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

by Shannon Young

  I’m exhausted as I lean into my bunk, awaiting the other passengers who are slow to join, and wishing I had something other than an already-read Plath in my bag, a packet of over-salted instant noodles, and a nearly empty stash of deodorant. Three days on a bus seems an interminable amount of time to be alone, but then again, I remind myself, I chose this journey.

  *

  When you live abroad at 20, everything feels ripe for the taking: every man, every city, every discotheque. Time flutters between days on a calendar; weeks turn into months, months to a year. For me, that year was 2000, the millennium recently dawned, the entire world waiting for an instantaneous burst of recognizable change like a wing elbowing a chrysalis. My second homeland, as it felt since I lived in Beijing in high school four years earlier, was China: a nation on the verge of something bigger, trapped in that nebulous moment between adolescence and adulthood. Everywhere, the city showed evidence of optimistic change: the new office towers in Chaoyang, the potential Olympic nod, the increasingly Gucci-clad citizenry. The city’s geography shifted as much as the sands in the nearby Gobi: in 2000, the fourth ring road was barely complete, and by 2012, there were six rings in an ever-expanding urban landscape. What my friends and I once lovingly termed our "Beijing boogers” (the black coal soot clogging your nostrils) was being replaced by the more noxious, pervasive smell of industry—factory fumes and automotive exhaust. Near the city’s quaint hutongs, the shadowed alleyways that made me feel both protected and liberated, construction cranes towered menacingly—in the next decade, over half of Beijing’s famed architecture would meet the wrecking ball.

  I was spending the year studying in Beijing University’s International Relations department. Living on the leafy campus in the Soviet-style "Shaoyuan” dorms for foreign guests, there were scant plush or foreign-friendly accommodations: shared squat toilets reeked of bodily refuse; tattered underwear and dirty socks hung to dry on laundry lines strung between hallway walls. My roommate, Wang Xin, was a Chinese-Canadian on a post-college fellowship. She was tall, beautiful, and innately Chinese in her language and personality: she showed her love in scathing criticism ("Your face is too skinny!” meant that my diet was working).

  Wang Xin aligned with the Chinese at the university, so with her I hung with the school’s basketball team, the team’s groupies. The other expat students mostly ignored their Chinese counterparts: the Europeans were one tribe, Africans another, Koreans and Japanese boisterous in their unexpected Northeast Asian union. Most Americans arrived via a study-abroad program that kept them to themselves in a separate part of campus. Because I’d enrolled on a scholarship through my university and had already lived in China before, I was, even there, an anomaly.

  In autumn, Wang Xin and I flitted between Moon Bar outside the East Gate and the rustic cafe Sculpting in Time down a hutong alleyway outside the West Gate. Not long after my year at the university, both student hangouts were demolished to make way for multi-story office buildings. But for now, the city around us was head-high. We could bicycle down dirt roads surrounding the Summer Palace as if we were Manchu empresses, hand-plucking fresh peaches off farmers’ carts pulled to the city by donkeys.

  Within the cradled comfort of this carefree existence I fell in love the way you do at that age, as I had with China: at first sight. I had been sitting in my dorm with Wang Xin when I saw Austrian Martin outside our window, walking from class to the cafeteria. He was rugged, introspective, with a sheepish smile. Quickly, a ritual was born: every day I watched for him and his gaggle of European friends heading to lunch. There was something inaccessible about him, his standoffishness like a Great Wall I was determined to scale.

  Finally, Martin and I found one another outside the squat toilets at Moon Bar. It was Halloween. I was Bam Bam. He was a German punk rocker. We were both drunk.

  "Hi,” I said, swaying, the alleyway so dark I could hardly see his face.

  "Hi,” he said, drawing closer. He tugged on my highly-positioned ponytail. I ran my fingers through his hair. A kiss was inevitable.

  Soon, I learned everything there was about him: how one summer he walked the length of Ireland alone, camping in sheep pastures. The next, he hiked from his home in Austria to Italy’s boot. By himself. Without a plan of action. He was impossible not to fall madly in love with, especially in a city like Beijing with its impending winter of dry, desert winds.

  But I also learned Martin left an ex-girlfriend at home in Austria. Although they’d broken up, he still felt connected to her, strangely guilty at our budding romance. Whenever we grew too close, he’d shy away, becoming that impenetrable wall again, too distant for me to conquer.

  In the meantime, five of us, Martin included, along with two Swedish girls and a Canadian guy, planned to head south to warmer climes for Chinese New Year. It was bad timing—Martin and I were growing distant just as we were to spend such intimate time exploring China by train and bus.

  A few weeks before we left, I spent Christmas Eve alone at Tiananmen, whispering carols into the empty square and warming my hands with my breath. When I returned to the dorms, I could hear the European students at their Christmas party on Martin’s floor: a cacophony of languages I couldn’t speak, Martin’s somewhere among them.

  Three days later, I met a man I called "The Swede” at a bar on Sanlitun South Street’s Jam Bar. I let him woo me, spending a few extra days with him in Beijing, telling my traveling friends, Martin included, I’d take the train alone to meet them in Chengdu the following week. Something about this detour felt natural, and I welcomed the attention of someone who didn’t seem distracted by a romantic past in which I played no part.

  When I got off the train at the Chengdu train station, Martin was there, the only foreign face smiling for me among the local horde awaiting arrivals. Four hours later, in our hostel, I finally told Martin about my dalliance with The Swede.

  "How could you do that?” he asked, turning away from me to look out the window at the city streets bustling with mopeds, street vendors selling stir-fried noodles, puppies, anything with a price tag.

  "I don’t know how this is going to work when you’re always falling back in love with her,” I said, confident in my decision, but at the same time wanting him to prove me wrong. I was too young, too enamored to realize I was merely hurting him out of self-defense.

  "I think you should bunk alone tonight,” he said. "I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  For the next few days, he ignored me at meals and we sent one another handwritten letters airing our frustrations via our traveling companions, who surely found the debacle amusing, if not immature.

  Later that week, halfway through our climb of the famed Taoist Mountain Emeishan, we spent the night in a working Buddhist temple. The rooms were doubles, but we were five. Because Martin still wasn’t talking to me, he slept with the Canadian. The Swedish girls bunked together.

  I spent the night alone in a drafty temple room, unable to sleep, fearful of the monkeys playing on the roof. I imagined one would climb through my window—they were curious, aggressive creatures and had, earlier that day, reached into one of the Swedish girls’ pockets for a pack of peanuts. Fortunately, there were no monkey visits; after sunrise, the temple bells roused us like a soft rain, reminding us there was still a good portion of the mountain to climb.

  Over a breakfast of cold vegetables and soggy noodles, feeling somewhat cleansed from the night in the monastery, I wanted to apologize to Martin, but what could I say? The entire year I’d been trying on masks, discovering who I could be with and without different men—although who I was with Martin was clearly my favorite, I wasn’t sure this was who I wanted to be for the rest of my life. Wasn’t I too young to decide?

  After breakfast, a monk escorted us from the temple up the steep path, holding his robes in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

  "To scare away the monkeys,” he assured us.

  On the iciest section of the cl
imb, the robed, bald-headed monk reached for my hand as we ascended. He didn’t let go for several minutes. For the span of that grasp, I fell in love again, but Martin didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he noticed, as did I, that my footing was growing sturdier with each step.

  *

  Place: Kunming Long Distance Bus Terminal

  Time: Five hours later

  Slowly, the bus fills. Despite the driver’s protests, I sit staunchly on the front bed (really a cotton pad above a wooden slab) while others make do with the shared accommodations elsewhere, the top bunks least desirable due to their inaccessibility.

  When the bus is nearly full, a woman in a tight black suit decorated with glittering green-and-white rhinestones boards. Her stiletto heels mark her pace down the aisle where passengers who’ve already removed their shoes pull their knees to their chests to allow her to pass.

  "It stinks in here! Ai-ya!” the woman declares, pinching her nose.

  "Do you think you’re a foreigner or something?” someone shouts from the back, implying such complaints are unbefitting of a Chinese woman. The well-dressed lady rolls her eyes, paces the bus. She can’t find a satisfactory home. Finally, she dramatically climbs over a man in the bunk behind me and makes her bed near the window.

  W. Somerset Maugham, upon traveling to China in the 1920s, wrote in On a Chinese Screen, "…Now, the Chinese live all their lives in the proximity of very nasty smells. They do not notice them. Their nostrils are blunted to the odors that assail the Europeans and so they can move on an equal footing with the tiller of the soil, the coolie, and the artisan. I venture to think that the cesspool is more necessary to democracy than parliamentary institutions.”

  He’s correct: there’s nothing more egalitarian than sharing a long-distance bus with the unshowered. I hear the well-dressed lady huffing and mumbling to herself about her discomfort. I want to tell her I’m with her, but then again, I’m the foreigner here. Immediately, I’m intrigued by this woman and make a mental note to befriend her at the first rest stop.

  That night, over a dinner of soggy Southern-fried noodles, I sit beside her at a rickety wooden table at a rest stop. She tells me she’s visiting a friend in Guangzhou for the holiday. Her second husband is a businessman in a suburb of Kunming; she’s a homemaker who has a teenage son from her first marriage. She, like all of us, has been wearing the same outfit for the trip’s duration, but I notice she changed the fake diamond pin on her breast, rearranged her hair for the meal. These must be the small ways she makes herself feel beautiful. Meanwhile, I’m dressed like an American backpacker: jeans, hiking boots, sweatshirt. I haven’t washed my face or worn makeup in days, and although this feels strangely liberating, there’s also something admirable in my new friend’s commitment to femininity, an unlikely humanness on a journey so utterly anonymous and dehumanizing.

  My friend is chatty and girlish despite her middle age. She doesn’t think it’s strange I’m a young foreign woman traveling alone on this long-distance bus. Instead, she views the happy coincidence we’re riding together as something more: "Wo men you yuanfen,” she explains as we finish our first meal together. We’ve got fate on our side.

  After dinner, while the bus driver blares the horn and curses at donkeys blocking the road, she climbs into my bunk to chat. She wants to hear everything about my life in the States, particularly my love life. I tell her about Martin, The Swede, how alone I feel despite having two men who seemingly care about me.

  "Maybe I should be alone. That’s what I deserve,” I admit, defeated. I have no idea what I want, and traveling solo on Chinese buses all my life seems as good an idea as any.

  She’s having none of my pity party. "Don’t talk like that. You’re so young and lucky! Besides, you don’t need to get married yet.”

  I say yes, that’s true, but even though I’m "young and lucky” I want to believe every relationship I enter bears the possibility of forever, of the yuanfen my new friend believes brought us together on this bus. Otherwise, what’s the point? But she doesn’t live with such introspection. She rides out every day, every marriage, while she can.

  "My first husband thought I’d gained too much weight,” she says, "So I said to him, ‘You have a child and see how much weight you gain.’” I pass her a moist wipe to wash her face as we ready for sleep. Her cheeks glisten in the moonlight like a baby’s freshly cleaned bottom.

  I say, "You were smart to leave him.”

  She quickly corrects me: he was the one to leave. Another woman. Well, several women actually. Someone at the office. Another: a masseuse. She laughs—the cliché of it!—acting like none of this emotionally roils her, but I wonder how much her quick retorts, her glittery pins, and her well-made hair are a cover for some deeper messiness she’s grown much better than I at wearing on the inside.

  I tell her I’ve gained ten pounds this year. The oil in my beloved yuxiang eggplant. The alcohol. I’ve picked up smoking, but only at bars, because of the Europeans. I’m good at misplacing blame.

  "Oh, don’t drink like that,” she says, assuming the role of a chastising mother. "It’s not womanly and it makes you gain weight. And the smoking is bad for your skin. Next time, tell the chef to use less oil.”

  I nod. She’s womanly. She’d know.

  The second night at midnight I get a gift from the gods of womanhood: my period. Apparently my body wants to prove its reproductive capabilities despite the fact I look like a caveman. My only blanket is a towel I’ve brought along, so with the bath towel draped over my bottom half, the dark Chinese countryside streaming by, I reach beneath my pants and surreptitiously shove an American-brand tampon where it’s needed. Everyone around me is asleep. The bus shudders over potholes, careens around thin mountain roads.

  My new friend is asleep in the bunk behind me, her hand flung over her head like a Chinese Scarlett O’Hara, an eye pillow sliding off her eyes with each bump. I want to tell her about my feminine feat, for her manicured beauty to brighten with a smile, her hands to pat me on the shoulder and congratulate me with a "Well done, girl.” But maybe this, like many other experiences I will come to bear, is best kept to myself. Maybe it’s less womanly to make everything so public.

  I watch her sleeping, unable to doze while my mind spins tales: I wonder where Martin is now, if perhaps he’s found some new woman with whom to bunk that night, perhaps one of the attractive blonde Swedes. I have no idea where I am—China’s back roads don’t announce provincial borders so I can’t tell if we’ve left Yunnan for Guangxi or Guizhou. I can barely see the skeletal outlines of mountains, the pitched moonlit slant of village roofs. No one on the bus knows my American name—my Chinese friend only knows me by my Chinese name: Su Li-Ming. I could run away at a rest stop but who would follow? This untethered existence is alternately terrifying and exhilarating; it makes me uniquely lonely in a way I’ve never experienced.

  I recall that Gao Xingjian, one of my favorite Chinese authors, once wrote,

  A tree or a bird may seem to be lonely, but this is an attribute bestowed by the person making the observation… The feeling of loneliness produced is thus a form of aesthetics, in that while observing one’s external environment, one is at the same time examining the self that is located within it, and to a certain extent this is an affirmation of one’s personal worth.

  But I don’t feel worthy tonight. I can’t sleep. Beyond the window, my reflection plastered over everything, I watch the world—suddenly, briefly caught in the scanning flash of the bus’s headlights is a town placard: PU PU, Population 300. I laugh to myself, incapable of explaining this hilarious linguistic hiccup to anyone who’d understand, and I realize that laughter, like loneliness, makes us human. It indicates our pleasure or our need for validation. With no one to share my laughter, the joke loses potency, but also makes me feel enough outside myself to witness the necessity of being here, alone. It’s only a glimmer, a brief sheen of a face I hope to become.

  The next day
, I change my tampon during a rest stop in a farmer’s field, just out of sight of hunched, elderly farmers raking the earth. My new friend instructs me to leave my toilet paper in a ditch, along with the used tampon. Another bathroom that afternoon is an open tiled room with drains along the sides, no partitions for privacy, just all of us women squatting, chatting, and picking at our teeth while waiting for our refuse to slide away.

  The women on the bus have already built a sturdy camaraderie. We eat together at rest stops, find the most suitable places to relieve ourselves when needed (the buses have no bathrooms). I wonder how women where I come from are anything other than this. Here, we are friends due to circumstance and boredom, but I learn everything there is to know about the well-dressed woman and she of me: she is remarried to a nice (if a bit portly) businessman, who buys her jewelry and lets her travel alone whenever she wants; her parents live in a village outside Kunming; her father has Alzheimer’s, her mother, lung cancer; her son plays too many videogames, and she worries about his studies. I tell her about my childhood in New Hampshire, how desperately I dreamed of foreign travel, how I’d attempted to dig a hole to China one afternoon when I was ten. Like most women, she wants to hear the details of my romantic life, how many partners I’ve had, which man treated me the best. After I’ve divulged, she tells me to forget about Martin, The Swede, any man.

  "Women like us need to stick together,” she says on the warmest morning so far, our last day of the journey. We walk out of the shared public toilet, her arm snaked in mine, ready to face the world together. But part of me wonders if this woman overestimates me, if she’s placing her own face atop mine, incapable of seeing the reality of the world outside herself for the jaded view from behind the mask.

  *

  The rest of the year, Martin and I attempt a relationship, but it never quite works—we’re on two separate tracks while around us our expat friends are still drunk, still lost, still perpetual travelers readying for their next adventure despite the fact they linger in Beijing for durations never anticipated.