Yulin: The Organ Grinder's Monkey

Jamie said that Yulin would be different from Beijing, and guess what, it is. It is a different landscape, for one thing, but right now I want to talk about how people react to us.

Early on in his stay in Yulin, Jamie wrote that on the street he sometimes feels like he’s a on display rather than being seen as a real human being -- I called it being the organ grinder’s monkey. Now I’m seeing it first-hand every time we go out in public.

In Beijing, even in the neighborhood of our hotel where there were hardly any other foreigners around, people didn’t pay much attention to us. Beijing is a city of 15 million people, so I suppose they’re urban/urbane and absorbed in their own bustle. Sometimes people gazed, but they really didn’t seem all that interested in us. Sometimes they were a little surprised that Jamie spoke Chinese, but even that didn’t cause much of a stir. Once, in the place where we ate most of our breakfasts, I attempted to say “thank you” in Chinese, and even though it’s a hard word because it has a sound that we don’t have at all in English, the young man behind the counter laughed and said (in Chinese) that my Chinese was very good. (That is not the consensus opinion.)

Here in Yulin we get stared at constantly. We went into a little fast food joint one day (imitation Western food; I’d much rather eat local food but we couldn’t find anything open because of the holiday), and the young folks in the booth behind us laughed out loud. Later I nodded and said hi to them and they were perfectly friendly; the staring doesn’t seemed to be hostile, because every time I’ve smiled at or spoken to someone I get a friendly response. In the grocery store one day, I had a few moments of rare separation from Jamie when I waited in the produce section with our vegies (you have to have them wrapped and weighed before you leave the section), and he went off to grab something else that also needed to be weighed. Three women who worked in the store were just standing around staring at me, so I said “ni hao” (“hi” in Chinese), and that set them all smiling and talking to me a mile a minute, and of course I couldn’t understand any of it, except that I caught the word “mama,” which, amazingly enough, means “mother.” I tried to say (in Chinese) that I don’t speak Mandarin, but either they didn’t understand my pronunciation, or they didn’t really take it in, because they kept right on talking. When Jamie came back we were able to have a little conversation that mostly consisted of saying hello and Happy New Year. Elsewhere in the store a man with a little boy in tow said “Happy New Year” (in English) and we returned the greeting and everyone smiled and that was nice.

One day on a walk we ran into an elderly man Jamie knows, a retired farmer who lives around here and walks very slowly with a cane, and with him I had a nice little chat with Jamie’s help as interpreter. He asked me what I think of China so far and I said that it’s amazing and interesting and that I have so many impressions I can’t even sort them out. He was very sweet, as are all the older folks we’ve talked with, mostly meaning the men at the guard house near Jamie’s building, who are just tickled that his mother is here.

On the day of Spring Festival we walked to the nearby shopping district. We were about to cross a street when a guy stopped his van, rolled down his window, said “Hello” in English, then asked Jamie in Chinese why he hadn’t gone home for the holidays. Jamie shrugged and said his mother had come here. That seemed to satisfy the man, who then said “Happy New Year” in English and drove off. He was a complete stranger.

Sometimes people say “hello” and just laugh. I have to battle a tendency to be offended or alarmed by this, but Jamie told me a story about being in the park one day and having a young couple who were walking near him look at him and talk and laugh. Since Jamie, unlike me, can understand Chinese, he was able to pick up that they were laughing because neither one wanted to be the brave one and try to speak to him in English. So their laughter was at themselves, not at him.

I am working on my own reaction to the staring. If I’m tired and crabby, I tend to keep my eyes down so I don’t see it and therefore have nothing to react to. If I have more mental energy, I tend to greet some people and not others. Sometimes they look away, sometimes they just keep staring, but far more often they get a big smile and say hi back. Not infrequently, someone will walk by us, staring, and then when we’re out of eyeshot and walking in opposite directions, say “Hello” -- usually with a laugh. I’m not sure what this is about, and I keep fighting the tendency to do a little mind-reading. The smiles and greetings that usually come when I say hi help with that.

Thinking of home - without a doubt, people who look “different” (by any number of measures) can get treated oddly or offensively in the U.S., and probably everywhere else on earth. On the other hand, in a lot of the U.S. these days the population is so diverse that though there is always the potential for a reaction to someone “different from me,” there’s no way to define “different from ‘all the rest of us’” because “all the rest of us” are a crazy quilt from everywhere. In China, it’s still overwhelmingly Chinese people, and it seems like it will be a very long time before that changes, if it ever does. Especially in a frontier outpost like Yulin.