Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [94]
I soon found myself next to a young Chinese woman from Shanghai. Her Western name was Judy and she’d settled in Dali three months earlier but would join her boyfriend in Dalian, a city in northern China, when he returned from the United States.
“I want to be a housewife,” she said.
This was a surprisingly popular ambition among young women in China. But then, I reflected, it sure beat working in a factory twelve hours a day.
“And where’s your boyfriend from?” I asked.
“He’s from North Carolina. He was my English teacher.”
“And a fine job he did too. Have you been to North Carolina?”
“Yes.” She scrunched her nose. “I don’t like it there.”
“Why not?”
She struggled to convey her thoughts. “People are very fat there.”
“Well, that’s not a good reason to not like North Carolina. It just means the barbecue is pretty good.”
“There is no culture there.”
“No culture? Have you ever been to a basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina? It’s a tribal conflict that has its roots in the dim mists of time.”
“I still don’t like North Carolina. I just want to be a housewife.”
“But what if your boyfriend wants to return to North Carolina? What if he becomes homesick? As an American, he can never truly become Chinese, can he?”
She nodded her head slowly, as if she’d never considered the possibility.
“But if you come to America, you can become an American,” Jack chimed in. “It’s what makes America great. Anyone can become an American.”
“But I don’t want to go to America.”
“I know,” I told her. “But I’ve seen this many times before. Your boyfriend will always be a laowai here. Maybe he doesn’t want to be an outsider his entire life. Maybe, one day, he will want to return to North Carolina because he wants to be someplace that feels like home.”
She began to quiver. “But I don’t want to live in North Carolina. I want to be a housewife in Dalian.”
“Dude,” Jack interjected. “You’re going to make her cry.” He turned to her. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a bad man.”
“I don’t think he’s a bad man.”
“I’m not a bad man, but him?” I said, pointing to Jack.
“He’s a bad man. Do you like George Bush?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“He likes George Bush.”
And just like that, all the goodwill toward us evaporated. Our barmates ignored us. Our glasses remained unfilled. The owners wouldn’t even look at us.
I knew, of course, that George Bush wasn’t the most popular of presidents. But still, simply because Americans had elected a psychopath didn’t strike me as a sufficient reason for this denial of alcohol. True, we did it twice, but I think that would elicit the need for more drink, not less. And so here we were. We’d been 86’d? Cut off from ale. Cruel indeed.
“You don’t think it’s because we’re completely drunk?” Jack asked.
“I don’t think you get 86’d for that around here.”
Jack tried hard to regain their good graces. He served up witty banter, to no avail. His attempts to rejoin the conversation around us fell flat.
“So, James, can I ask you something?” Jack finally asked, raising his voice so that James, who had slinked far, far away from the Republican and his guilty-by-association friend, could hear. Cautiously, he moved toward us. “So, James.” Jack searched his mind for something that would alleviate this wall of bitterness. And this is what he came up with:
“Do you like the Grateful Dead?”
I snorted so hard I damaged my sinuses. But it was enough. James did indeed like the Grateful Dead. People were talking to us again. Soon, Jack was no longer regarded as a dangerous madman but as a peculiar alien, one called to explain his world. It helped that Jack had always thought that invading Iraq was a bad idea, and that his conservatism was of the old school, Reagan kind.
“No, I respectfully disagree,” he said to the Englishman. “Gun control is bad. See, the reason we don’t have soccer hooligans like you do in England is because we’re all armed.”
Soon, another group of foreigners arrived. Jack, eager to reclaim the warmth so recently lost, asked them