by Sarah Vowell
When I passed another person, I’d see what I came to know as the Look: not threatening but a look more of curiosity or even shock, mostly due to my obvious non-Han appearance. Sometimes they’d ask me where I was from. Some would say nothing. Some would even ask me if I was okay, if I had eaten, and where I was going.
I don’t know whether it was the fact that we lived in the ultramilitarized People’s Republic or just that Taigu men are not the type to catcall, but I always maintain that China felt like the safest place I’d ever lived. Perhaps my outsider status as a Westerner protected me. Years later, when I returned to the United States, finding myself living in a host of smaller towns, as well as cities like Chicago, Washington, DC, and New Orleans, I was shocked at how often some stranger on the street would whoop at me or stare for too long or start to walk too close. In my own homeland, strangely, I felt the most unsafe being by myself.
In a country of a billion people, personal space isn’t just something that’s frowned upon; it’s often impossible to find. Even a small town like Taigu—just forty thousand people—was no exception. If you wanted to be alone in the daytime, you could ride your bicycle past the grain fields and the coal- and bauxite-processing plants to the even smaller village at the edge of the mountains, where there were several temples in the outcroppings.
In China, university dorms are not named after famous educators or benefactors but are instead referred to by serial numbers: “26 building,” “27 building,” and so on. I soon discovered that the undergraduates were living eight to a room: four sets of bunk beds pressed against the walls, one shared table in the barely existent center of the room. The graduate students, thought to be deserving of a bit more space, were also in dorms but housed in groups of four. The first time I entered a dorm room at the agricultural university, it was as if I was entering a unit in a warehouse. I saw schoolbooks, clothes, shoes, packages of dry noodles, and clothes-washing bowls crammed beneath the lowest bunks and around the perimeter. The room’s one narrow window was strung with several drying lines for shirts and underwear. It was the middle of the day, so the students were elsewhere.
My friend Wang Yue, a twenty-year-old English major, pointed disapprovingly to one of the lower bunks and told me that a pair of her roommates—two nineteen-year-olds who preferred to be called by their self-selected English names, Sky King and Toni—always slept side by side in this single bed. They were obviously in the early stages of a romance. “It’s like they wish the rest of us weren’t here,” Wang Yue told me, rolling her eyes.
It was unclear to me where her disdain came from. Was it just homophobia? Was she annoyed because these women had upset the guanxi and balance of the group, prioritizing their personal interests over the harmony of the whole? Or was it because they were two women, finding a loophole in the single-gender dorm, the thing that was supposed to keep students focused on school, not on sex?
Everyone on campus was struggling for intimate space. The foreign teachers’ houses were adjacent to a small, circular garden where the willow and birch trees created a shadowy canopy over a few park benches. This was hardly a hidden place, but it was more secluded than the rest of campus. If I passed by at nightfall, I’d see the flash of someone’s limbs wrapped around another body, and then another couple on the next bench, just a few feet away. This was the official campus hook-up area, a kind of twenty-first-century drive-in theater. The students called it the qingren shulin, or “Lovers’ Forest.”
Even the privacy in my half-a-duplex was not a thing I could always count on. My girlfriend, Sarah—who also had a teaching fellowship, but down in Indonesia—managed to visit China the first fall I was there, during her Ramadan break from school. We’d spent a large part of our senior year in college in bed together, but coming to teach in Asia, as well as our physical separation, had resulted in an almost celibate life for both of us. Desperate, we tried to cram as many sessions as possible into those two weeks of her visit.
One late Friday afternoon, we got interrupted by Ben’s frantic knocking on the door to my bedroom. He warned us that Xiao Zhang, a staff member for the Foreign Affairs Office, had just come over, and she was about to walk in any minute. She needed to see something on my side of the house, and right now, apparently.
A wave of indignation passed through me, which was instantaneously replaced by panic. I didn’t have any closets to hide inside. There were no locks in our house, except on the front door. And it was no use to pretend to be out: Xiao Zhang and the office staff members, for all sorts of reasons, regularly came into our apartments when we weren’t home and would have no trouble coming into the bedroom. The units belonged to the university, after all; we were just living in them.
Flushed, I pulled on my tossed-off clothes and rushed out into the foyer area, apologizing for my delay. I tried to close the bedroom door behind me, but, like most doors in the house, it didn’t fully latch. Xiao Zhang advised me, in the slowest Mandarin she could manage, about getting some sticky paper to try and trap the mice that had invited themselves in just after the weather had turned. “Right,” I kept saying, nodding, hoping to make the conversation as short as possible. I stopped understanding her instructions after a while. My language skills were not up to snuff, especially when I was panicked.
But it was clear from her hand motions that she was describing what happens when the mouse actually dies its horrible death inside the adhesive. She even went so far as to mimic a rodent scream, just so I would be prepared. I stood fidgeting. On the other side of the partially cracked door, Sarah was hidden under the duvet, still undressed and trying not to move.
Besides teaching, eating, and the lessons with my Chinese tutor, I spent a few late afternoons a week at the campus’s indoor swimming pool. The idea of swimming, especially in a poor, dry province like Shanxi, sounded luxurious in theory. In practice, the pool felt like an environmental apocalypse, so gritty and chemicalized that you could barely make out the T’s on the tiled bottom. The water smelled like a mix of spoiled vegetables and bleach. The chlorine powder was dispensed in satchels that looked like giant artificial jellyfish floating just above the underwater jets.
One week, I ran into my student and his friends on their way back from the pool building. He told me they had closed the pool down for a couple of days. “They must change the water this week,” he told me assuredly, in English. “It is the first time in seven years they will change the water.” I hoped something had been lost in translation.
The pool scene was, despite this, pleasant enough. Of course, if you headed there with the sole intention of swimming a bunch of laps, you’d be frustrated. Like everywhere else, the pool was full of bodies, especially in the shallow end. For every fifteen meters I swam, I’d usually stop to talk to someone: a student, or a friend, or sometimes a complete stranger. If I didn’t stop, I’d likely collide with them in the water anyway.
Right away, I noticed that most of the women stayed in the shallow end, trying to develop the basic skills to pass the university’s swimming test. The lifeguards/pool keepers, all middle-aged men with beer guts and sagging swim trunks, were impressed with my sessions in the deep end and with my swimming skills. “You have a good sui jue,” one of them told me, which literally translates to “feeling of the water.”
But my sense of the water wasn’t intuitive so much as it was another marker of my Western, middle-class upbringing. I thought of the series of photos in my mother’s albums back in North Carolina: me at six months, fat and smiling, at baby swim class at the YWCA; me at four, splashing in the waves at the beach; my first swim-team picture at the age of six, posed next to the diving board. In China, however, swimming pools were scarce, and most natural bodies of water seemed apocalyptically contaminated. For most of the Chinese students, the university was the first place they’d had access to anyplace where they could swim.
The women at the pool intimidated me. It was not because of their swimming. It was the locker-room shower scene that I found daunti
ng: an enormous, packed-to-the-gills mob of bodies and steam.
Unless you are very wealthy in Shanxi, most homes do not have their own shower. Chinese towns have public bathhouses. At university, similarly, there were no showers in the dorms themselves; showering was something most people did a couple of times a week in one of the university’s provided facilities. Or, if you bought a swim pass, you could take your showers at the pool.
At any given time, the showers at the pool had four or five people gathered around each showerhead, taking turns to rinse. To pass through this shower room, even just on your way to or from the pool, was to push through a crowd of women and soap and hair. Much to my Puritan dismay, it was almost impossible to find unscented anything in rural China, including laundry detergent or maxipads, and the shower room was no exception. The air was overwhelming with its shampoo and soap perfumes, freesia and juniper and lavender. In the fog, it was a humid, scented forest, with limbs reaching in every direction.
I had never seen so many naked bodies together, been close to so many people at once. Most of the women, being students, were in their twenties: their skins completely smooth, their breasts small, their bodies angular and narrow by my own Western standards. Many of them had tied a red string around their hips, with a jade pendant for luck. There were some older women, too, who were teachers or lived in the community. Their bodies were considerably rounder, more weathered by time. Some had caesarean scars that had never faded, their bellies divided by the pink line.
The level of intimacy here terrified me. In this shower space, my own shame came from what I couldn’t hide: the obvious strangeness of my Caucasian body and its larger proportions of fat, muscle, and hair. It was one thing to walk through Taigu, wearing jeans and a jacket I’d bought in town, and be stared at immediately because of my red curls and pale skin. It was another to enter the shower room, for it to be obvious that the hair in my crotch was as red as that on top of my head.
“Wow,” my friend Wang Hui Fang said the first time she got a look at me, not long after we had met. We weren’t even showering then; she and I and our other friend were just changing into our bathing suits, stuffing our clothes into a shoebox-sized locker with no lock. “Name hong!” she exclaimed, an expression meaning “really, really red.”
When she saw my embarrassment, she switched to English and tried to reassure me.
“It is very interesting,” she said with enthusiasm. She grabbed, then, at the nonexistent flesh on her own waistline. “I am really getting fat,” she said, as if she meant to comfort me.
So I usually rushed through the shower room at the pool, being there only long enough to rinse off, my frantic quality probably causing me to get even more attention than I would have otherwise. Sometimes I avoided the shower room altogether, opting to walk home shivering, with the chlorine eating away at my hair. I was choosing, then, to use my own showerhead in my apartment, which was simply attached to the wall and got everything else in the tiny bathroom wet: sink, toilet, trashcan, floor. Even in the privacy of my own bathroom, showering could be a messy, unbounded experience.
Once I went with Wang Yue to visit her hometown of Datong in the north of Shanxi province, another cold, dusty, coal-mining city that borders Inner Mongolia. On Saturday afternoon, we went to a public bathhouse near her family’s apartment.
The showers were strangely empty that day, much less crowded than the pool building’s at school. Several middle-aged women turned to look at me incredulously and then went on with their scrubbing. With all that empty space in the tiled room, I actually felt cold, despite the hot water beating down on me.
I admitted to Wang Yue then that I felt embarrassed showering at the pool at school. To make things even weirder, I pointed out, I was a teacher. The shower room called to mind one of those teaching-anxiety dreams, I explained, when you suddenly find yourself naked in front of one of your classes. Wang Yue looked me at, confused. It hadn’t occurred to me that the “teaching naked” dream might be specific to my cultural background.
“Like, what if I see one of my students in the showers?” I asked her, reframing my point. “That would be embarrassing.”
“Why?” she asked. “I mean, like . . .” she said, her English colloquialisms flawless, “they are also there taking a shower, right? They don’t care. They are doing the same thing as you.” She offered me her bottle of soap. She had a point.
In this new phase of my life, where I felt exposed all the time, there was still so much in the culture that seemed guarded, so much information I’d never be privy to. At the start of the day’s classes, I frequently got notes from missing students who gave vague excuses for their absences. “Dear Teacher,” the notes usually read, in English. “I am sorry I will not attend class today. I have something to do.”
In Mandarin, the expression you shi means you have some kind of business to deal with, the specifics of which might be private and need not be explained in detail. There is no good translation for this phrase, at least in my experience, though my students tried. What these somethings were, I never found out.
Despite the communal culture, there was a limit to how much of myself could be seen. I had my own secret. My first year in Shanxi, I felt I couldn’t explain to any Chinese person—mostly because of the conservative social mores of where I was living—how much I longed for Sarah and how impossible communication had become, given unreliable Internet access and my crackling phone as well as the unpredictable restrictions from the government in Beijing. We found our Skype calls going silent.
As exhilarating as it was to be living abroad, there was also, for me, the day-to-day panic I didn’t know how to explain to others, which came from an accumulation of small things: not being able to read all the characters on the bus schedules or figure out how to send a package. Or what to do when you eat something that gives you violent diarrhea all night and when the water source to your toilet is cut off, in a province with severe shortages, between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. When I think back on China, even my good days had an undercurrent of deeper, untranslatable anxiety. It was that dislocation that only comes when you find yourself living, all of a sudden, on the other side of the world and not understanding how anything works. On bad days, I felt that I shouldn’t have come to China. As an outsider, maybe I had no business being in Shanxi at all.
At night, I lay awake in my cold little bedroom, listening to the rat inside the radiator vent toenailing his way out onto the dark floor. China is a pretty loud place, but at night in Taigu, there was only this, plus one other noise: a train, about a mile away, from Xi’an on its way to Beijing, sounding its horn into the crisp, landlocked night. I could hear its pitch shift as it grew closer, then farther away. A sort of reverse alarm clock: I heard this every night at the same hour. Years later, when I think of the word alone, I still hear this sound.
That first spring, when I’d been in China nine months, Sarah finally broke up with me over the phone, the result of a multicall argument we couldn’t seem to resolve while in two separate countries. Neither of us would back down. “This is impossible,” she admitted and then hung up, as if some unknown force in the universe was responsible for what was happening to us. Despite the fact that we were already physically separated, and knowing the unlikely odds for relationship survival—several countries between us, two new cultures to adapt to, no plans to see each other until later in the summer, and being immature, in our early twenties—the breakup blindsided me.
I wasn’t out to any of my Chinese friends yet. So the night after the phone call I spent wallowing in the company of the Americans next door, eating, in alternation, seaweed-flavored potato chips and beef-flavored potato chips. (We would eventually start calling them “breakup chips,” since hardly any American’s long-distance relationship survived while one member of the couple was living in China.) We drank large bottles of Xue Hua, a mediocre Chinese beer. The next morning, I woke at dawn, hungover and disoriented, to the loudspeaker narration of a campuswide exerci
se routine. I couldn’t decipher any of the voice’s directions except for the counting parts. “Three . . . four . . . five . . . SIX!” the voice kept saying, the reason for this emphasis unclear to me.
My grief that spring was enormous, maybe even out of proportion. Before China, I had never been particularly weepy, especially not after a breakup. Now I cried anytime I was not in front of a group of students: during dinner, during my Chinese lessons, after I bought vegetables in the square, while sweeping my floor or wiping the black coal dust from the windowsill. In Shanxi, all my usual emotions became augmented in ways I didn’t understand, and the boundaries for who should and shouldn’t know my feelings became more and more unclear.
Everything I ate made me sick. I started to resent hosting the usual dance parties, giving a thin-lipped smile as twentysomethings flooded my house. It wasn’t long before my new Chinese friends put two and two together, even though I had never directly explained to them that Sarah, who had visited in the fall, was my girlfriend. I did not have to spell it out. “Oh! You have xin shi,” they would tell me, letting my lesbianism be implied rather than stated outright.
When it comes to emotional matters in China, there is a variation of the vague expression you shi, the usual “I have business” or “I have something to do.” If you say you xin shi, it means, more specifically, you have a matter of the heart to deal with, or something is weighing on you, or that you’re worried in an all-consuming way. The word xin, written in Chinese, is an actual pictograph meaning “heart.” Xin shi was how my friends referred to struggles with their boyfriends or girlfriends, or, occasionally, even more sensitive matters. (One close Chinese friend, I eventually discovered, had had three abortions in the past four years, all of which she’d kept a secret from her family and most of her friends at school.) The phrase is useful and can serve as a euphemism if you want it to, allowing you to both guard the details of your situation while also offering the gesture of an explanation.