“My American Friend"

There was a noodle shop I particularly liked, nestled along a dusty side street connecting the city’s central shopping area to a cluster of art supply shops around the South Gate. It was your typical Muslim noodle place—six tables inside, a barbeque outside, a table near the door for kneading dough, and a little kitchen separated by glass. On the walls were a few posters in Arabic script and a large picture menu advertising the various noodle dishes available—and, more often, not available. The food was good enough, but I’d made it a return destination on the thinking that an expat has to have a few places that are his haunts.

One particular day when it was pouring down snow and the roadways were covered in a dirty, depressing mush, I decided to stop in. The thought of a belly full of noodles, green beans and tomato sauce seemed ideal in those conditions. As I entered in, pushing back the flaps of heavy plastic that hung over the doorway, I was greeted by clapping and someone shouting “Hello, welcome, welcome” in a very Chinese accent.

The welcoming committee was one man. He looked middle aged. Not yet gray, he had a wispy mustache and scattering of chin hairs.

“Yes, welcome, ‘huanying,’” I said back to him without his really acknowledging it. He repeated his sentence a few more times as I sat down at an opposite table. This type of thing was pretty typical and I marked him for another in a series.

“Where are you from?”

“Seattle.”

“Ah yes, I know!”

“Yeah?” I was incredulous.

“Yes! Oregon . . .no! Washington, Oregon, California. Yes . . .what do you do here?”

“I’m a teacher. At Aston School. You know?”

“”Yes, I know several Aston teachers.”

“And what is your job?”

“I am . . .it is hard to explain. I work at school. If there is electrical problem or building problem, I fix it. I clean things . . .”

“Mmm . . .okay. Custodian, maybe. And where do you learn English?”

“Ah, from helpful foreigners.”

Not wanting to not be a “helpful foreigner” I continued the conversation. His name was Lee and he was coming from the art supply street. In the chair next to him he had placed a bag of calligraphy brushes. He came to this restaurant regularly because the staff was from the same Qinghai province city as his ex-girlfriend. (Maybe I’m the asshole for thinking this should be a strike against the place in his book, but to him it was the source of connection.)

He was forty one and lived with his elder sister while his own, newly bought apartment was undergoing construction. He was from Xi’an, but his father had been in the army and they’d moved around a bit. At one point his father had been stationed in the Northeast to oversee factory production. Matter-of-factly he explained that, “during the Cultural Revolution, there were many problems between managers and workers.” In thanks for his service, his father and other officers had been personally feted by Chairman Mao. After retiring, his father had moved to Xi’an and the family now worked for a military equipment factory in the east of the city. His sister lived in factory housing.

Since I didn’t enjoy shouting to talk, I moved to his table and, while we waited for our food, he showed me two calligraphy books he had just purchased. Both were by scholars from the ninth and tenth century—there was something of a Socrates-Plato relationship between the two apparently.

Chinese calligraphy is one of those arts for which the taste must be acquired. The whole idea is to express emotional states through the way one writes—not so different from italicizing or boldfacing font, but certainly more visually pleasing. Since calligraphy examples are usually poems and not just random words the style and content can create interesting juxtapositions (or so I imagine, actually asking this question, albeit more simply, gets me blank stares). Over two thousand years different schools have come and gone. Often a new school will rise up emulating the style of some previous great—it all very insular. (The most interesting sort I ever saw was a type called seal script which predates current Chinese character system and looked far more ancient and pictorial—it’s the sort of thing you imagine seeing on cave walls. During the Qing dynasty, scholars seeking to resurrect ancient forms, began practicing it again.)

“Calligraphy is very relaxing,” he explained as he leafed through the books, “I often do it after work or at school. All my art supplies are there now and the school is closed for Spring Festival. Therefore I buy new brushes.”

I nodded.

“I have many foreign friends. A teacher, he is from Korea, he likes tea, so we always drink tea. White Peony. You know?” I shook my head, mulling my response to the inevitable question. “Near my sister’s house in East of Xi’an there is big tea market. You want to go with me?”

I said yes and the food came. He got up and said something to them which I guessed to be paying for mine—this happened enough to me that I’d developed a sixth sense about it. We ate and left together. As we walked, though, I modified things and asked if tomorrow was okay. Once we’d agreed upon a time, we parted ways.

The following day the city was hit by even more intense snows. The bus out to the eastern neighborhoods was slow going and humid with collective body heat. We’d agreed to meet in front of one of my school’s branches, a newly constructed building whose bottom floor was still just bare walls and a small trash-covered table with a space heater plunked down on top of it. A cleaning lady and doorman sat here while I waited at the drafty glass entrance doors. After a short wait and a text message, I learned that he had not yet left his house. Forty cold minutes later he arrived.

He was very apologetic, but it was clear that he had not expected me to follow through on the meeting—really, the way we’d parted could easily have been construed as giving him the brush off, so I didn’t grudge him the skepticism of a warm home.

He had his heart set on a certain restaurant that wasn’t particularly close. After initial failed attempts to flag down a taxi followed by some trudging to and fro in the snow, we finally succeeded and were whisked off a kilometer away. In the taxi Lee seemed extra animated. I can barely speak a word of Chinese, but I can pick out a lot of words and the gist of the conversation was the driver asking about me and Lee giving him the low down. He was taking on the role of my publicity agent.

The restaurant Lee picked was on a busy street across from a large, wholesale vegetable market. The place was packed with groups small and large. Customers entered bearing large shopping bags full of New Years gifts. Unlike many overstaffed Chinese restaurants, this place had only three harried girls and an older woman working the crowds.

We took a seat by the window and Lee headed off to order our food. He was set on having us order the yangrou paomo, a soup that consists of chopped up bread and a few pieces of mutton or beef. This is, apparently, the equivalent of eating lobster in Maine. Multiple Chinese who’d taken me out to eat had insisted that we order this meal because it was the traditional food. And, sure enough, it was very satisfying—if not particularly flavorful. Usually it came pre-done, but at this restaurant we were each provided with a bowl and two hard pieces of pita bread.

“Tear it into small pieces,” Lee instructed.

I set to work half-assedly until he exclaimed, “No smaller. If you tear big pieces, the cooks will think you are a farmer. From a village. The cooks will not give you a good cut of meat.”

Tearing properly took nearly ten minutes—a process Lee called “very Buddhist”—and finally, my bread acceptably torn, our plates were whisked off to the kitchen. While we waited, Lee grew ever more agitated, looking around, standing up, calling over to waitresses, exiting the building to hock a ball of snot.

When he returned he remained standing, calling out to the waitresses before sitting down and telling me, confidentially, “The waitresses are very pretty here”—he indicated a particular girl to make his point. She struck me as very plain and very young. He called her over and introduced me. Then he called over another young girl who he introduced as the owner’s daughter.

“Hi,” I said, not really sure what role I was meant to play in all of this.

“She was a pupil at our school,” Lee explained.

“Good,” I added.

The girl fidgeted for a second before rubbing her tummy and saying something in Chinese.

“She’s hungry,” Lee translated, smiling and freeing our little captive to return to her own activities.

Our food came. To our bread crumbles had been added hot broth, chunks of meat and some transparent rice noodles. Accompanying the food were little side dishes with chili paste and sweet pickled garlic. Lee had received the wrong bowl, but accepted it and started eating. I was less sanguine about the idea of eating bread some other customers hands had ripped and double checked that mine was no mix up.

Food eaten, we headed out—but not before I was introduced again to the plain young waitress or before we loitered around the outside for Lee to catch her eye and wave again. Our path led up, past the wholesale market and a couple other peripheral dry goods markets, then down some side streets until we came to a large new building. This entire property was devoted to tea merchants. Shop after prettily furnished shop contained boxes and boxes of tea. Considering that this was the height of shopping season, the place was morbidly empty.

“This building is new. Where were all these people before,” I queried.

“A different market. Now they are here, but business is bad.”

This was an understatement. Each store was manned by a solitary worker engrossed in her laptop or starring vacantly. As I’d often seen in China, the scale and presentation of the business was not equal to the actual demand. We stopped in one place where Lee introduced me and bought a few bags of tea. I asked what made this place special, but he gave no answer. We headed to the second floor and popped our heads into another shop, this one drearier than the first. It was manned by a young girl from Fujian province—all the tea shop folks seemed to be from there. After introducing me, Lee sat us down for free samples.

Once we’d left this building, we made our way along several more side streets. Here and there Lee would call out to people and point at a child who, he’d explain, had gone to his school. He seemed to know a large number of people, but, equally often, he seemed to be shouting at complete strangers or making conversation with people whose humoring of him was mere politesse.

One dingy street brought us to an even dingier wholesale market set up in a space which in most other countries would be reserved for a parking garage. Many of the shops sold bulk tea, but other sections we passed sold electronic razors, shampoos, bike wheels, portable water heaters and the like. Passing up stairway, arriving on the second floor, we came upon a tea market far larger than the previous—albeit less spic and span. Like its newer cousin, it was equally empty of customers.

Instead of customers, the place was full of visitors. Instead of a solitary clerks most places had between two and ten people sitting around, playing cards, smoking or chatting. Even the most lonesome merchants had a child running around in front of their shops. Besides tea, this place stocked large quantities of supplies—varnished sandalwood tables, animal ornaments to decorate those tables and small drainage trays for pouring off excess tea.

Commenting on how beautiful one store’s offerings were led to Lee dragging me into the place and introducing me to the owners. I was very hesitant to stick around because I didn’t want them to get their hopes up—I was not keen on buying anything they had on offer. My entrance caused a stir, however, with the owner, his wife (baby in arm) and a few hangers on standing up and coming to greet me as Lee made introductory remarks. They offered me to sit and have tea, but I begged them off. They showed me various sandalwood tables and beds and cupboards. Out of one cupboard the owner pulled a series of large scrolls decorated in red and black in ink stamps. The stamps were all in seal script and the man had carved each himself.

From there we passed several more stores. Lee, seeing a bald man he knew, shouted something and then, in English, for my benefit, shouted, “Hey egghead!” and, to me, “he is an engineer at my elder sister’s factory.” Again I was introduced.

Now we came to a tiny little place more on the scale and design of an office coffee break room. There were few teas on display and a large refrigerator which took up much of the floor space had but one bag of tea inside. At the tea table was a middle aged man and, overseeing the joint, was a rather attractive woman in her early thirties who looked a bit like Michelle Yeoh. We took seat and I was yet again introduced by Lee who now aunched into an extended spiel about something or other while the man and woman smiled and nodded. I was utterly left out of the picture. Occasionally Lee would turn to me and explain that he had just complemented the woman on her looks or he might ask me whether I liked the tea before telling me that there was nothing more pleasurable than having tea in the company of a lovely lady.

After a bit, the man and woman began asking me questions—or looking directly at me when addressing the question, then waiting for Lee. These questions would be on the order of “why did you come to China?” “Do people drink tea in America” or, more cryptically, “How is the situation of young people in America?” (The woman had, apparently, been an elementary school teacher before. Finding herself out of work, she’d opened a tea shop.) I tried to give short simple answers to these questions and each time Lee would take several minutes to relay the answer. Often he would tell me that he had added a compliment to my answer. When I tried to ask a question there was this same unevenness of translation. A question I asked about how long she had worked at this place or in what capacity the man served here would take a minute to be asked and the answer would always be abridged when returned to me.

Finally I became silent and merely watched the proceedings. The entire time I we had been here, the suspicion—always present—had steadily firmed itself in my mind that Lee was showing me off to people. We were making a tour of his usual haunts (or places he wished were his usually haunts) and I was being displayed like a trophy. Whenever he spoke of me in Chinese I was his “American friend” and everyone he spoke to asked of me with the same formulation. I was a Jaguar, a Savile Row suit, a Jacob watch; a status symbol. I didn’t exactly begrudge him this victory lap. He’d treated me well, bought me two meals and a taxi ride, but I rankled at playing the role of trained bear.

By the time we said our goodbyes, my stomach was full of tea. But we weren’t done yet. There was another attractive tea hostess to visit and then another guy to sit with and sip black tea. This last shop in particular sapped my endurance. I was already full and didn’t really care for acrid black tea, but Lee was undiminished in his ebullience and continued to hold forth on the merits of various teas. The two men chatted about tea while I sat peripheral, stony faced. It was all an odd position to be in. Here I was, Lee’s key to a bit of respect and yet, really, a pointless appendage. To prod him to hurry would be rude and yet it was from me that he was gaining reflected stature in the first place. Like I said, it grated.

The final place we entered, a spacious tea supply store full of beautiful tea sets, must have been a let down for Lee. He ambled around greeting people and making introductions, until he came to the boy who seemed to have the run of the store. Gesturing to me, he said in Chinese, “My American friend is a teacher. At Aston School.”

The boy, unimpressed by my pedigree, shrugged and said he didn’t know Aston.

Lee then gave some words of explanation, but I suppose the damage had been done. The boy had seen through me. What was I, but another foreigner? My presence gained Lee nothing in his eyes. We didn’t buy anything there.

After this store, I was finally able to get us moving out of the tea market. On are way back to the bus station—punctuated by numerous encounters with students and allegedly-former students of his school—we made a last stop to buy him a belt. (All along the streets were carts covered in knock-off leather belts. Although none was to Lee’s liking, he managed to get the vendor to punch a new hole in his old belt for free.) At the bus stop we said are goodbyes and I headed back downtown.

The whole day had left me with a bit of unease. I was none the poorer from the adventure, but it was galling, that sense of being imputed a value above one’s worth. Making friends in foreign lands is easy enough until peripheral players enter the process. You, the foreigner, come into people’s lives, tornado-like, with your eagerness to learn a bit about their culture. You throw their routines out of order, elevate them momentarily above the pack, and then disappear, leaving them right where they were. Seeing how much pleasure this guy had derived from showing around me—an absolute nobody—made me feel dirty and ashamed.

He deserved better.