Old Nanjing: there and back again

I love it here. Old Nanjing is, without a doubt, one of my favorite places in China.

Here are a few stories from living there last week:

I’m hanging out in Big Sister Chongyang and Big Brother Guo’s house on Saturday evening, when Big Sister, in her early forties, comes home late, big bags under eyes and shoulders slumped, with a motorbike full of groceries shoved in the back container and tucked in the front two holders.  

One last homemade meal before you leave, Big Sister says to me. I help her unload her motorbike, and she piles plastic bags full of vegetables on the counter and gets to work. I help her peel and pull out the edamame beans, but other than that I’m not much use. I sit stupidly and watch her transform this pile of groceries into a feast. In about an hour or so, the table is full of 4 steaming plates of vegetable and meat dishes. The highlight of the dinner are the pork ribs she made, which Big Brother Guo claims she hasn’t made in 4 or 5 years, and she claims are her specialty. When she’s done, she puts them on the table and asks Big Brother to taste them. He does and then says that they don’t have enough salt. He puts them back in the pot and turns around to say to me, “Who is the real master [gaoshou] cook around here? Me or her?” he demands. I say, “Big Sister is the best cook.” I’m half-joking as he is a pretty good cook, but I can stand his boasting. “Never!” he insists. “Anything she makes it’s because I taught her how to make it but she messes everything up, and now I have to fix it!” he says, throwing more salt into the pot. I roll my eyes. He insists that we start eating before his wife is finished cooking. She doesn’t sit down to join us until 5 minutes into the meal. He tells me how there are places in China where women don’t ever sit down at the table for meals, preferring to eat separate from the men in the kitchen or in another room. “You see, we’re very open and liberal here allowing Big Sister to join us at the table.”

We eat the meal quickly as though we are starving from a 10-year long famine and I delightedly eat the pork ribs coated in sweet sauce. The other vegetables, which I don’t think even have English names, are also delicious. One of the neighbors comes in while we’re eating and sits and chats with us, gossiping about the neighbor’s new daughter-in-law and complaining about how one of the neighbors doesn’t watch after her daughter closely enough. Big Brother and Hannah retire, and Big Sister and I are left alone, finishing off the dishes.

Side note: A couple days earlier I had shown them a book I had made. I had collected all of my favorite pictures from Old Nanjing and put them into one of those picture books you can get made online by sites like Shutterfly. When I showed them, Big Brother, who has always been really enthusiastic about my research on Old Nanjing culture, was like, “Oh this is cool! You should save this and it will help you remember this place and us after it’s demolished.” But Big Sister and Xie Rui’s reaction was the opposite, “Oh my god, look at how shitty this place is! I hate this stupid, backwards, dirty, run-down place,” they complained loudly. Xie Rui chucked the book the across the room in disgust when she was finished flipping through it.

So that night while we are eating Big Sister says, “When I looked at that book of pictures that you made, I was so disgusted and ashamed by what I saw. I don’t normally notice my surroundings during my daily life because I’ve gotten used to it, but when I saw how tattered and worn-out [polan] this place is, I was angry and embarrassed by how horrible it looked. There’s not a feeling of historical beauty at all, just junky. If the city officials saw that book you made they would order this neighborhood to be demolished right away.” I told her that’s not how I felt and not how I saw it, that appearances aren’t as important as what’s in the heart, and that this is my favorite place in China because the people here are the nicest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. “How many books did you make?” she asked. “Just one,” I responded. "I won't show it to anyone else."

Last Sunday, I’m walking back home from dinner at a friend’s house, and I see Big Sister Chongyang and Big Brother Guo’s door is open with the light on. I peak inside and say the obligatory greetings: have you eaten? what did you eat? are you tired? were you busy today? After the exchange of small talk, Big Sister eagerly grabs my hand, “Come jogging along the river with us!” She has a sparkle in her eye and a big grin on her face. “I mean, if you’re not busy. If you want to. If you have time,” she adds politely. “I want to go running because two people told me recently that I’ve gotten fat.” She has a gorgeous figure, by the way.

I decline running, but said I would like to join them--I would walk while they ran ahead. “Are you sure? It’s okay if you’re too busy, really,” Big Sister inquires. “Yup, I’m sure, I’ve got nothing else to do,” I reply.

It’s already dark, which is good because it’s already getting quite hot during the day. Hannah (that’s her English name), who is Chongyang and Guo’s daughter, who is now 10 years old (!!!!) joins us. We cross the busy road near our house and walk towards the park that runs along the ancient city wall. Right next to and inside the main entrance gate of the city wall, we come across a singing and dance show. Over 75 men have formed a crowd around a solitary woman bathed in purple and pink lights practically screaming into a microphone. Well, she is singing very, very loudly, but it sounds like screaming to me. A few men have climbed halfway up the city wall to get a better view and are perched precariously on a small ledge.

The crowd is too thick for me to actually see the girl in detail, but based on the glazed over eyes and fixation of the men, I imagine she is scantily clad. I have never seen a crowd of men with such focused concentration. It’s like they’ve been put under some kind of spell. There is no shortage of pornography shops or brothels in Old Nanjing. But this was a completely free show that flourished on donations. Xie Rui had told me that lots of people donated money to this kind of thing, like putting money into an open musical instrument case to the guitar player in the subway station.

We continue walking and soon arrive at the park nearby, a long and skinny stretch of grass and trees nestled between the ancient city wall and the river. Big Sister and Hannah run ahead and say they’ll catch me on the way back. Hannah immediately starts sprinting as fast as she can, Big Sister screaming, “RUN SLOWLY,” and running after her. The park is crowded. This is one of my favorite things about China and indeed about Old Nanjing in particular. People of all ages, from 5 to 80 are walking, running, playing with tops, singing karaoke, listening to music on stereos, and dancing. It’s chaotic and beautiful. It makes you feel not so alone anymore, like you’re a part of a community.

Big Sister and Hannah run all the way down to the end of the path, where a sign says you can’t go any farther, and then turn around and meet up with me halfway down the path. We walk home together, discussing American pedagogy and American style parenting. Big Sister is curious about how Hannah’s childhood compares to an American child’s and frequently asks me lots of questions about how much homework American kids get and what kind of extracurricular activities we participate in and if we have school on Saturdays (Hannah does). The next day Big Sister tells me that she thinks running is a waste of time, and she’d prefer jump roping on the street in front of her house instead. She says she would prefer dieting to exercise, but she can’t stand not eating dinner when she gets home. So she’d rather eat and then jump rope, she says.

Little Sister Xie Rui, my 22-year old roommate in Old Nanjing, are having fun together. Last Monday, I was at home doing laundry when Xie Rui came out of Big Brother Guo’s house, where she had been watching movies online, and asks if I’m hungry. We’re both hungry, so we walk down the street for lunch at one of the restaurants specializing in home-made dishes of stir-fried dishes around the corner from us. I got fried tomato and egg and she got thinly sliced potatoes with meat on top of rice. She put some of hers on my plate and I put some of mine on her plate. She didn’t finish hers because she claimed not be hungry, complaining about being too fat and saying she needs to lose weight.

I got taro flavored ice cream on the way back and we sat at the table in Big Brother Guo and Big Sister Chongyang’s kitchen and watched the movie Bad Teacher (we don’t have Wifi, but Guo and Chongyang do). Xie Rui has been bouncing around between jobs this entire year, leaving her with large swaths of free time. She’s been watching Game of Thrones, Big Bang Theory, and Two Broke Girls religiously and it shows: her English has actually gotten pretty good and we can have simple conversations in English together. She never once spoke English with me when I lived with her in past years, so it’s really cool to see her improve not only in the language but also in the confidence to talk with me and the willingness to make mistakes. Not being willing to make mistakes is the thing that paralyzes most people from learning a foreign language, in my somewhat limited experience.

When she gets back from her job tutoring middle school students around 9 pm, we meet at home and I pack my stuff. We walk through the winding alleyways to her step-dad’s house to shower. We don’t have a bathroom in our ancient house; we have to go to the public toilet and showers. I can shower at the gym if I have jiujitsu that day, or I go to the public showers, because she doesn’t like me coming over when her mom is home. But her mom wasn’t going to be home that night and I didn’t have jiujitsu, so she invited me to shower at her mom’s house.

We walk together, chatting back and forth, making small talk, her inserting some English phrases here and there. I shower first, and I collapse on her mom’s bed in exhaustion and fall asleep while she is showering. We walk home with her dog, and she gets some fried rice from a street cart on the way back. I stop at the bathroom, and when I get home, Xie Rui greets me at the door, wringing her hands, and crying out, “OH MY GOD MY FRIED RICE IS GONE!” She had dropped all of her fried rice on the ground when she was holding the dog’s leash and trying to open the door at the same time. It was ruined. She walks to the corner store and gets some ramen, coming back to eat it while we steal Guo and Chongyang’s Wifi and watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory. We get into bed and chat until we fall asleep, talking about boys and marriage, and Taylor Swift, and America, and mosquitoes. She tells me she doesn’t want to work tomorrow and she doesn’t want to get married. She tells me she thinks she’s fat and needs to lose weight, but that she thinks Max from Two Broke Girls is really pretty, but she’s fat.

All names have been changed to protect privacy.

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