheld men lifting the fronts of their shirts to expose, cool off, and fondly stroke and pat their bellies, as is the local custom.  I observed slender teenage girls in merry groups of chirping girlfrienderie putting away astonishing amounts of food.  I didn’t trust my electronic translator, which had failed me before, to express my heart’s…  um, stomach’s…  desires to a waiter, and I cursed my equally untrustworthy memory which was at the moment running on a dangerously low blood sugar supply to the brain and seemed  consequently wiped clean of any and all Chinese words I ever attempted to scratch onto its surface.  I was swallowing my own saliva in the best traditions of taoist cultivation.  It tasted of sour grapes.  I was getting ready to swallow my pride as well and go get some sausage or something at the local supermarket when a young woman suddenly rushed out of the crowd, blocked my path, and urgently asked me a very good question:

“Can I help you?”

The best thing about the question was that she asked it in English.   She was not a waitress, just a pedestrian, but her words were exactly the help I needed.  You take a stroll around the craters of the Moon or along the canals of Mars, you hear more English spoken than you do in the streets of Xi’an.

“I’m looking to buy some food,” I told her, “some dinner, hot food, for two, to go.  I can’t say it in Chinese though because I forgot how,” I confessed, sheepishly lowering my head with its clean slate for colloquial Mandarin.

“I will take you there,” the Mingde Men Xintai street angel said.  “I study English.  I don’t make much progress.  I study more.  Make progress.  What kind of food want?”

“Rice, beef, eggplant, and something strange only Chinese people eat.”

“Let’s go best place.”

***

“Most Chinese people are very kindly,” Li Meini told me when me, her, and her husband went shopping together at the South Gate antiques market, a week after the first encounter.  “They will help you.  Almost everyone.  Nearly anyone.  Anything.  Just ask and they will help.”

That simple?..

Who knows.  If that’s been Li Meini’s experience living here, maybe she does…

Do I know a people, a nation, a country…  an empire…  most of whose constituents are very kindly?  Have I ever heard anyone say this about Americans?  Russians?  Ukrainians?  Austrians?  Italians?  Have I ever lived among such people?

I feel sudden heartache, I don’t know why.

Then I feel Li Meini’s husband gently but — I can tell because he speaks no English so we communicate in body language — gently but reproachfully tap my shoulder — for the third time.  What he is communicating to me is that I keep forgetting to zip up my shoulder bag every time I open it.  Yes, yes, OK, sorry, I know you’ve already told me twice before.  I forgot.  I just never remember to zip up this bag.  So he’s worried that my bag is an open invitation for the less morally upright among his very kindly compatriots to steal my wallet.  Violent crime is less common in Xi’an than anywhere else I’d ever been, but pickpockets happen, and they are reportedly exceptionally good at what they do.

In 206 B.C., when the rebel leader Liu Bang captured Xianyang, a former capital a few miles to the west of Xi’an,  he summoned all the distinguished elders from the surrounding provinces and addressed them with a proposal.  “Esteemed elders, you have all suffered for a long time under the cruel laws of Qin.  Those who dared to criticize the government used to be executed with their entire families.  Even talking in pairs was considered a crime and could result in public execution.  We are going to change all this.  I want to propose a new code that consists of only three laws:

First, a man who murders another will receive the death penalty.

Second, a man who harms, robs, or steals will be punished according to his crime.

Third and last, all the other laws of Qin are hereby repealed.”

In Xi’an, I often felt that, despite all the horror stories a foreigner hears about the convoluted and mysterious ways of Chinese bureacracy, in many everyday situations Liu Bang’s legacy lives on.  Centuries — nay, millennia — of laborious cultivation of artificial legalities and illegalities prescribing everyday behavior to every man, woman and child have failed to completely eradicate this thorny, sturdy, indestructible weed, rooted in common sense, whose coarse leaves are inscribed with a single commandment worth a thousand laws criminalizing this or that behavior:  “Thou shalt not micromanage.” I’m  sure there’s complex and turbulent legal undercurrents beneath the surface quite invisible to a foreign newcomer.  But on the surface of things, it would seem that paternalistic laws effectively protecting citizens elsewhere from more and more thoughtless or, god forbid, fearless expressions of personal freedom they might, god forbid, attempt to exercise in public, haven’t grown as many tenacious tendrils and tentacles here…  not yet anyway.  Being quite used to these appendages of power propagating in all directions exponentially and relentlessly, reaching into every nook and cranny of everybody’s body and soul with ordinances and prohibitions and penalties and fines and dark threats, curtailing more and more spontaneous expressions of biological diversity of humans, as though the ultimate goal is to create human behavior one hundred percent predictable at all times for all purposes and limited to a very narrow band of functions at that, I was surprised and relieved, but also intimidated, when I started noticing that this hasn’t happened here yet, despite…  despite, well, all those things beneath the surface I can only know of from hearsay.  From personal observations, however, a typical situation of everyday human functioning in Xi’an is that of being immersed in an ongoing self-mediating chaos that keeps complicating and stratifying itself, seemingly by itself, without enforcement and without fail.

For instance, traffic rules and regulations are exceedingly sparse.  Not only are there no stop signs nearly anywhere, parking or no parking signs, this or that speed limit signs, one-way signs, yield to pedestrians signs, or any such pointers in the general direction of where you might expect the cars to go or to stop, but, with the exception of the major intersections, there are no traffic lights either, nor any contraptions or constructions to otherwise indicate, much less dictate, “stop” and “go” to anyone, whether on wheels or on foot.  The practical outcome of this arrangement is that the cars, by and large, neither slow down nor stop for any reason until they reach their destination.  Not for pedestrians, not for other cars cutting across their path, not for head-on encounters — for the choice of the side of the street to drive on is left entirely to the driver, and no one presumes to know what a particular driver is going to choose — the lanes are mostly only imaginary, and the general direction of movement is established by use and can change abruptly at any time at any driver’s discretion.   If you are trying to cross the street, it’s not enough to look to the left then to the right, as is our own indoctrination.  It is necessary to somehow maintain a 360-degree panoramic view and rely on some additional senses while not really trusting, e.g., your hearing, since the soundless electric motorcycles offer no warning whatsoever by way of noise, appearing like swift ghosts out of nowhere and startling you into a somersault in the middle of your street-crossing endeavor.  At times it seemed to me that pedestrians were ghosts too (I often feared I was about to become one as well) — entities drivers don’t see, and therefore don’t make the slightest attempt to avoid, not even when driving onto the sidewalk, on a whim or for the purpose of parking on a grassy lawn or in a flower bed the nearest to the entrance to their apartment so as to maximally shorten the distance they would have to walk from the car when bringing home something heavy.  “They don’t want to run you over,” Patrick explained to me, “but neither do they want to slow down.  You simply play chicken  with them when you have to cross the street, is all.  That’s how you do it.”  Great.

Despite the chaotic Brownian pattern of a typical busy street, accidents are rare, and serious ones even more so.  There is no road rage in Xi’an.  There is much honking, but it serves its original purpose, that of communication, rather than intimidation.  Somehow centuries of the taoist go-with-the-flow pursuits seem to have been internalized by the population to the extent that it becomes one’s second nature to orient oneself correctly in the middle of this flow — of cars, changes, life — and navigate one’s way across with a nonchalant sense of entitlement.  I am entitled to cross this street here and now.  This is the will of the gods.   That’s why nobody is afraid to play chicken:  it’s not nerves of steel, it’s a habit, a practice-made-perfect, of playing chicken with the gods, in a population that has been civilized for so long that most distinctions between the “natural” and the “unnatural” flow have blurred.  The skill of negotiating your way across in life may be psychological for other peoples; for the Chinese, it is also physical.  It is embodied.

(to be continued…)