How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

by Shannon Young

  "For you,” the man said in English. "Dry skoshi more minutes, then tie,” he instructed as he handed me a string.

  "I can carry your lunch,” Anita offered.

  I accepted the gift, carefully taking hold of each end so that the ink would not smear. Bowing deeply, I said, "Domo arigato gozaimashita.”

  "Ki o tsukete,” the man said, just before reaching for his brush.

  "I’ll be careful,” I promised.

  Anita rushed onward, a striking sight with her long, thick black braid against the light blue of her uniform, her arms balanced by the weight of the two lunches, one multi-colored Indian batik bag, and one red lunch pail.

  "Anita, wait one second,” I pleaded as I stopped to roll up the scroll, which had dried. I held the string between my teeth. Anita set the lunches down and took the string. She wrapped the string around the scroll, securing it with a bow. We then scooped up our lunches and ran.

  As we entered Todai-ji Temple, we were greeted by unexpected silence. Our classmates were staring up at an immense bronze statue of Buddha that was at least fifty times their size. The Buddha appeared to be watching them with a mild expression that inspired quiet. Anita and I looked up, equally transfixed. The scent of incense tickled my nose. I turned away, pressing my finger below my nose to attempt to suppress my sneeze. That is when I caught sight of Sister McGowan, who had silently come to stand a few feet behind me. I saw her wipe away a tear with her long sleeve, but was reassured to see that she did not look sad. In fact, she was smiling. She began to speak in a soft voice that made the girls move closer to her.

  "One of Buddha’s teachings is that all things change.”

  She reached her arms around the two girls standing closest, which included me.

  "We don’t want things to change and yet they do. Some things change quickly. Others change slowly.”

  I turned my gaze back to the Buddha.

  "Buddha taught his followers to be generous and compassionate toward other people. In addition, he taught them some rules.”

  "What are the rules?” one of the girls called out.

  Sister McGowan kept her eyes on the Buddha.

  "Say nothing to harm others. Do nothing to harm any living creature. Choose a job that hurts no living thing. Try to become a good person. Learn to control your thoughts and emotions to quiet your mind.”

  "Like when we pray?” I heard Anneka’s voice ask.

  "Yes.”

  One of the girls had noticed that a large hole was carved out of one of the beams in the building. In a voice filled with awe, she read aloud a sign affixed to the beam, "This hole is the size of the Buddha’s nostril. If you can crawl through it, you will enjoy eternal happiness.”

  The girls turned and congregated around the beam. The largest girl in the class skeptically studied the hole.

  "I hope I can fit inside Buddha’s nostril.”

  She dropped down to her hands and knees and stuck her head and body into one side of the hole and reappeared out the other. Laughing, all of the other girls lined up to do the same. Holding her index finger up to her lips, Sister McGowan tried to quiet us, while laughing herself, "Shh, children.”

  I stayed back as the rest of my class exited the temple building. I knew I had to be quick. I placed my lunch pail and scroll inside the replica of Buddha’s nostril so that I could take a picture of the Great Buddha. I took my time to get a second shot, and then grabbed my lunch pail before running out of the temple.

  The bus ride back to school was calmer than the morning journey. Tired from all of the walking, the girls carried on quiet conversations with seatmates or leaned their heads against bus windows or armrests.

  The bus headed west toward Osaka, a bustling city southeast of Kobe, where our school was located. Leaning back in my seat with my eyes closed, I tried to distinguish the sounds of the city. Horns, voices, buses, and cars blended together.

  Opening my eyes, I watched as we passed through crowds of people, office buildings, and neon signs. I saw a mother bend down to talk to her young son, while the baby on her back looked up in my direction. I hurriedly pulled my camera from its case and snapped a photograph.

  The bus moved a few feet, and then stopped for more traffic. I stared at a woman in an exquisite kimono, decorated with yellow, orange, and white painted birds and flowers. She gracefully scooted across the sidewalk in geta, Japanese wooden shoes. Her hair, so carefully constructed into fancy crescent rolls, did not budge. She stopped to look into a shop window. I looked through the viewfinder of my camera and saw what I had not noticed with my bare eye. My photo would include, in the foreground, two teenaged girls in modern dress, waiting at a bus stop. In the background: the woman in the beautiful kimono. I smiled with pleasure at this discovery.

  The bus lurched forward, this time moving without interruption for three blocks. It stopped again. I closed my eyes for a moment. Without the sights to distract me, I realized what the city sounded like. Crickets! I opened my eyes and glanced out the window.

  The revolving door of a hotel caught my eye. I looked down at the tiny window on the top of the camera that showed me the number of pictures I had taken: eight. I still had four left. A group of three businessmen, dressed exactly alike, popped out of the revolving door onto the sidewalk. I snapped a picture of them, holding matching briefcases, and thought of the three French hens in the Christmas song.

  A foreign couple exited and approached the street to summon a taxi. I was still holding the camera up to my eye. I watched as the man held up his arm for a taxi, obscuring his face for a moment. A taxi pulled to a stop at the curb, and the man guided the woman, whose long auburn hair was mostly covered by a red silk scarf, toward the open door of the backseat. They stood talking for a moment, the man’s back to me. When they gave each other a hug, the woman leaned her head on the man’s shoulder, resting her red leather purse on his back. The red of her scarf on his shoulder, next to the red purse resting on his back, were pretty. I snapped a photo.

  The man turned his face to say something into the woman’s ear. I tightened my hold on the camera, my index finger frozen on the shutter. I recognized that face. I knew this man. Yet, how could it be? Keeping my eye up to the viewfinder, I both wanted to and didn’t want to see. What was my father doing with this woman?

  The woman got into the taxi alone, and my father looked up for a moment in my direction. I gasped, thinking that he might see me. I kept the camera up to my face, hiding, hoping that he would not see me. My father entered the next taxi, and I finally lowered my camera. Pressing my face against the glass, I tried to keep sight of the taxi, but it was hopeless.

  From somewhere deep inside my chest, the cry I tried hard to push down rose higher and higher. I held my breath so that no sound could escape. The next thing I knew, Sister McGowan was sitting next to me, her face staring into my eyes, as she pressed a cold cloth against my forehead.

  "You fainted. Take deep breaths and you’ll be fine,” Sister said. "We’ll be back to school soon.”

  I closed my eyes and heard crickets. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I remembered another fact about crickets I had totally forgotten. Crickets had many eyes, yet their eyesight was very poor. Their hearing was much better. How I wished I had kept my eyes closed, just listening to the sounds of Osaka.

  With sudden dread, I began to search around my seat. I had forgotten the scroll! I had left it in the nostril of Buddha. The loss of the scroll was almost too much to bear, for now it seemed it might hold an answer I knew I needed.

  I tried to recall Buddha’s rules. Frustratingly, I could only recall one of them: learn to control your thoughts and emotions to quiet your mind. That was impossible.

  Shibata-san came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. Yumi was waiting at the gate as Sister McGowan had phoned ahead. She rushed up to the car and opened my door.

  "Is Mommy home?”

  "Hai, with baby Amy,” Yumi answered.


  When we reached the front door, Yumi bent down to untie my shoes. She led me into the kitchen, where a pot of tea waited on the countertop, along with a tray of rice crackers and a plate of peeled tangerine. She turned and wrapped her arms around me, hugging me close. She touched the back of her hand to my cheek, the way she did to check for fever and asked, "Hatsui desu ka?”

  I shook my head no. I wished I were hot instead of cold. I wished a fever had made me faint.

  Yumi poured a cup of tea and handed it to me. I took a sip, which tasted good but did nothing to soothe the ache in my chest. On the drive home, I had finally remembered Buddha’s other rules. One continued to echo in my head: say nothing to harm others.

  From upstairs, my mother’s voice called down, "Yumi-san?”

  "Hai,” Yumi answered.

  "It’s okay. I’m okay,” I said, even though it and I were far from okay.

  Yumi pushed the swinging door open and disappeared. The kitchen was still and quiet. I leaned against the counter, sipping tea and thinking. I knew what I had to do. I had to keep the truth to myself, for sharing it would certainly harm others. I went to my school bag, slowly undid the two buckles, and retrieved my camera from the big inside pocket.

  *

  I went outside and leaned against the maple tree. I thought of the Great Buddha, whose expression had seemed to change subtly even though I knew it was impossible—it was a statue. Yet I wondered whether anyone else had noticed. Might the photo I had taken have captured his expression?

  I looked up at the house where I lived, where everything was changing. I heard Yumi singing a Japanese song to Amy, which quickly soothed the baby’s cries. I wondered if my mother and father were going out for the evening. If so, would my mother notice that anything was different?

  I looked back down at my camera. It had seen too much. Was there a way to get rid of the one moment and keep the rest? I pressed the button on the back of camera, which released the latch. The back of the camera swung open, revealing the negative from the last few images I had photographed, including the final photograph of my father with the woman. Holding the door open, I raised the camera to the sky and waved it around. That would erase the last few images, but possibly save the earlier ones.

  Sighing deeply, I sat on the ground and leaned against the tree trunk. I gently placed the camera on the ground in front of me and prepared to close the door and re-wind the film. Instead, I stared at the film and saw a tiny scroll. I had captured a truth, and it was too painful to see. Carefully, deliberately, I removed the shiny, light brown cartridge from my camera, and slowly began to unroll the film. Then, holding my arms taut, I held the long scroll to the sky.

  Born in Japan, Pamela Beere Briggs spent her first decade in Kobe. She moved "home” to Napa, California in 1968. Realizing years later that "Napa” is ”Japan” spelled backwards without the J describes her memory of leaving: turned around with a missing piece. She went on to become an award-winning documentary filmmaker and has written essays for a variety of publications. She is currently working on three World War II novels for middle-grade readers and blogs with her teen daughter at www.TwointheMiddle.com.

  FINDING YUANFEN ON A CHINESE BUS

  By Kaitlin Solimine

  Place: Kunming Railway Station

  Time: Morning, Chinese New Year, 2001

  If there’s one place to avoid at all costs, it’s a Chinese train station at the start of the Lunar New Year. But I’m too young and inexperienced to escape such blunders, and I stand in an exorbitantly long and unruly ticket "line” (more closely resembling a swarm of angry bees), a rising sun pouring unexpected heat onto my head. I need a sleeper bunk on the next departure to Hong Kong, where I’m meeting a friend.

  I’m wearing a too-thick sweater. Sweat pooling beneath my armpits, I curse the warmth of this late-winter day. In Lijiang, extra layers were required to fight the chilled mountain air in from Tibet. In Kunming, sun reigns over wind. I should be enjoying this, but I’m too preoccupied with my own narrative of romantic tragedy: last night, I left behind my on-again, off-again boyfriend Austrian Martin (so known in our Beijing early-20s expat circles to differentiate him from Polish Martin) in the mountainous backpacker enclave of Lijiang. Martin and I suffered a relationship like a water snake: as soon as we gripped it tightly, it slipped from our hands. The slipping part is where we’d found ourselves in recent weeks.

  This solo journey, as a 20-year-old woman, from China’s backwater Southwest mountains to the glittering isle of Hong Kong was to be my coup de grce, a traveler’s soliloquy to prove my independence. But at the same time, I’d hoped it could save me, and thereby Martin and me, from the endless insecurity that plagues early romance.

  Finally, it’s my turn to buy a ticket. I elbow past a man with garlic-tinged body odor who’s cut in front of me. Planting my hands squarely on the booth’s overhang, I shout above the sound of the busy station, "One ticket to Guangzhou!”

  The ticket agent sitting in the florescent-lit booth wears the requisite attendant uniform, short hair cropped to her ears, dandruff speckling her shoulders. Grime rims her fingernails: she’s the ultimate Chinese bureaucrat.

  "Hard sleeper,” I clarify, indicating my choice of service.

  She scoffs at my request without looking up from her keyboard, her bulky computer a relic from China of the ‘80s, a bowl of oily vegetables at her side: breakfast.

  "You’ll have to wait at least four days for standing-room only,” she says.

  My Chinese, which I’ve studied since age fourteen, is near fluent. Unfortunately, this doesn’t buy me camaraderie with the bureaucrat.

  "There’s always the bus,” she offers, picking something green from between her teeth with grimy fingernails before shooing me away with a terse nod.

  Step aside. Good-bye now. The universal Chinese gesture to imply there are a million (or more aptly, a billion) others waiting with the same request. Perhaps in your home country you are large, significant. Here you are trite, disposable, and fighting for a shrinking piece of a very small pie. It’s a humbling experience I would recommend to any self-absorbed teenager.

  Off the station’s main square, I find a public pay phone—really just a vendor allowing patrons to use his red rotary phone for a fee. Sitting on a plastic stool, I pull an international calling card from my wallet to phone my mother in New Hampshire. I tell her I’ll be on a bus for the next three days so I won’t call again until I reach Hong Kong.

  "Is the bus safe?” she asks.

  The buses line a brick wall opposite the station. They’re mostly in one piece, wheels dusty, undercarriages rusted.

  "Yeah, I’ll be safe,” I tell her, but a knot inside me clenches tighter. The week before, I’d taken a bus from Chengdu to Lijiang that navigated what had to be some of the world’s most perilous and narrow mountain roads; when the bus blew a tire, my friends and I hitchhiked to the nearest town. It took an entire day to travel 50 miles. I don’t tell my mother of the incident.

  Hanging up, I sense my mother’s apprehension from ten thousand miles away, like a chilly wind blown in from the Himalayas. Two years before, at eighteen, I’d traveled alone throughout Manchuria as a researcher-writer for the travel guide Let’s Go: China. The entire summer, my mother paced the hallways of our New England home each night, eagerly awaiting the daily phone calls I promised.

  I sling my backpack over my shoulder, leave five yuan for the payphone operator, and walk to the buses with the steadfastness of a soldier recently deployed: in choosing a young life of solitary travel, I’d quickly learned the necessity of not thinking too long about those you’ve left behind, nor the precarious state of the bus you’re about to board. Questions could only lead to more questions, which could only lead to you high-tailing it to the nearest luxury hotel and a commercial flight back to the States. Some things are best left unexamined.

  The Guangzhou-bound vehicle, or so says the rusted placard on the dashboard, is empty, sa
ve for a driver lounging in the front seat, loafered feet on the steering wheel, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed.

  I knock on the door and he startles awake, shaking his head like a Polaroid camera—I’m an apparition taking form. Slowly, he understands what I want and cranks open the door.

  "Is this the Guangzhou bus?” I ask, my smooth Chinese resettling him: now we are equals, sort of.

  "Yes. You have a ticket?”

  I ascend the crooked, dented stairs and hand him the ticket I bought minutes earlier from a man I swore was ripping me off even though the fare was only $8 for a 1600 kilometer, three-day journey. I’d lived in China long enough to know there’s always the "locals” fare and the much-adjusted "foreigner” fare. It made me unreasonably suspicious and cynical, a terrible combination in a young woman.

  "When do we leave?” I pile my overstuffed bag on the single bunk nearest the door, just behind the driver’s compartment. I’m close enough to see the dandruff in his hair. Everyone in this station is in need of a good shower. Then again, I haven’t showered since I left the guesthouse in Lijiang. I probably don’t smell like roses either.

  "We leave when the bus is full,” the driver says with a shrug, reclining again. "But you won’t want to sleep in that bunk—too drafty at night.”

  I look to the rest of the empty bus. The only other bunks are doubles I’d be forced to share with a stranger. I choose a cold night’s sleep over sleeping next to a potential rapist or murderer. To calm myself, I think of Martin, his back turned to me as he had returned to the Lijiang guesthouse and I had left for the Kunming-bound buses the night before. We were so involved in the story of us that we’d forgotten to look up at the snow-capped Jade Dragon Snow Mountain towering over the small town like the gateway to a wispy, transcendent heaven. On the overnight bus, I hadn’t glanced away from my book at the passing scenery—so preoccupied with Plath’s The Bell Jar and my own narrative of romantic sadness, I hadn’t considered there may be something larger worth attending to. Perhaps this is both the beauty and tragedy of youth: each moment, each relationship, feels so utterly indispensable.