You Came Back / 回来了

i.

(Read by the author)

From the outside looking in, the way I look is the most obvious thing about being foreign; that I am most obviously foreign to others here in China. Some people will stare at me when I walk down the street, ride the bus, or walk around the grocery. Some will stare boldly, non-stop, and when I look back at them, they keep staring. I wonder if they are being confrontational, rude, oblivious, amazed, or some combination therein. Some folks look more slyly from the corners of their eyes and when I look back, they stop. Once on my way to work I was stopped on my bike at an intersection next to a man on an electric scooter. He looked at me, and I looked back at him. Usually this prompts the person to stop, provided I hold my gaze for a few seconds, but this man would not look away. After a long four seconds I spoke: 你好 (Nǐ hǎo), hello, and he looked away. I don't know what he was thinking or what he wanted. On Friday I went to dinner with a few co-workers, and a few of the folks who worked there took pictures of us foreigners. I like to think it doesn't bother me much, and I am somewhat oblivious to it when walking down the street. It's possible that this obliviousness is a defense mechanism: people may be looking at me, but I don't want to look at them; some combination of shyness or willful ignorance. I'd rather look out the window, or read a book, or scroll through my phone.

Sometimes I can enjoy the novelty of being novel, and rarely has this attention been hostile or confrontational. I went to play basketball at a private gym with one of my co-workers. I don't know if I attract extra attention on the basketball court because I am foreign, or if it is because I am taller and/or heavier than most of the other players. It’s both maybe, but part of me wants to think that the player guarding me takes special delight in blocking the foreigner's shot or shooting over his outstretched hands. Then again, back in the States, I would think the same thing playing in Indiana, though instead of being foreign it was being older that made me paranoid and alienated. There are a million ways to other each other, and I am certainly capable of making the smallest distinctions in search of injustice. Regardless, the other people at the gym were generally friendly, though for a while there was a group of mid-20 something dudes that were really good and really arrogant. They laughed and chatted while they tore through the competition as well as any group of fraternity brothers I encountered in Indiana.

ii.

Over the weekend I visited Suzhou, an old city famous for its gardens. I went to two of them, The Master of the Nets Garden (网师园), and The Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园). It was difficult to know what I was looking at. The Master of Nets was located through a series of winding alleyways in the south of Suzhou's old town, an area cut through by water canals. "The Venice of China." I arrived in the morning, paid, and proceeded to wander through the buildings, courtyards, and open areas, taking in the synthesis of architecture, plant life, water pools and rock formations all constructed with an intent as foreign to me as the Chinese language. Later, traveling up to the Humble Administrator's Garden, the confusion grew as not only was the second garden much larger, but that there were hundreds of people there wandering around taking pictures. My idea of a garden is an open space to relax. Yet here this was not the case, moving through crowds in search of space.

Maybe I didn't know enough about these gardens to make sense of them. The solution to the problem, framed in terms of factual knowledge at least, is to get a book, hire a guide, and read. This is a way to do it, to experience the garden through the lens of stories and symbolism; to understand who built it and why, what the peacock represents, and which great poets lived in what pavilions. And then there is the long game, the literary references and the paintings inspired by the place and embedding the gardens in a larger historical frame. Like finally meeting the person that you've been reading about for so long, and there is much to talk about. I wonder, however, what counts as knowing about China. That is, that to understand these gardens I need to know stories and facts, such that I can read these gardens like I could a book, the garden held as an object of contemplation, frozen in time.

A few weeks after I had visited, a co-worker came into my office and we started chatting about Suzhou's gardens. I told her about my experience, about my difficulties finding a means to appreciate what I was looking at. She seemed to understand. Offering another way, she told me that each window and each door was a like a picture frame. As one moves through the garden, one moves through distinct points of observation, the architecture framing and shaping one's sensory experience. One can look through the opening created by the curled and gnarled root of a bonsai to see a pagoda in the distance, every angle a result of an intention one-part human and one-part the changing seasons. The Cornelian Dogwood’s yellow flowers, thus, were also part of the composition. Its scent barely legible in the cold, wet air of winter. I reflected on my experience, that while standing in in one of many pavilions I was struck by the sunlight passing through the latticed window and its shadow, flowering into maze on the stone floor.

iii.

My tutor introduced some of the common taste words in Mandarin: 咸 (xián) salty, 甜 (tián) sweet, 辣 (là) spicy hot, 苦 (kǔ) bitter, etc. And though I have a general sense of what these words mean, translating from English, I wonder how different my sense of what these words meant was from my tutors' sense. Take苦, or bitter for example. I understand bitterness as something that leaves a particular aftertaste in my mouth, somewhat "sharp" and "dry.” When I was a kid, I remember biting into a pill I was supposed to swallow. I was maybe four years old. I didn't know how to swallow the pill without chewing, and so my mother wrapped it in a piece of bread. I remember when I bit it, there was a yellowish stain on the bread and it tasted so terrible, and strong, and I remember my mom asking me if it tasted bitter, or perhaps I asked her what it tasted like, and she said bitter. Or maybe I said it tasted like metal. This is my earliest association with the word bitter. Since then, I've come to use it mainly to describe the taste of two things I have come to like: Japanese sencha and the metallic taste that sometimes follows a pilsner style beer.

There is dish in China called 苦瓜 (kǔguā), or bitter melon. It's not really a dish but a plant that can be cooked, green and innocuous. When I tried it in the cafeteria one day, I was unable to eat more than a single bite. If that is bitterness, I thought, I don't understand what bitterness means. Sitting in the small room with glass walls, learning Mandarin, my beautiful tutor told me she loves to eat 苦瓜, especially in the summer.

iv.

The other night when I came home from work, I pushed the elevator button and waited with my bike as the floor indicator ticked down. When the door opened, my neighbor, one half of an older couple that lives across from me with their son and grandkids, saw me and said, "回来了" (huíláile), or, "You came back,"; “You’ve returned.” In that moment, not knowing exactly what 回来了 meant I responded, "你好." We smiled at each other, she moved out and I went in with my bike. As soon as the doors closed I took out my phone and recorded what she said three times to account for the possible variations in tones that my ears cannot distinguish and the next day, played the recording for my tutor. We talked about this greeting and when to use it (when someone has come back), what to say in response, (对, 回来了; yes, I came back), and when not to use it (if the person has not come back). This phrase leading to a larger constellation, that in China, when greeting people that you know, greetings are contextually dependent. One does not use open ended greetings like "what's going on?" or "how's it going?" but greetings that express a sensitivity to what an individual is doing or going to do.The most common example of this phenomenon then is "你吃了吗" (Nǐ chīle ma), or, "Have you eaten yet?" which is, so I've been told many times, a common greeting here in China. My apologies to anyone reading who has studied Mandarin for more than ten minutes, but the point here is that when saying hello, it's important to consider where the person is coming from or where they might be going. In contrast, in the parts of the United States that I'm familiar with, asking if someone has eaten yet is regarded as a kind of invitation to eat. An invitation isn't bad, but it requires an intimate relationship between the individuals. In the U.S., if someone who lives across the hall with who you do not speak with regularly, said to you, ah, you've come back, a person might feel intruded on. As in, this person who I don't know has been keeping track of my whereabouts and makes mental notes of when I am home and not home. One might wonder what their agenda is.

In China, however, it is generally polite to assert an interest in the physical wellbeing of a person if you have at least some acquaintance with them. I like this about being here. I liked that my neighbor said to me "回来了." Whereas, in the U.S., it's polite to exclude context; that it's rude to presume something about someone unless you know them intimately. And even then, presumptions of whereabouts, desires, or doings might not be welcome. I think about living in California, talking with random people at bus stops or when carpooling with strangers from Oakland to San Francisco. It was impossible to know by looking at someone where they were from, what language they might speak or what they did for a living. The sheer diversity that exists in some places in the U.S. makes it difficult to guess about an individual or what customs they have. The skill then becomes not "reading the air" and making your best guess about the person, but in how one uses their words to draw a person out, notions of persuasion. It's difficult to get past the feeling that I am being rude by presuming an interest in a person's wellbeing that I don't know well. This is not only a language issue, but a product of deeply entrenched habits, i.e. my foreignness, 回来了.