Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [40]
Not that it would have mattered. Every attempted utterance I’d made in Chinese was met with quizzical glances.
“Your ticket?” she asked. “May I see it?”
I passed it to her.
“Yes,” she said, glancing at the piece of paper. “Your ticket is for tomorrow.”
“Ah…so that’s what everyone’s been trying to tell me.” I reflected for a moment. Apparently, people did have assigned seats, then. So why the mayhem of boarding? As I was pondering this question, my rescuer tapped me on my knee.
“My name is Cinderella,” she said.
Another curiosity! Many young Chinese had assumed Western names, but I hadn’t yet encountered one quite so evocative as Cinderella. I glanced at this Cinderella, who, unique in my experience in China, had inexplicably decided to subject her hair to a perm, and tried to remember the name of the prince in the fairy tale. If the Chinese can assume new names, perhaps I could too, and then all sorts of red flags popped into my brain and I introduced myself as the man I am.
“Maarten,” she repeated, uncomfortably rolling the word in her mouth. There was that pesky r in the middle. “What do you do?”
“Do you mean for a job? I’m, uh, a real estate investor,” I offered, inwardly chuckling in a demented manner.
The train rolled on through a black night and I spent the time in stilted conversation with my new friend Cinderella. She was from Tai’an and worked in a factory in Qingdao, where she made handbags, an occupation she called “very boring.” I asked her to teach me Chinese phrases like I’ll have the dog special and I think President Hu Jintao is very sexy, but when it became apparent that vocalizing the Chinese language was clearly a physiological impossibility for my mouth, we settled on learning how to count to ten with my hands, which is completely different than the Western way, and learning it left me feeling giddy and triumphant.
It was nearly midnight when we pulled into Qingdao. Outside the train station, the air was cool and a mist hinted of the sea.
“Well, it was very nice meeting you, Cinderella,” I said at the taxi stand.
“You are going to your hotel?” she asked. “I will go with you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”
“You are a laowai. He will overcharge you,” she said, hopping into the taxi and immediately beginning to haggle with the driver. Well, okay, I thought. Did I really seem so utterly incapable? Yes, probably.
As we pulled into the hotel driveway, I paid the driver and turned to Cinderella. “Well, thanks so much and good luck to you at the handbag factory.” But she had leapt out and marched onward to the check-in counter.
I checked in. The front-desk attendant fetched the key and I turned to Cinderella. “Well, thanks so much for all your help…” But Cinderella had taken the key and had forged toward the elevator. Now this was getting to be a little awkward. Surely, I could be trusted to find my room.
“Well, thanks so much,” I said again as we reached the door to my room. She used the key to open the door.
“This is a nice room,” Cinderella noted. She turned to me, her perm billowing on her head. “It is very late.”
“It sure is.”
“I am locked out of my room. I have no key.”
“Oh, well, I see,” I stammered, trying very hard to understand the Chinese context of this particular situation. Perhaps she regarded it as auspicious that we shared a seat number on the train. Perhaps she’d concluded that her destiny lay with this laowai from the West who would sweep her off the factory floor and take her onward to a life of romantic intrigue. Or perhaps this was normal, accompanying a random foreigner from a train all the way to his evening hearth. Are Chinese women really so very helpful? And Cinderella was nothing if not helpful. Should I chivalrously offer to sleep on the floor while she claimed the bed? In the Chinese context, would this be the right thing to do? I had planned on calling my wife. Hi, Honey. I’m in my hotel