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.

Re-Entry Culture Shock and Frequently Asked Questions

After returning to the US, it can be very overwhelming to answer questions about my experiences in China. I decided to write out some answers to the questions that are most commonly asked to help condense my feelings into concise answers. This can help because, while it's hard to answer these majorly broad questions about a very long period of time, I do want to share my experiences with others. And droning on for hours about a place others have never been to is not super helpful. If you are interested, please feel free to PM me and we can talk in more detail.

I've organized the answers into short, medium and long answers for the impatient and apathetic to the interested and caring! 

How was China? 

• China was amazing. It was very challenging to live in a foreign country and I struggled a lot at times, but it was very rewarding at the same time. I learned something new all the time; life was always fascinating.

• It kind of feels like a dream now. Sometimes I ask myself, “Was that real life?” My memories are starting to slip away from me, and sometimes it feels like I never left; I was just asleep in this dream for a long time. It was wonderful though. I had a lot of freedom to do what I wanted to do with my own time. I was still super busy--fieldwork completely consumed my life in pretty much every waking moment—but I was constantly out meeting new people, writing down my observations, conducting interviews, exploring new places and new ideas, and practicing my language, so it was a very rich and fulfilling life full of community and meaningful work.

• It was difficult in the sense that I was very lonely at times and it was hard to find a solid community there. I had a few really close friends, but they had all moved away to other places or gotten really busy with work by 2016. I would often make a few close friends, but for whatever reason, things would fade out after a few months. I jumped around a lot between several different groups. I had a far-reaching community network with a lot of different types of people—jiujitsu, Crossfit, lesbians, a few migrant families I was helping with English—but it was hard to find those kinds of really close, intimate bonds with people like I have with high school or college friends. Despite that, I made some friendships that made a lasting impact on me. I had several friends who meant a lot to me and it was hard to say goodbye to them at the end.

How was the food? 

• I loved the food. There was a lot of diversity because Han people eat a lot of vegetables, fish, and spicy food, and Uyghur people eat a lot of squash, carrots, and bread.

• My favorite food was pumpkin dumplings because they were sweet and also had lots of carbs, oily fats!

• My Uyghur tutor taught me how to make their version of “spaghetti” (called leghmen) and rice pilaf, and I still make those dishes at home now because the ingredients are all really cheap! The Han food is more difficult to make here because they use a lot of specific spices that you can only find in China (and I’m too lazy to find my way to the Asian market). The Uyghurs really only used salt to flavor their food, so it’s a lot easier to replicate here. I also learned how to make dumplings, but that can be very time consuming so it’s easier to buy the frozen ones at Trader Joes!

What were you doing in China? 

• Field research for my PhD dissertation

• I was able to collect a lot of really fascinating and valuable data, and explore the violence of inequality and totalitarianism.

What is your research about? (non-academic response)

• My area of interest is at the combination of anthropology and political science, and I look at the effect of authoritarianism and capitalism on urban areas.

• How and why economic inequality is growing remains the main passion that drives my work. By taking that to China, I look at how a dictatorship can either stifle or encourage economic growth, and the effect that has on how local people live their lives. Especially in China where there is mass urbanization, I look at how people cope with moving to and living in cities in terms of assimilation, culture shock, and forming communities, while under incredible economic stress.

• My methods are mostly observing, interviewing, and analyzing government documents. It was really important to me to learn about what everyday life was like there—that’s why I spent so much time in-country—because it wasn’t about conducting a survey. It was about learning how people lived their lives. By integrating as much as I could into the community, I was able to learn about what was most important to people in their everyday lives. I learned that inequality and economic crises are a huge part of people’s lives—how they are going to feed their families is a main concern of people. But then, of course, there were also people who were jetting off on international travel, had multiple houses, and would spend hundreds of dollars on a purse, which is why I’m so interested in inequality because there was a big gap between the rich and the poor. Another main concern was the separation of families because often a family would get separated when some of them went to the city to work. So that was another major theme in people’s lives: missing their family and friends back home.

What is your dissertation about? (non-academic response)

• I focus on how people live their lives in the midst of state security and economic stress

• I look at local government, how minorities express difference from the majority through cultural practice, and how rural migrants live in the city in terms of culture shock and discrimination.

• I find that people will always find ways to live outside of attempted state control, and that counteracting negative stereotypes is a major influence on minority cultures’ lives. I find that rural migrants encounter a lot of discrimination and hardship in the city.

How is it being back? 

• It’s nice to be back and see my friends again, I missed my family and friends a lot while I was gone. It’s also hard to be away from my friends in China, and it’s hard to feel uprooted and at a loss for community again.

• There’s definitely a lot of reverse culture shock, such as going to grocery stores or big box stores like Target, and being faced with the overwhelming amount of selection. There’s a lot of unacknowledged privilege in the US that can be frustrating, and a lot of luxuries that feel unnecessary and excessive to me now—even like ice in cold drinks, greek yogurt, pre-cut and pre-washed spinach: those kinds of things feel weird to me. Customer service staff is so friendly here that it feels really fake to me. I am worried for my friends’ safety but I can’t contact them, so that’s super tough too.

• It’s nice to have an office where I can go and write in peace and quiet every day—that was the main reason I came back was so that I could focus on writing my dissertation—but it also feels super lonely and isolating. I’m also super overwhelmed about the dissertation because I feel like I have so much material and so much to say, and it’s hard to put all of that into the right words. Obviously, the political situation in the US is not in a good place either, so that can be hard too to be in such a tense and depressing political climate. I’m finding community at the jiujitsu gym and among other grad students. It’s nice seeing and talking on the phone to family and friends again.

Are you going to go back? 

• I don’t know. If it wasn’t for the pollution and the oppressive political situation, I would undoubtedly go back, even to live or teach there long term. It’s difficult to live in a situation where you live in constant fear of what someone will overhear, report, or get in trouble for being in contact with you. It’s difficult to make an impact or impart change or inspiration when you and everyone around you is living in constant fear of being watched and getting arrested. I also feel obligated to my family in the US, and it’s difficult to give up the comforts and luxuries of the American lifestyle—including, but not exclusive to, cheese, Netflix, fast internet, and freedom of speech. However, I feel a very intense sense of obligation to my research participants and deeply desire to give back to the community who gave me so much. I also feel like I abandoned them when they needed me the most, and I have no intention to abandon those friendships and relationships. I hope to go back frequently to visit, and maybe to live for short periods of time. Perhaps I will go back and teach English for a year of longer someday. Or perhaps I can figure out a way to live and teach there part-time while maintaining a teaching position in the US as well.

Saying Goodbye

China has been my home for almost 5 years of my life. During that time, I have learned a lot about myself…and a bit about the world.

I have learned what it is like to be a minority and an alien—both in terms of being physically strange, socially ostracized, and culturally abnormal, and also a foreigner—to have no rights, to be an outsider, to dream of one’s home country. I learned what it was like to live in a place whose language you struggle to understand.

During these years, I experienced loneliness that I had never thought was possible. An unshakable loneliness that forces you to hug yourself at night while tears squeeze through your shut eyes. A loneliness that you can only know in a place where you are always and forever the outsider culturally, racially, and linguistically. Every day and everywhere you go, you are the other, the weird one, the alien.

I learned what homesickness was, a sickness that speared my heart and tangled my stomach and blocked my lungs. A homesickness that stays with you until you finally start to learn how to breathe again and you start to crawl and then walk, and finally you’re okay again. Before you know it, you realize that you’re starting to become fluent in a second language, and you learn what it’s like to go back and forth between languages in your thoughts and your dreams.

After learning about Chinese language and culture for two years, I started a new adventure in 2014. I learned a third language. I witnessed the politicization of ethnicity. I learned the comfort of a headscarf. I learned how to go days without showering. I hand washed my clothes. I learned that eating Halal is about so much more than abstaining from pork. I experienced in a fearful and visceral way what it meant to have a violation of unwarranted search and seizure violated. I learned what it felt like to live in fear of state surveillance. I learned what state inflicted terror was like. I learned the violence of minority oppression in new ways, and witnessed people continuing on despite it.

In China, I struggled but I also learned what it meant to live with all of your being, a richness and fullness of being that required every ounce of my energy, but gave back a life more colorful than I could have imagined: to love and be loved in a foreign language, to laugh until tears streamed down my cheeks, to scream in excitement and fear at the cab driver’s kiss with death, to dance until the sun rose, to weave in and out of traffic on a bicycle, to share the fuzzy warmness of an intoxicated closeness, to have sleepovers and weddings and parties and dinners and secrets and whispers and inside jokes shared only with the people who know your faults as well as your attributes. The people of this country have given back to me 10 times what I have given them, and they have shown me the love and warmness and kindness and hospitality in the fullness and generosity of humanity. They have shown me as well how rich life can be when you take the risk of an adventure, the risk of a first kiss in the rain, the risk of looking stupid, the risk of failing. They have shown me the richness of adventure that you can find if you take the risk of getting lost. They have shown me their hearts—their fears, their dreams, their sorrows, and their triumphs—and in doing so have shown me the humanity of vulnerability that each and every one of us share.

In China, I learned how to live through the winter without heating or running water or an indoor toilet. I learned about the violence and instability of displacement from real estate development, the pain of inequality, and the violation of freedom. I saw development that was moving faster than anyone could handle. Development, yes. But at what cost? Pollution, poverty, discrimination, and debt. Debt that drove people to suicide, debt that drove people to hopelessness and to lives and jobs that they hated. Development that led to the disintegration of culture, social, and familial ties. And yet, despite everything, people here yearn more than anything else to give their children a better life and have sacrificed their entire lives for that purpose. For them, development was the answer to their lifelong dreams to provide a better life for their children.

China has taught me more about race and gender, the pain of inequality, and the violence of development more than I could have learned by staying in the American bubble and reading books. China has taught me about my Western white privilege in painfully visceral ways that I wish I could, but never will, forget.

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I say without a trace of doubt in my mind that China is one of the best thing things that’s ever happened to me. Today I leave with tears on my face and a broken heart shattered in my chest, with a dream to someday give back to the world what this experience has given me.