Hospitality

(Note: This was about 1 year ago.)

I walk over to visit G at her house. She and her mom live in a one-room apartment with one shared toilet (and when I say toilet, I really mean a hole in the ground) for the whole building and no showers. When I arrive at their room, I am slapped in the face with the smell of sweaty feet and unwashed bedding. Their room is small and stuffy; the summer heat is oppressive and the windows are too small to let in any breeze. They apologize for the heat. In one corner, there is a carpet with large red flowers and a double bed. Along the walls sit a wardrobe, a refrigerator, a sink, a propane stove, and a TV. Undeterminable stuff hidden behind sheets is piled up along the rest of the wall space.

I’m sitting on the carpet helping G with her English—reading and translating from a story book I brought her from the US—when we hear a knock at the door. “Kimu?” Her mom asks. “Who is it?” “It’s me!” we hear the reply from the other side. G’s mom, S, opens the door and a large woman greets her enthusiastically, while a young, skinny girl stands next to her. “Hello!” she cries out, and steps across the threshold. “We were in the neighborhood and figured we’d drop by,” she explains breathlessly, and her daughter quickly makes herself comfortable by sitting on the bed and playing on her phone. “Let’s have dinner together! Let’s make chuchure!” (Chuchure is a type of dumpling soup.) S nods without saying anything and sends G out to buy some chives and onion, pulling out a crumpled 10 kuai bill from her pocket.

“Now who is this??” The Auntie has now seen the foreign girl and descends on me. No question is off-limits, and although I feel under the third-degree, I have to welcome the opportunity to practice my language as she expands beyond the usual questions of how many siblings do you have, is your sister married, how old are you, are you married, do you have a boyfriend, what do your parents do, are you a student or an English teacher, for how long, how much is your tuition, your income, and your rent to include, “Why are you here? But WHY did you choose this place? Why not somewhere more developed, like Hong Kong? What do you want to do when you graduate? Did you know about this place before you came here? How and where did you learn our language? What do Americans think of us? What are the differences between here and your hometown? What do you like about it here? Why would studying here help you in your career?”

After G comes back with the groceries, she and her mom set to work making dinner. S mixes flour and water to make dough and rolls it out, rolling and flattening it out laboriously over the course of an hour to make it flat enough for the circled dumpling noodle wraps. G chops up and diced the chives, onions, and frozen meat into diced pieces. At one point, S gets a message on her phone and asks G to listen the voice message from her Chinese boss, who has a very heavy accent (we can all hear the message as it plays out of the phone’s speakers.

“What does it say?”

“He says he has a job for you at a restaurant.”

“Can you reply and ask him the hours and salary, and say that I’m still working at the school cafeteria?” Her daughter relies the message back in Chinese.

Finally, it’s time to make the chuchure dumplings, and auntie teaches me how to stuff the meat and onion mixture into the noodle circles. After making a few ugly ones, I finally catch on, making them like little money packets, and am able to contribute and chat while we all worked.

Here is a picture of the dumplings we made that day:

Auntie is on a mission to get me to teach her 12-year old daughter English, “It will be fun! We live really close—it’s only an hour away on the bus near the airport—and you guys can be friends. I’ll cook you dinner, and you guys will just be the best of friends. It won’t be work, it will be fun, you can just hang out and chat in English and have the best time. Please. Please, this is such a good opportunity for her!” I finally have to say I would think about it.

G and her mom work over the boiling water for 30 minutes on the stove to cook the dumplings. Finally, four hours later, the chuchure, which would have cost us each about 10 kuai ($1.50) for one bowl, are ready. The restaurant price of those dumplings would have been prohibitively expensive for S to treat us—and it would have been unacceptable for us to “go dutch,” and so she had no choice but to make these for us over the course of 4 hours. S’s son shows up then, and we all sit around a table cloth on the floor, passing around a bag of vinegar and spicy chili peppers, with sweat pouring down our faces and backs as we drank the soup.      

I go out with Auntie for a stroll around the block. The sun has set and the air is cool and breezy. We start walking down the back alley, and we see a group of police officers gathered ahead of us. We stop walking. It looks like there is some kind of scuffle or confrontation happening, as the police officers appeared to be standing in a circle surrounding someone. I actually think that they were arresting someone because I thought they were frisking someone with his hands above his hands. As I keep looking more carefully, I realize that they are just talking amongst themselves—goofing off and playing some kind of game. I must have imagined that someone was getting arrested. At first I say to Auntie, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, they’re just hanging out,” but then I realize that I don’t want to attract attention to my foreign presence and I suggest we turn down another alley.

We do and Auntie tells me how her husband died 10 years ago. She asks me about my rent again, and I say demeymen (“I’m not saying”), and she says why, and I tell her that in our customs, we don’t just casually chat about money. She furrows her eyebrows in confusion. “Why not?” Money, such as how much we are paying in rent, is just not a subject we chat about, even amongst family members. She nods, but says she doesn’t really understand.  

We walk around the block and again turn down the alley with the police officers—this time coming in the opposite direction—and it’s clear now that they’re playing some kind of game, one that involves them jumping up, squatting on, and jumping down off of a wall. I hook my arm to Auntie’s and I look down, breathing a sigh of relief when we pass them and they don’t say anything to me or about me. Then all of the sudden, I hear them starting to speak in Chinese and they are walking quickly behind us and walk past us, still apparently not noticing me, or at least not saying anything. A guy is speaking Chinese with them. One of the police officers breaks off from the group and goes down our alley while the rest continued going straight. He starts talking to a woman at the front gate of one of the apartment buildings.

I tell Auntie I want to go because I am getting nervous since I don't have my passport on me. I didn’t want them to get in trouble either. We see S’s son squatting in front of one of the convenience stores, and I tell him I’m leaving. He says, why don’t you stay over (stay the night) [qonup qalmamsiz]? (In that moment, I thought of how in Jay Dautcher’s (2009) book he had said that it’s custom to insist that people sleep over even if they don’t really mean it. Now I know that it’s okay to say no and that they are really just being polite. With how aggressive they are, it’s really hard to tell. I know it’s a thing to invite someone into their house when saying goodbye, it happened a few times in another town when we were all going home and people would say, “kiremsiler?” [do you want to come in?”] as a way to say goodbye.) I say, no thanks, and I keep walking.

But Auntie keeps insisting that we find S first before I leave. Finally, we get in touch with S on the phone, and Auntie tells her that I said I wanted to leave (it was about 9:00 pm at this point). S suddenly comes running down the alley, fast, her eyebrows furrowed. “Why do you want to leave? Why? Why?” she demands, seemingly angry. But I know she is just being polite. I just smile and touched both sides of her cheeks with mine. I don’t say anything. I know she is being ridiculous. I had spent 6 hours with them that day and it was time to go.

I say, let’s hang out before you go to Turpan. She says, when? I say, how about Tuesday? She says, how about tomorrow morning? You can come back for breakfast. I say, I’m busy tomorrow. Then Auntie says, tomorrow is my day off, you’ve got to come hang out. S says, Please? We’ll go to the park.

So I give in since I was planning on visiting N in the hospital anyway and it’s on the way to their house. Auntie explains to S about the passport and police situation, and S nods. Auntie adds me on WeChat and I leave.

I block Auntie from viewing my Moments. I didn’t want her to know I do jiujitsu and hang out with Chinese people. I think they might be too conservative for that. I was already embarrassed when I showed them pictures of my family from my grandpa’s funeral and I was wearing a sleeveless dress. They must think I’m so scandalous, I thought. They just kept saying I was very ochuq (open).

I came back the next morning for breakfast to find that 6 people had slept over in their one-room apartment last night. In a room that was too small for one person. I can’t believe they invited me to join them. That would have been insane on so many levels if I had said yes.