Welcome to China

Looking out the window of the office in my apartment, I am struck by the scale of what I see. I can count 26 stories in the apartment building kitty corner to mine, and there are 12 more complexes like it in the immediate vicinity. The building directly across from mine stands 13 stories, the top two of which have balconies colored bright with lines of clothes hanging from the railings to dry. A woman on the seventh floor is leaning far out of her open window, sipping on a cup of tea. I’ve seen her there each morning I’ve been here. The rest of the landscape is covered in smaller apartment buildings—maybe only 6 or 7 stories tall, the roofs and windows of many built with a bright, ocean blue plastic. More clothes and air conditioners dangle from the windows, motionless in the stagnant air. If I look a little further south I see a round billboard written in Chinese standing tall next to a slowly rotating, massive yellow crane, the men below it working steadily on a new subway. Just below my window is a small courtyard—a pleasant reminder we are in fact on a university campus. Tree stumps are arranged in circles for reading or conversations. A man is sitting out there now smoking a cigarette and rifling through a newspaper. The sky is veiled in the same smog that it has been every day—not nearly as thick as that which we saw in Beijing, but enough to block the sun, even at 9:30 in the morning. Streaks of blue peak through at several points, but mostly we are enveloped in gray.

We have been in Wuhan 4 days now, and more than I have ever felt in my travels, I am constantly aware I am a foreigner. It is not merely the color of my skin, my height, or my funny American clothes, but overwhelmingly, it is the language that makes us stand apart. Never having studied Chinese, I knew the transition would be a challenge but, perhaps naïvely, I assumed I would encounter more people who spoke at least a little English. I had not even considered that all of the menus at restaurants would be written solely in Chinese characters, making it impossible to even guess at what you are ordering. I have been lucky enough to have several other Americans in my apartment who speak some Chinese, and so we have been able to receive the shock of being utterly unable to communicate with a little more ease.

Two nights ago, four of us ventured out for dinner on our own, without the safety net of our fellow Chinese speakers. We chose a restaurant on Culture Street, one of the main drags close to the college campus. The area encompasses about two blocks, lined with restaurant after restaurant, with the occasional clothing or shoe storefront jammed in between. The restaurant we chose looked promising because it had a large poster on one of the windows showing different dishes, with what we assumed was the name of the meal underneath in Chinese. At least with a picture menu we could examine the contents of the dish and point to whichever we wanted. The waiter sat us down in a separate room with a large round table, better suited to a party of ten than our party of four. He then passed us a menu which upon opening proved to have no pictures but rather line after line of characters. We tried to point at the posters on the wall in an attempt to ask if they had any picture menus, but the man simply thought we wanted pijiu (Chinese for beer) since there was a large bottle of beer on one of the posters we pointed at. We shook our heads and continued to struggle with the menu for a few more minutes, one of our group members trying to look up some of the characters on her phone. We finally gave up and started to make our way out, defeated by the characters and feeling like ignorant Americans. 

But as we waved goodbye to the waiter, he frantically motioned us over into the main room which was full of groups of Chinese eating dinner. An older man and two college age girls were sitting at a small back table. One of the girls, with big hipster framed glasses and a white graphic t-shirt, came over to us saying “I speak English—we speak English—we can help you.” Relieved and grateful we made our way over to the table where the old man bowed and asked us to “please please take our seats…we have just finished our meal and can help you order yours.” Humbled by his perfect English and kindness, we sat down as the waiter cleared the table of their meal. We told him where we were from and that I am a vegetarian, and he spouted out a few dishes in Chinese to the waiter. “Four dishes and a soup, is that alright? They will be vegetable dishes, do you like cabbage? Bok choi? How spicy do you want them?” We answered his questions and tried to piece together the Chinese words for the dishes, scrambling around in our bags for our notebooks to write down the names of the food for the next time we went out. As we did so, the girl with the hipster glasses stood to the side, snapping pictures of us with her camera. “I am from Malaysia,” the man said. “I hope that the food is good. I know that we will meet again, and I look forward to it. Goodbye for now.” As we thanked him he bowed again and left the restaurant, the two girls giddily waving goodbye to us as they followed him out. 

We ate most of our meal in silence, reflecting on what had just happened. I realized then the immediate necessity of learning Chinese—at least as much as I am able in the year I am here. The experience was embarrassing even though I know we are not the first foreigners to come to China without knowing Mandarin. However, it was also purposeful in showing us that it is now up to us to make the transformation from mere tourists to active and learning participants in Chinese culture.