Lana
(Written several days ago)
Lana was my roommate for a couple of days. Lana is from Serbia. She’s quite striking and made herself even more so when she managed to find a salon in Xi’an that dyed her already dark hair purple. She told me she didn’t feel right in her body until her hair took on a shade of black-purple in the sunlight. She studied Chinese for four years in University and had been teaching English, I think, in her country until last year when she moved to a small city near Shanghai to teach English to children. Her students ranged in age from 10 to 17. After speaking with her for ten minutes, she reminded me of the teacher type that you always remember from Elementary school. You know, the Ms. Applebauchers and Thorntwisters who wore quirky clothing and sparkling white tennis shoes and were very active with their students? The ones who seemed to never have lives outside of school, but surprised you by talking about travels to far-off lands and always brought different dates to school functions where teachers could bring spouses or significant others. I’m almost positive Lana is headed off in this direction. She said she plans to teach when she returns to Serbia and then would like to return to China to teach again next year or the year after that. It seems a shame to me, almost, as her Chinese is incredible. I think she could do anything. She’s also the type that doesn’t like silence. I think she’d call it emptiness where I would call it peace. She was a busybody and would knock about our room moving the few objects from one corner to the other and tidying up her bed and locker every fifteen minutes. When she got talking about a subject she was fixated, and talked about the Chinese, in general, like they’re some kind of adorable species of animal so unlike anything usually encountered in the wild and that one can never know what to expect with them so one just has to love them. (I actually happen to agree with her about this sometimes. Not that the Chinese are animals, but that their actions are so far from anything I would expect that I’m always waiting for the salt shaker to contain sugar.) I didn’t have much interaction with Lana until Wednesday night when she asked if I wanted to go see the mosque in the Muslim quarter with her. She didn’t want to go alone because she was certain she would be robbed. I think the only reason she wanted a companion was to put someone else in the path of the pickpockets in the hopes that she’d be left alone. We set out from the hostel around 8pm. I hadn’t eaten and was looking forward to a few snacks from the stands along the streets in the Muslim quarter. The first thing I found was that Lana had absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever. She told me she had been on the street the night before, but as we walked, she kept trying to take us in the opposite direction. Simply from the map, I knew she was going in the wrong direction, but because I hadn’t BEEN there, she would argue effusively, until we found ourselves definitely in the wrong place and then she would say, “Oh, you’re talking and confusing me!” This happened three times before I said, “Would you just trust me until we get to the street and then YOU can navigate again?” Sheepishly, she agreed. The girl loved to talk. She loved to interrupt too. She’d ask a question and then a word I would say in response triggered some other thought in her mind. I got to the point where I didn’t speak, and she didn’t notice. Being with her was very exhausting, but once I just decided to listen, it became very entertaining. She held three conversations with herself and seemed to only want a listener who would add the appropriate “Mm-hmm” or “yes” or “no” every once in a while. When we got to the Muslim district, it was alive and teeming with activity. Lana turned to me and furtively whispered, “Clutch your bag from being ripped off of your body.” She walked around with her purse against her chest and both arms locked in front of it. If anything, she drew attention to herself, making it appear as if she had something terribly valuable inside that she was terrified of losing. I kept my eyes open for people following us or sizing us up as prospective victims. Walking along, Lana bumped into me the same way Sandy had in SH the day we went touring together. I find this behavior fascinating (read, irksome). It is annoying for me to be bumped into, but isn’t it annoying to bump into someone no matter whether you’re the bumper or the bumpee? As I write this, I realize how finicky I’m sounding. Xi’an has definitely tested my patience, and I’m really learning how short a fuse I have. Definitely something I need to work on. Anyway, back to my rant (I suppose that is what this is?) Or, I’ll call it a character study. Lana lost her patience a couple of times while we were walking due to the noise of the street. She said the lack of personal space didn’t bother her at all, but that the noise drove her crazy. She hated the horns, the shouting, the cacophony that to me represents China and all it currently stands for: growth, activity, constant movement, and vitality. She actually lost her patience a couple of times while we were walking and would shout in Chinese, mild epithets that drew attention from both sides. At least when I’ve lost my nerve, I’ve hollered in English, though what would I say in Chinese? After we had been on the street for about fifteen minutes, Lana said, “Would you mind if we were to get back to the hostel by 9pm? I’ve got to meet my teacher then.” I was surprised that she had given us an hour to walk to the street, find the mosque, and walk back. However, I didn’t mind one way or the other and said, “My only desire is to purchase some snacks for dinner. Otherwise, I don’t mind getting back by 9pm.” When she said this, it was already 8:30pm and for the next twenty minutes she was wringing her hands in worried dismay. I told her we could split up if she needed to leave, but she didn’t want to walk alone. She also really wanted to find the mosque. I was willing to go back with her early, but we ended up walking around looking for the mosque down teeny streets that looked bombed out and had no light with her cursing all the time her bad luck. I tired of trying to ease the situation and followed blindly soaking in all of the interesting differences that made the streets more Muslim and less Chinese. Then came a litany of frustrations from Lana. It seemed that at the moment, everything Chinese frustrated and angered her. I was starting to understand why she praised everything Chinese in the comfort of an air-conditioned hostel room with other foreigners. I think she felt a little guilty about her real feelings when among the people. Being around Lana, I wanted desperately to not end a year feeling as she felt. Sadly, yesterday when returning from Hua Shan, I found myself repeating a lot of her frustrations to myself. I want to blame it on the heat, on my exhaustion, on my lack of language skills, on temporary insanity, on anything that doesn’t seem permanent. In meeting Lana, I’ve learned that I’m going to have to adjust my approach to living in China so that I come away with a positive experience and not a negative one. I’m doing a lot of soul searching right now to try and figure out what exacerbates the problem so. Mostly, it has to do with feeling like a caged animal. When you walk down the streets and people really point and stare and nudge friends so they don’t miss the foreigner and you hear the “Haaallloooo, Haaallloooo” bellowed like you would hear people imitating animals in the zoo, you lose yourself. Or, at least, I lose myself. It is a feeling that cannot be duplicated in the US either. What ethnicity or nationality would cause me to point and stare on the streets of Seattle, or Birmingham, even? Not a single one. Luckily, I have ten more months to grapple with this question. I really hope to learn how to deal with it or how to internalize it innocently because sometimes my thoughts are ugly and this really frightens me. I also understand why Americans choose to stay home. I would never go so far as to choose that path personally, but I really empathize with wanting to avoid these types of challenges in a strange land where you can’t understand the whispers and don’t know how to ask, “Which way is North?” And here I am ending this study of Lana with a bit of a study of myself. My greatest wish is to be able to tell you in ten months that I’ve figured out the beginning to the answer, if not the answer itself.
