Speaking of China

Are Mandarin-speaking foreigners the only ones who can integrate into China? Or will foreigners always be foreigners no matter what (and stand apart from the crowd)?

Even in a city as large as Hangzhou — with over 6 million people — it’s hard to escape your past. My ex-Chinese boyfriend Frank still sat next to me at work in the Chinese Internet company. And far across the West Lake sat remnants of my ex-life in Hangzhou, when, in 2001, I endured four months in an international NGO struggling to be a technical writer.

I wanted to leave that place behind, because, like Frank, it left me with painful memories. A dictatorial Chinese director who blocked me from doing the writing I was hired to do. A European roommate who harassed and humiliated me, in an effort to drive me away from our coworkers. Poor facilities, from the broken washing machine to the dank, windowless basement kitchen filled with crickets. The only thing I could be proud of was that I managed to survive for four months.

So when Camille — a new European volunteer at the NGO — got in touch with me, it was like getting a call from an ex that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk to again. Continue reading Speaking of China »

Tags: China, China life, China memoir, Chinese boyfriend, dating in China, foreigners in China, Hangzhou, life in China, love in China

Even though my Chinese boyfriend, John, was going to Shanghai for graduate school, what he left behind warmed my heart.

More than a month ago, John’s duffel bag mysteriously appeared in my apartment — as he moved in with me. Now that blue duffel bag had turned into a maroon wheeled suitcase we bought at the corner supermarket, and that suitcase would be leaving with John for Shanghai. There was no mystery in it — John was going into a master’s program in psychology at a university in Shanghai.

We had our official sending-off dinner at the formal dining room in Hangzhou’s Town God’s Temple, perched on a hill just above Wushan Square. As we walked up the winding trail to the restaurant, weaving in and out of the shadows of pine and oriental plane trees, I sang “Rainbow” by Yuquan, a song that had become ours ever since John gave me the CD with it on my birthday. Yuquan was John’s favorite Chinese rock group, and now I was using the music he romanced me with to romance him back.

But, even as I sang to John — in the music John loved best — he wore a salmon, Italian-style buttoned shirt and slacks, one of the many outfits I had bought after discovering that, in fact, John had only two decent T-shirts, a worn pair of jeans and polyester pants with frayed hems that fluttered in the wind.

So much of our recent lives had been lived together, and influenced in subtle ways by our shared presence. Continue reading Speaking of China »

Tags: China, China life, China memoir, Chinese boyfriend, dating in China, foreigners in China, Hangzhou, life in China, love in China

On an afternoon alone, as I read through "A Dream of Red Mansions," and lost power in my apartment, I wondered what would happen in my life without John, who was leaving Hangzhou for graduate school in Shanghai.

Sometimes love isn’t enough, as A Dream of Red Mansions — the classic Chinese novel of the demise of a powerful family during the Ming Dynasty — tells it. It’s not enough that Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu love each other — love is not theirs to choose, but chosen by their parents instead. And the weepy, sensitive, and critical Lin Daiyu just can’t win hearts like the well-behaved, more presentable Xue Baochai. Xue Baochai and Jia Baoyu are married, and Lin Daiyu dies not long afterward.

As I read A Dream of Red Mansions on the afternoon of September 14, 2002, I am reminded that life is not always ours to choose — that sometimes, things happen. Sometimes, things just die…like the power.

I was all by myself that rainy afternoon, while John went to spend the day saying goodbye to his close male friends from high school and college, his “brothers” — in just five days, he would go to Shanghai to start graduate school. I spent the afternoon with the love triangle in A Dream of Red Mansions — Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu and, yes, even Xue Baochai. But as I turned the pages, approaching Lin Daiyu’s inevitable demise, the power suddenly went out. Not long after that, so did Lin Daiyu, on the pages of my book.

With no John, no power, and no Lin Daiyu, my world — from the pages to the present — felt so dark and lonely. If John was saying goodbye to his “brothers,” I seemed to be saying hello to what it would be like without him by my side. I wonder if that alone could have sent Lin Daiyu — who was ill even as a baby — to the sickbed. Continue reading Speaking of China »

Tags: China, China life, China memoir, Chinese boyfriend, dating in China, foreigners in China, Hangzhou, life in China, love in China