Speaking of China » Memoirs of a Yangxifu in China

Memoirs of a Yangxifu: Most Popular Posts

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:08:05 +0000

What were the most popular (or in some cases, embarrassing ) moments from Memoirs of a Yangxifu?

Memoirs of a Yangxifu was the story of love, cultural understanding and eventual marriage between one American woman from the city and one Chinese man from the countryside.

What were the top 10 most popular moments, by views?

Chapter 72: Private Parts in China. An embarrassing afternoon of trying to get my — well, you know — checked out.
Chapter 1: My Heart is Shut Away, My Chinese Boyfriend is Gone. As I took a weekend trip, to escape the muggy summer heat and a painful breakup, little did I know I was heading towards my future husband.
Chapter 8: John is my Chinese Boyfriend. The night by the West Lake, when John and I officially become a couple.
Chapter 4: The Embarrassment of Love in China. Those first flirtations between John and I become fodder for laughter and jokes, especially among friends.
Chapter 47: A Picture of My Chinese Boyfriend’s Family. Even as I shot a photo of John’s family during Chinese New Year, I still didn’t see have the entire picture of his family — until I showed them pictures of my own.
Chapter 19: Only Mandarin-Speaking Foreigners Belong in 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)? My European friend Camille posed the question to me one evening during a walk in Hangzhou.
Chapter 58: China Marriage on My Mind. In Shanghai, my Chinese boyfriend and I were almost as close as husband and wife. All of the signs said we were headed to a wedding — so why did I have to ask?
Chapter 13: Different Eggplant, Different Cultural Expectations. One day, you wake up and smell the eggplant — and you discover you both smelled something different after all. At least, John and I did.
Chapter 16: Foreign Girlfriend or Fascinating Moonlight Tale? Chang’e was banished to the moon because she asked too much out of her husband. Was I asking too much, to be the foreign girlfriend of John?
Chapter 2: My Chinese Matchmaker, Caroline. Behind Caroline’s reticence was a matchmaker, determined to bring me and John together.

A special thank you to my readers, whether you’ve followed from Chapter 1 or just begun. Without you, this list — and endeavor — wouldn’t be possible.

———

Memoirs of a Yangxifu in China is the story of love, cultural understanding and eventual marriage between one American woman from the city and one Chinese man from the countryside. To read the full series to date, you can start at Chapter 1, or browse the Memoirs of a Yangxifu archives.

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Epilogue: The Destiny to Marry in China

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:08:16 +0000

Six years ago today, John and I registered our marriage. Today, I look back on the series, Memoirs of a Yangxifu, and also announce a new posting schedule

In China, lovers are often said “to have the destiny to meet across one thousand li.” For my Chinese husband, John, and I, it wasn’t just one thousand li — it was ten thousand li.

Distance, of course, is all relative.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and John in the countryside of Zhejiang Province. I knew the distance between us, something around 8,000 or more English miles apart (almost 13,000 kilometers). But this kind of distance, where separation is measured by miles, by continents, is as meaningless as the “Model Unit” plaques adorning work units all over China.

So what is it that can turn a thousand li into ten thousand?

I wrote the series Memoirs of a Yangxifu to explore this idea, to look at what it took for one Western woman and one Chinese man to overcome the distance — cultural, mental, even physical — to become a couple.

Six years ago today, John and I stood before the great seal of the People’s Republic of China, and bridged the final distance between us — being lawfully married. I signed a little red book as scarlet as the knit top I wore, and pledged myself to him, forever.

Over the months, I pledged myself to you, the reader, as well — to share this story with you in all of its honesty. You helped me bridge the distance, as I poured my heart out on the pages with your support behind it all.

So, what’s next? I’m closing the series Memoirs of a Yangxifu on my blog — but not in my writing. Some of you know I’m working on a manuscript behind the screen, and many more stories not published here will find a home in that book.

Here’s my new posting schedule:

On Mondays, I’ll post an essay, much like many of the Memoirs of a Yangxifu entries, exploring love, life and family in China. But I’ll jump around in time. It may be a more recent revelation, or a remembrance of something far in the past.

Every 2nd Wednesday, I’ll still run my travel series, Travel China with the Yangxifu.

On Fridays, I’ll still run my Ask the Yangxifu column, offering advice on love, life and family for cross-cultural couples in China, or with ties to Chinese culture.

However, this Wednesday, I’ll be looking back on the Memoirs of a Yangxifu series with a list of the top 10 most popular entries. What were your favorite stories? Let me know and I’ll be sure to share them.

Sometimes, I’m amazed by how John and I went from flirting to forever. I cannot even claim to say it was only love that kept us together, and helped us overcome the distance. I’ve known many a couple in love that eventually gave up. I’ve even loved Chinese men before John, and our love withered away into that abyss between us.

But maybe that’s why that Chinese expression begins like this: “to have the destiny…”

Have you felt you had a certain destiny with the People’s Republic of China?

(Also, if you have favorite stories from the Memoirs of a Yangxifu series, let me know!)

——–

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Chapter 83: Salad, But Not Safe

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:08:35 +0000

When John, my Chinese boyfriend, refused to eat my salad, that moment was a window into one major difference between our culinary cultures.

One Saturday evening in Shanghai, I holed up in the kitchen with some long lost culinary acquaintances — angel hair pasta, ripe red tomatoes, and mesculin mix, with flavors that ranged from the bitter, toothy mizuna to the sweet baby lettuces. I wasn’t even close to being purebred Italian, yet for years, an Italian meal on the weekends was as important a ritual as evening mass at the Catholic church. It just wasn’t a week without our spaghetti and salad.

Well, in China, I had spent many a week without spaghetti or salad. And after discovering the foreign foods market just blocks away — the tawny olive oils, the deep balsamic vinegars, pasta, and even salad greens in a rainbow of colors and shapes — I schemed to dazzle my Chinese boyfriend with a taste of my childhood, and feed my thirst for something beyond the usual Chinese fare.

I cooked down the tomatoes with nuggets of garlic and a splash of olive oil, and then a little basil seasoning at the end. I boiled the angel hair pasta to al dente perfection. I washed the salad greens and tossed them together with tangy balsamic vinegar, olive oil and a little salt. And then I set the creaky wooden table, the tomato sauce crowning two steaming plates of angel hair, with two salads to start the meal.

I walked around the table, as if I was parading it before a crowd, proud of what I had done this afternoon. Oh, he’s going to just love this, I thought, the anticipation surging within after I called John up for dinner.

John pushed through the door, and surveyed the dinner spread on the table with his hands on his hips. Suddenly, the usual gentle, happy-go-lucky smile faded away to a slight grimace as he bent over to look closer at my afternoon’s work.

“Is that lettuce?” he wondered.

“Of course it’s lettuce! That’s what we eat for salads.”

He frowned. “Uncooked lettuce gives you diarrhea.” The dinner I’d spent hours on was now, according to John, a digestive liability.

If I’d spent more time at his home, I’d have known better. Years later, I would sit down at the round, plastic table in his parents’ dining room, and find, among the vegetables they prepared, a dish of lettuce stir-fried in rapeseed oil, soy sauce, salt and MSG. The lettuce of my childhood — crisp greens kissed with vinegar and olive oil, the wrinkled leaves giving the illusion that the salad was even greater than reality — drowned in sauces, and wilted miserably in the bowl. One Chinese New Year, I prepared salad and spaghetti for the whole family, and observed as John’s parents avoided the salad bowl.

It was their way in John’s home and culture. You must cook lettuce, like every other green, to avoid harmful bacteria. Eat it raw, and prepare to meet your toilet — many, many times.

The thing is, there’s some truth there. After all, people in my country, the US, have died from eating spinach and lettuce tainted with deadly microbes such as E. coli. Yet, here in the West, we worship our greens, despite the headline-making risks.

I never imagined risk until that night, seeing John’s response. But he took a risk too, and tried it.

“Mmm, that’s not bad,” he declared, munching on a few of the greens on our table. That was one small step for John, and the beginning of a new culinary love — his love of salad.

How did China change your perception of your favorite foods?

——-

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Chapter 82: Late to the Perfect Shanghai Apartment

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:08:10 +0000

When the real estate agent in Shanghai arrived late for yet another apartment visit, I wondered -- will I be late in finding a good place before in Shanghai, before the month is up? (photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert)

We arranged to see yet another apartment in Shanghai, one dreary Friday at noon in late November. John and I stood at the intersection of two streets just blocks from Xintiandi, the very intersection the real estate agent had designated as our meeting place, and stared at our watch as the minutes ticked past noon, with no sign of an agent.

The agent is late. People arrive late in China all the time. But this followed a string of disappointing apartment visits, with Taoyuan Xincun the nadir. This wasn’t a late agent, but a foreshadowing of failure — our failure to find a good place to live.

After 10 minutes past the hour, a harried, lanky Chinese man in a long trench coat stepped out of a taxi and approached us. “Sorry I’m late. But, don’t worry, this will be fast. The place is just down the street there, that entrance next to the bicycle store.”

I peered down the road at where he had motioned, and groaned within. Only 50 meters away from where we currently lived? John and I had visited several other places in the area,
including an attic apartment that felt like an abandoned antique store, its depressing wooden floors and walls strewn with hard wooden furniture, cobwebs and holes. When it came to budget apartments in our neighborhood, the lanes of Shanghai longtang homes — in all their glory, decay, peddlers, and pests — were the only possibility. Or were they?

We passed through the gate into another lane with concrete, three-story buildings, the first floors with a courtyard and often osmanthus or pipa trees that stretched their limbs into the second floor level, a comforting patch of green in the city. And as I looked around, I felt as if it was all too familiar.

“These used to be Shanghai longtang homes, but they were renovated into something more modern,” explained the agent. No wonder. It was like my current apartment, but in concrete.

But Apartment 203, tucked near the back and left of the community, wasn’t like my current apartment at all. I walked into the living room, besot by the sunshine embracing the living room and its gleaming wooden floors, whitewashed walls, and inviting leather couch and queen bed. The kitchen had new granite countertops, the bathroom a tub, and the other room golden carpeting (which I had never seen before in an apartment in China). Outside, a pipa tree gently nudged up against the small balcony, and all around, a rare quiet shrouded the whole neighborhood.

We leaned into the couch, the sunshine reflecting on our faces as we met the landlord — a dimunitive, fortysomething Chinese woman with permed shoulder-length locks and professor credentials at an agricultural university. We talked details, for the first time — rent, utilities, deposit, furniture included, terms. But we talked because we had to, to play the part of the discerning prospective renter. The thing is, the apartment already had us at clean, quiet and sunshine. Minutes later, we signed a lease.

But even though the agent’s tardiness never came to curse our chances for finding the perfect place, it cursed me — with lateness. I slipped back into my office, 10 minutes late, just as my boss was probably checking her own watch, wondering where I’d been.

Fortunately, I had a good excuse.

——-

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Chapter 81: Shanghai Apartment Hunting Angst

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:08:02 +0000

John and I go on a dead-end visit to an unsavory apartment building in China -- in an effort to find a new place to live -- and make the landlord angry with our disinterest.

In late November, 2003, John and I stood before this shadowed, six-story housing complex that looked more of a Gotham City glum than Shanghai, with a soundtrack of scooters, motorcycles, car horns, and bar hoppers playing all around us in the streets. A fifty-something man with a greased Elvis-style do and dull gray button-down shirt, exuding overconfidence like bad breath, led us towards this urban planning nightmare. The whole scene felt more like a trap — the kind you don’t survive — out of a Hong Kong kungfu movie.

I looked at John with one of my desperate, please-can-we-get-out-of-here glances. The thing is, we both knew this was a dead-end. Not the killing kind of dead-end — but the apartment-hunting kind.

“Now, Taoyuan Xincun,” Elvis said, referring to this glum complex, “used to be a residence for high-level officials.” He smirked proudly about the pedigree of the place, but used to be was the operative word here. The blemishes on the wall, dirty air, and the scream of traffic out the window made it clear that no high-level official would ever live here, even if he got the apartment for nothing.

Over and over again, Elvis nudged us to make a decision — now. “These apartments are usually gone within a few days.” We wanted to be gone from this apartment within a few minutes of seeing it, and our only commitment was a thought — that “we’ll think about it.” Of course, in this case “we’ll think about it” is my code for “this apartment sucks.”

The following night, Elvis gave us a second performance at Taoyuan Xincun. But since we hadn’t given him a standing ovation the night before, he decided to get a second opinion from the audience — and brought along a young Chinese fellow.

Elvis threw around superlatives and praise like confetti all over the apartment, hoping, once again, we wouldn’t notice what a rat-hole it was. But the windows still blared noise from the city. And, this time, even the bathroom made a statement — with a cockroach that strutted brazenly across the toilet during our tour. No, and no.

Just then, I got a call from an old friend, a European who happened to be in town. I sat back by the windows, as if I was just hanging out at someone’s house and not looking for an apartment, and barely noticed Elvis and the other Chinese guy in the corner, talking about the utilities and the water heater and everything else I didn’t care about in this apartment.

As I hung up and prepared to leave the place, Elvis confronted us. “So, what about this place?”

I could have told him hundreds of things wrong with it. The noise level. The cracks in the walls. The poor air. The cockroach in the bathroom. But why create a fuss over an apartment I don’t even want? Instead, I went for the indirect refusal, smiling politely. “We’ll think about it.”

Instead of a polite goodbye, or an invitation to call him again about an apartment, the jumpsuit truly came off. “Well, I’m fed up with your indecisiveness. This guy is already discussing renting this place. If you can’t make up your mind, I don’t want your business.” Well, that’s one way to say goodbye, for good.

As John and I rushed down the stairs of Taoyuan Xincun, I kept running through the past two apartment visits there in my mind, wondering what I’d done to deserve that comeback from this landlord with the Elvis hair. Was I really that cruel? Should I have just refused to come after that uninspiring view of Taoyuan Xincun?

“Don’t worry about it,” reassured John. “He’s probably just annoyed that you didn’t respond to his sales pitch. Maybe he’s always used to getting buyers the first time out.”

Well, he did get me, all right — get me to never, ever look at a place like that again.

Have you ever had a frustrating experience finding an apartment or home in China?

——–

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Chapter 80: The Foreign Foreigners

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 08:08:43 +0000

When you’re abroad, your brethren foreigners can sometimes be just as foreign to you as the locals, just as John and I discovered one night while dining on a bar street.

One Saturday in Shanghai, John and I eschewed our usual date-night standby — the Tianran Vegetarian restaurant — for a Mexican joint my coworker recommended. The place hovered over a bar street in Shanghai that I’d heard of — from heavy ads in all the foreigner mags in Shanghai — but never visited. I maybe had a beer or glass of wine once a month, and couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been in a bar. Still, in a country where avocados were more foreign than I was, I missed Mexican food desperately — desperate enough to go to a neighborhood I’d never gone to before.

With all of the bar ads for this street — and all of those “happy hour” promos — I expected the patrons and music to be overflowing as much as the alcohol. But instead, I could barely hear the music, and saw only a handful of patrons here and there lurking in the shadows, as if this was the Prohibition era and no one wanted to be caught. And even stranger, the restaurant, perched on the second floor, had the same lascivious glow of a red-light district brothel in Amsterdam. Was this really the Mexican food dinner my friend, a girl at that, had recommended?

Reluctantly, we wandered upstairs, relieved to discover that it still was, in fact, a Mexican restaurant — but it was as deserted as the bar street outside. “Should we even stay here?” I wondered aloud to John, who had the same puzzled look as I did. But stay we did. After all, we’d come all this way for a burrito — and if not here, then where?

John and I slipped into a booth by the window that overlooked the ghostly street below, and only noticed the other two patrons — a pair of thirtysomething European guys hunched over the bar nursing their beers — in passing.

But I didn’t just pass them by, because they looked at me and shouted across the way: “Are you from France?”

I should have known this was trouble. Why would anyone ask your nationality, just like that, after entering a restaurant? I felt a little nervous, uneasy even, to have strangers address me so suddenly. But I thought, maybe they mistook me for someone else? Maybe I should just tell them?

So I did. “No, I’m an American,” I said.

Why did I have to say American? I could have just said “no,” and left it there — and probably spent the rest of the evening lost in date night reverie, never giving the cheeky lads at the bar another thought. But I volunteered the extra information, and at my own peril.

“Oh, an American! I’m an American!” they taunted, in their louded stage whispers. “Those Americans, they think they rule the whole world, don’t they? They’re just war trash! An American, ha!”

And so it began, their drunken monologue about the evils of my country and people, for everyone — particularly me — to hear. To be sure, in the wake of the Iraq war, which had begun more than 6 months ago by that evening, it hit my ears hard.

Suddenly, I felt like I was back in high school again, with yet another bully facing me down — and yet another urge to get the hell out of there. I never wanted to punch or kick — with words or bodies; I always just wanted peace. But now here I was, in a foreign country, on a nearly deserted entertainment district, and the confrontation felt even more threatening than ever.

I sank into the corner of the booth and stared at John in an effort to forget the hooligans there. “Should we just go?” I asked in Chinese, guessing — correctly, as it turned out — that the two foreigners couldn’t even speak the language of this country.

John looked straight in my eyes, like a coach to a desperate player. “We cannot leave here. We cannot let them have the pleasure of that. We came here to eat, and we’re going to eat.”

His words washed over me like a cold shower, and washed away the urge to flee. I could stay. I could have my dinner. I could still have my date night, in spite of them. So I took a breath and decided to fix my gaze on John or the street, and nothing else, as the two of us lived in a virtual world built of our own conversation, and our own hopes — even as the hooligans droned on in the background.

“Americans are such arrogant assholes,” one laughed. “Those Americans!” And on, and on.

And we talked in Chinese, and sat, and finally ate our burritos. But we never left. Never.

In the end, the drunken hooligans walked away first, tumbling out the door — probably to another near-deserted place on that street for yet another round of beers, or even something more. As for me, for the first time in my life, I walked away with a little more courage.

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Chapter 79: Battling Roaches and Rats

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:08:57 +0000

In our old Shanghai town house, John and I faced a double infestation -- cockroaches and rats -- despite the popular wisdom that you can't have both together.

In China, I’ve heard people say you might have rats or cockroaches in your apartment, but never both.

If only they’d lived where I did. That creaky old wooden Shanghai townhouse — in the same 1920s style as the surrounding neighborhood — oozed a lot more than just character after we moved in.

John and I returned home one balmy evening and turned the lights on to find a black spot on the ceiling that moved. And just as I shrieked in disgust, it then began to fly, darting around the ceiling with a defiant buzz, as if to say “Go ahead, just try and kill me. I dare you.” Not even John’s whacks to the ceiling with a broom did any good, as the cockroach scrambled — and flew — away from our reach. We looked at each other with a tired grimace, and almost didn’t even need to say what was on our minds — yet another cockroach infestation.

Not long after that, we found the other offending party.

It was late at night, just after John and I retired to bed, when I heard it, this pattering across the floor that could not have been the wind, or the neighbors. “What’s that?” I whispered to a half-comatose John laying next to me, gently nudging him out of sleep. “Did you hear that?” He yawned and and began to open his eyes, just conscious enough to listen to that same pattering, which seemed to move from one side to the other. And then came the answer from John, confirming the worst: “Laoshu,” he moaned. A rat.

So began the war within our home. For the cockroaches, we drew the battle lines with cockroach chalk, said to kill any roach who dares to cross over the deadly white streaks we left on the walls, floors and stairs. For the rats, we left deceptive rat boards on the floor, their sticky goo said to imprison the vermin for life (or, rather, for death). But even with the chalk and boards, we still had crawling spots on the ceiling, and pattering at night. Roaches. Rats.

After a summer and fall of infestation, we decided to move to another apartment by the end of November 2003. In the end, maybe the reason people say you can never have both roaches and rats in your home is because no one will put up with two pests at once.

Have you ever faced cockroaches, or rats, or both?

——-

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Chapter 78: Chocolate and Forgiveness

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:08:02 +0000

I brought my Shanghai neighbor chocolate, as a token of forgiveness, but never expected her to come back with her own sweet reply (photo by Zsuzsanna Kilian).

One evening in mid-October, 2003, I visited my downstairs neighbors, bringing some fine chocolates and a little forgiveness over that stolen bicycle. Only the wife was there, but she welcomed me in. “Come in, please have a seat and enjoy yourself,” she said in Chinese, with her heavy Shanghai accent, motioning towards the couch inside.

“I hope you like the chocolates. I picked them up in the US during my trip back home,” I explained, handing them over to her.

She looked at the packaging, covered in the English she couldn’t read or understand, and smiled at me as she accepted them, and set them aside.

And then she set aside her usual pretenses, and said the last thing I expected to hear. “I’m really sorry about the bicycle. I feel so guilty about what happened.” Just weeks ago, she had shifted all the blame to me, even as she denied me that precious parking space. But now, here she was, admitting the words I wished I’d heard from the beginning.

And I said the words that come from time and distance. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not angry about it anymore.” And I wasn’t, really. My bicycle was gone, and no anger would bring it back. After two weeks of vacation in the US, I just let it all go. And while I didn’t know if she and I could ever be close friends, I knew that maybe, just maybe, we could begin to get along.

We chatted about this and that as I played with her black and white cat, a reticent feline who, for the first time, it seemed, purred with each loving stroke from my hand. I would have sat there longer to enjoy her company, were it not for my jet-lagged body aching for sleep.

And as I put myself — and the past — to rest that night, I slept as I’d never had in weeks.

Have you ever found unexpected forgiveness?

——-

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Chapter 77: The Stolen Bicycle in Shanghai

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:08:13 +0000

I never should have left my bicycle outside of my apartment house. And I never should have expected the community to understand the theft.

Friday, September 19, 2003 was just another overcast, dreary Friday in Shanghai — until John pounded up the stairs and asked about my bicycle. “Where did you park your bicycle last night?”

“Why outside, of course,” I responded. I pulled on my clothes and bounded down the stairs and outside, just to prove it.

But I was proven wrong. I stood before the doorway, only to find my bicycle gone. I had parked it inside of John’s bicycle, a generic little cement-colored bike that seemed a foil to my sturdy Giant. John’s bicycle was still there, but mine had become another statistic. Robbery.

I should have known better than to park a 6-month-old Giant bicycle outside the old, creaky wooden townhouse that contained our apartment. But we had no garage where we lived. And the only possible garage — my neighbor’s kitchen downstairs — was an unfriendly, unwelcome one. The wife often complained about my bicycle being indoors, even though her family parked theirs in the kitchen, or the hallway downstairs. But I obsessed over “keeping the peace” in our home, and conceded to her demands, parking my bicycle outside. What a fool I was.

When I came home for lunch that day, still smarting from the loss, the last thing I expected to digest was the wife’s explanation of why she forced me to park outside. I don’t remember what she said to me in that nasal Shanghai accent, shouting more than talking, because I pulsed with anger at her words. How dare she justify herself? I should have been challenging her in the first place, not conceding that space — but she should have been a good neighbor and provided that space without dispute.

Dispute was my life that day in the community — if you can call it a community. I not only lost my bicycle, but also any sense of community support. When we reported the theft to the head of the community, he blamed it all on us, and even attracted a chorus of retired old Shanghainese who joined to point a finger at me — never mind that no one bothers to watch the gates at the community, or even lock the other entrances to keep rogue thieves from sliding in and out. Even the elderly woman who lived across from us, a friendly and chatty neighbor we’d come to love over the months, called us reckless.

Now I know. I never should have left that lovely Giant bicycle outside. And I never should have expected this community to understand.

Have you ever had your bicycle stolen? How? And how did people/the authorities respond?

——

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Chapter 76: The Bench on Su Causeway

Jocelyn Eikenburg — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:08:56 +0000

John and I went to Su Causeway in Hangzhou not for the view or a walk, but to find the bench where we first kissed.

There are endless reasons to visit Hangzhou’s Su Causeway. A stroll with a lake view. A walk through — or rather on — history (it was, after all, named for Su Dongpo, the Song Dynasty poet). A brief respite from city smog. Or even just to fawn over the lotus blooms that grace the lake in the summer.

You don’t go to see a bench. At least, you don’t — unless you’re John and I, a couple minted beside the shores of this breezy little lake just a little over a year ago, on one otherwise unspectacular bench.

“This is it, isn’t it, sweetie?” I asked, pointing to the bench closest to one of the causeway’s bridges — a bench that happened to hold an entire family, curious why John and I were ogling their chosen seat.

“Yes, it’s ‘our bench,’” John beamed. We had secretly christened it our own bench, with John often suggesting that we plant a tree nearby, to commemorate a love that grew right from this very spot.

At least, we could commemorate the spot itself, in photo. Even as other empty benches beckoned people to sit and enjoy them, we wanted only one. That is, if that family would help us.

“Excuse me,” I asked in Chinese. “Would you take our photo together, on this bench?” The family of three must have wondered why this bench, and why this foreigner — they looked as confused, as though I had just spoken English to them. But their son, trembling a bit, accepted my camera, and then they made room for John and I to capture this moment, on Su Causeway.

But sometimes, the moment captures you. John and lingered on in sentimental serenity, breathing in the place and its memories, and staring into each others eyes with the same romantic aspirations we had that summer. Unfortunately, we lingered a little too late — and I missed my planned train back to Shanghai.

The moment, however, was worth it.

How has sentimentality taken you on a journey — in China, or elsewhere?

——-

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