He’s on his way to a rave. You end up at the same place much later at night. He gives you his number and card, and invites you to a picnic in the New Territories at someone’s ancestral village where they grow lychee. You’re allergic to lychee, but you accept the invitation. He was a traveler, he explains, so he offers to let you stay at his apartment, one traveler to another.
The person you are staying with is driving you crazy and has been offending you so much that you have bothered to record all of his insults in your journal every morning when you leave the apartment, but cannot be bothered to find another place to stay as it’s Handover so everything is booked up. You realize the guy has a crush on you! This is why he insults you every time he sees you! You wonder if this is because he is an engineer and/or if he simply has bad social skills. You prefer nuance. Illusion. Obfuscation, even! You’re a poet. There is an art to conversation. Geez. This is supposed to be a holiday. Friend of a friend is ruining it! You agree to meet The Nice English Sandwich Guy in the MTR station with your bag the next day. You’re moving digs.
But it’s the night that you agree to meet up after he gets off from work that you realize The Nice English Sandwich Guy is Someone Different. It’s hot and humid, and it has begun to rain. You’re sitting on a barstool in a Lan Kwai Fong bar, waiting for Someone Different, and he walks in the door. He shakes the rain off his head. He’s wearing a cream raw silk shirt with a mandarin collar. He smiles when he sees you. There’s a light. You think maybe you are falling in love. Pretty fast. He looks beautiful. At the very least, this is a terribly exciting adventure-filled holiday. You will definitely recommend Hong Kong as a tourist destination to your friends. He takes you on what you think is a romantic stroll by the old Legislative building. It’s hot. The lights are yellow and orange. There’s a blur of people. Your first date is, in fact, a protest march. It’s scenic. But it’s a protest. In the voices over the megaphones you sense the worries, the concerns, the anger, the general confusion. It does not take an understanding of the language to hear this cry. In the years that follow, when you manage to walk alongside the Hong Kong people when they demonstrate, protest, and raise their voices, you will come to greatly admire this quality about them: their willingness to get up and be heard.
You go back home to California. Someone Different plans to relocate to Tokyo. Hong Kong was never his destination of choice. He arrived here as a compromise. These are the early days of email. CompuServe with its number addresses, and AOL with the hip monikers. You are both writers. You email, once, twice, three times, maybe four times a day. He writes beautiful emails. An epistolary romance. You ask Email Man to come for a visit to the US, where his brother lives, and where he has never visited. He agrees. Back in Los Angeles, you are house-sitting your friend’s place. You have no job. You have a little savings. You have a car. Your friend’s shoot gets canceled. Yikes. You have no place to live and you have a houseguest coming from Hong Kong. Your friend tells you: He’s English. All Europeans love the Grand Canyon. Take Email Man on a road trip. Your friend is half-French. You figure she must be culturally sensitive. It’s a plan. You pick Email Man up at the airport and tell him that you’re heading out to the desert the next day. You later learn that Email Man lives for spontaneity. You have plenty of that, and not much else. Email Man does not seem to mind.
You tell a friend who’s engaged to a guy who owns an auto body shop that you need an oil change before you head out to the desert with this guy coming from Hong Kong that you met for exactly three days while backpacking on your way home from Seoul. Concerned Friend tells you to swing by the shop. This guy could be some crazy axe-murdering freak, and you’re driving out to the desert with him. Your body could never be recovered. This has never occurred to you. You think to yourself that Email Man doesn’t seem like an axe murderer. He was charming and intelligent. But aren’t those qualities found in serial killers? But he didn’t email like a serial killer at all! Okay, okay, you agree to swing by the auto body shop in the early morning.
You introduce The Man Who Loves Spontaneity to your Concerned Friend and her Auto Body Fiancé. She tells you to come to the window, whispers he’s fine, and giggles. Have a great road trip, she says. You thank Concerned Friend. You pile into the car and you, with the driver’s license, drive out to the Arizona desert. Grand Canyon. Sedona. The Mojave. You drive back down to LA, then up again to San Francisco. Golden Gate. Chinatown. The Japanese Tea Garden. You have a great holiday. At the end of the six weeks, you have to face the reality of two nationalities and US immigration. You propose a trial marriage. He’s kneeling. You say this: Here’s how it’s gonna be…
A few days later, you’re driving to Norwalk, California, a burned-out industrial wasteland peppered by strip malls. The Man Who Loves Spontaneity has hair bleached white (fun in the desert hotel) and you’re wearing a pink sweater your Half-French Friend tried but failed to sell at a yard sale, and a flower print cotton miniskirt from Ross Discount Clothing that cost exactly one dollar. You have a few hours to kill before your appointment. You go into the 99-cent store while he moves the car. You’re nervous. You pick out forty-three dollars worth of 99-cent store goods. It’s for your new apartment. Tin foil. Plastic dish rack. A small rubbish bin. He buys it, along with plastic pens with fake US one-dollar bills floating in them. Why is he buying these? Souvenirs for friends in Hong Kong. You eat a bad Mexican meal. You have a manicure in the Vietnamese nail salon. You tell them you’re about to get married. They ask if your parents know. You say no and the woman gives you an accidental big bloody gash on your cuticle. It’s not intentional, but you have your doubts…
You and Your Future Husband stand under a white plastic trellis. You’ve brought two rings. A gold one from your parents. Another gold one from a Turkish rug salesman. A rug-salesman freebie after your father spent thousands of US dollars at a single rug store. That’s what happens when your mother looks for mauve-colored carpets. The ring’s worth about five bucks, tops. The judge smiles at both of you. You don’t look at each other. The reason is that Your Future Husband told you not to—he’s afraid he’ll laugh. And it’s a time for solemnity. Before she performs the ceremony, she tells you if you want the marriage certificate, which you want and need, you’ll have to wait in line right after the ceremony, or it will take six weeks to mail. You marry. The rings are put on the wrong fingers. You kiss. You queue in line. You walk out of the courthouse: you are married.
Fifteen years on you’re still married and have run the extreme in terms of the vows you repeated in Norwalk—for better or for worse, for richer and poorer, sickness and health—the whole thing. Yeah, you still love him. You must. You became an expatriate, joining him on what has become your family’s stateless, peripatetic journey and have found that the narrative of nation does indeed pose interesting philosophical questions. You think about your fluidity of identity, or lack of it, when you try to make sense of culture and belonging, and how your Korean-American-British son with the Hawaiian name tells you he is Chinese.
Being an expatriate has made you face some hard cold truths about yourself. Like how you always thought of yourself as an animal-lover until the day you saw a coiled cobra at the front door and all you could scream was "Kill it!” not "That’s a beautiful endangered species!”
You’re surprised about the knowledge you’ve acquired and what you’ve witnessed: water buffalos poo in soft diarrhea-ish piles and cows poo in clumps.
The words stereotypical gender roles have no place in expatriate or local parenting. When an acquaintance bites another woman on the ankle, it’s best to end that friendship before you experience bodily harm and no, it’s not an Ilocano thing, despite what everyone in the village says. Blonde women who kill cows with SUVs become social outcasts.
You think about the meaning of country and identity, about how nation is supposedly a story, and you decide that your Hong Kong story is more or less like a French film. Not the kind that reach the move theatres, but the
kind you see in museums. Fuzzy and stark. Surreal beginnings and endings. Beautiful colors. Images bleeding frame by frame. Repeat. Maybe not. Yeah, your expatriate life in Mui Wo reminds you of the rarely screened footage described in film theory journals read by a dozen people in Italian. You’ve forgotten most of your French and you only know a few words in Italian.
When you tell your husband about how you think of your life, he says, concerned, maybe we should celebrate more of your national holidays. He adds that he’s not that into turkey, and Native American genocide probably should be discussed more when celebrating Thanksgiving. You don’t celebrate July 4th, but he would wholeheartedly support this celebration, as he supports all political acts of rebellion against any empire anywhere at any time. Someone once called you an empress. You try not to think about that too much when he discusses empires.
You think to yourself that you are typically Hong Kong, but really, you are expatriates, and while you often wonder about how long or where you will end up, this is home, in all of its predictable unpredictability, dissonance and harmony, smog and rain and stinking heat. When someone asks you or your husband how you met each other, both of you tell the tale and then warn the person that marrying in a matter of weeks is not necessarily a good idea, but that yes, it works out, but you never know where you will end up. You warn them that geography is a serious concern when thinking of multiple ethnicities, nationalities, and cultural origins, and that it’s best to remember that nations are a relatively new construct in the spectrum of human development and that there are some people who test this idea of nation, in all of its possibilities, limits, and configurations, and these people are often, but not always, expatriates.
Stephanie Han (MA, MFA) is City University of Hong Kong’s first PhD student in English literature. She received two grants from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and has published poetry and prose in Kyoto Journal, Louisville Review, The South China Morning Post (fiction award), Nimrod International Literary Journal (fiction award), Women’s Studies Quarterly, Cha Online, KoreAm Journal, Disorient, Ampersand Review and other journals. Her writing has been anthologized in PEN-West’s Emerging Voices Anthology Strange Cargo, the Asian American Women Artists Anthology Cheers to Muses and will be included in anthologies The Tao of Parenthood and The Queen of Statue Square. Her literary criticism has appeared in Contemporary Women’s Writing, The Explicator, and is forthcoming in a 2014 volume by Beijing Foreign Studies University Press. She recently completed a poetry collection entitled "Expatriate”. www.stephaniehan.com
JEWISH IN CHINA
By Eva Cohen
Introduction
"Ohh, youtai ren, so smart, so good at business!”
Youtai ren is the Mandarin word for Jewish. When I inform someone of my cultural background in mainland China, they often light up with a smile and become excited to share what they have heard about the Jewish people. Sometimes, they take it further and draw a comparison between Jews and Chinese, saying, "Jews and Chinese have very much in common: very smart, have tradition.”
Being a single female traveling around China, often to remote places where I am the only foreigner, the locals are already impressed by my "bravery.” My Judaism creates an unexpected but entirely warm connection between myself and a people previously foreign to me.
Chapter 1: First Steps
I first arrived in China two days before Passover in 2011. I was to teach English at a tourism and hospitality college on the outskirts of Nanjing. I tried looking online to see if anything would be held in the city for the holiday. I only found information for holiday services in Shanghai, but I also came across the website of a Chinese professor who runs a Jewish studies program at Nanjing University.
Unaware of business practices in China, I didn’t want to take a chance as a new employee by asking to take time off for the holiday right when I was supposed to start my position. Although the professor, named Xu Xin, did get back to me right away with a very kind email saying he may hold something small for Passover, I said thank you and decided I would need to miss that year’s Seders (services).
Since I was not staying in the big city, I had immediately hopped on a Hangzhou-bound bus alone for orientation. The comments from strangers and treatment that would continue for the rest of my stay in Asia began: staring, pulling at my curls and asking if they are real, parents pointing and telling their children "laowai!”, everyone trying to take pictures (but most frequently middle-aged men). If a person spoke any English, they would comment on how white my body is (for a Caucasian I’m still quite white and if not for pigment in my hair might be mistaken for albino) and thus how beautiful I am. And then I was told how brave I am.
Brave. I had never considered myself to be particularly brave before that comment began to be applied to me en masse in China. As a journalist who had traveled to the Middle East, and with aspirations to cover human-interest pieces on poverty and corruption in Africa, I had never thought venturing to China as a teacher would mean I am brave. But in hindsight, my choice to teach in a "middle of nowhere” school with no resources for me as a foreigner—and often being the first female foreigner some students had met—I see now that, compared to the majority of the world who never venture outside of their immediate community, I do appear brave.
I was proud to be an inspiration to my students, and any other person who gave that adjective to me. One student told me that she had only ever done what everyone else told her to do, but that by meeting me, she had begun to envision herself traveling around the world, and becoming a strong woman like me. How I felt when she said this was so… meaningful. To think about it still overwhelms me for a moment.
Throughout my life in Canada, and afterward in the UK for my masters, I had frequently encountered anti-Semitism. Wearing my Star of David necklace on campus on occasion elicited negative comments. Sometimes a conversation would be very pleasant until another student would find out my culture and then go into attack-mode about Israel or the history of my people. When this would happen, I’d often disengage because arguing and defending myself all the time exhausted me. I felt that while I am white and fit in on the outside, the reason others picked fights with me was hidden on the inside, which can feel worse than open discrimination. When people talk about visible ethnic minorities, I feel those differences are sometimes "skin-deep”; a person from another race will see a Chinese person and either like them or not, because they can see the differences, and if they don’t care about skin color, then they will engage with them.
I had so much to learn about China and just assumed things would be the same, so I did not speak with my students about Judaism. I began to realize toward the end of my teaching stint that it could have been a great opportunity to share something my students had never encountered before. They may have only heard about Jews in the context of the "so smart, so good at business” stereotype. Today, when I meet people from mainland China and they wonder why I am not eating something—due to my kosher practices—I gladly explain that I am youtai ren. This teaching position provided a great starting point for me to learn about a new kind of bravery: to proudly teach people about a culture completely new to them.
Chapter 2: Nanjing Jewish Center
I write for several community newspapers in Canada, including the Jewish Independent in Vancouver. After my initial inquiry about Passover services to the professor at the Jewish Studies department at Nanjing University, I pitched the idea to the Vancouver paper to write about it for them, and it was accepted.
It was a sunny Friday afternoon when I traveled an hour by subway from my college into the city to the large Nanjing University campus. For the first time in a couple of weeks, I saw other foreigners while I traversed the streets looking for the right building. When I arrived, it couldn’t have been clearer that I was at the right place: plaques naming Jewish donors to the department lined the halls, Star of David designs graced the walls, and the door to a museum with a torah and other J
ewish artifacts on display was ajar. In this far-away place where I had hardly seen any other foreigners, to see cultural symbols of my own was so unexpected.
A student greeted me and brought me to an office to wait for the professor. Inside, her fellow students were studying. All of the students were Chinese, but not only did they speak perfect English, but also Hebrew, and a couple of them spoke Yiddish as well. Their dissertations were on topics that rabbinical students learn in formal colleges in the US and Israel about important Jewish sages. These students were very happy to meet a Jewish female, and while they were shy and polite, as many Chinese students are, a couple of them were eager to share information about the department and tell me about the trips they had made to Israel. Professor Xu Xin stresses that a PhD student must first visit Israel before graduating, but several students had been there more than once, and others had studied for a year on exchange. I have been to Israel five times, and the students were keen to hear about why a Jewish girl had now decided to come to China. My easy answer: adventure, something new.
Once Xu was ready for me, I followed him into an office with walls covered in pictures of rabbis. Friendly and energetic, he looked like a youthful forty-year-old, but I learned he was born in 1949 and had been at Nanjing University for over forty years. That would make him an even more youthful-seeming sixty-something. He was excited I had contacted him and eager to share about his work, and to introduce to me his students and the topics of their research.
How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia Page 12