The Tattoo
Some days are easier than others. Some days slip by in a haze of uninteresting studying and Sex and the City reruns (I know) and I barely realize I'm in Beijing.
Beijing is a funny city. It's an international city in the sense that there are hundreds of foreigners who for one reason or another have decided to spend some time with the word LAOWAI tattooed all over their bodies. The tattoos are invisible, but Chinese people can see them. This does not bother the foreigners I am thinking about at the moment because as far as I can tell they live their lives completely seperate from China. This could be Otterdam, or anywhere; they read That's Beijing! and do not think 60 yuan is very much to spend for a gin and tonic. They probably don't speak Chinese. Their Beijing is not my Beijing, but from time to time I pass through it.
Nor is my Beijing the Beijing of the locals; I'm not that deluded. There are times when I do forget about the tattoos, but no one else is forgetting them, as I'm reminded every time a Chinese person pantomimes at me or shouts "hello" off a minibus.
"I thought you'd be pleased to see other foreigners," Luo Wei said to me once, in Luguhu. "I thought you'd be excited." But pleased and excited is not what I feel, not at all. Other foreigners just made me feel more foreign, as though by virtue of my whiteness (or something) my alliance had to switch from the Chinese people I knew and cared for to these laowai I didn't know from Adam.
"We are all one family in a home we call China," we sang last semester. But I have never been so far from home.
These are things I tell myself on the hard days:
this is not my real life
elsewhere there are people who love me
I am lucky to be here
struggling will make me stronger
someday I will come home.
posted by Emily @ 4:28 AM
5 Comments:
It doesn't take very long at all for Westerners to start looking foreign when you are in Asia-- and it can be startling to realize that you are one of them. When you take up twice as much room on public transportation. When you realize that people-- not just children, everyone-- is staring at you. A really disrupting moment for me is when I turn down a street and realize that I have no idea if the shops I'm seeing are restaurants, or dry cleaners, or electronics stores, because I cannot read the signs.
At this point in my life I find that this sort of disruption from my usual state of consciousness is, if not pleasant exactly, at least a moment of existential awareness. On the other hand, I've never had to do it for as long as you have. For me it is like swimming underwater. For you, it must be like trying to learn to be a dolphin.
But is a dolphin as cute as a baby duck?
Hang in there, kiddo. I know what you mean about the tattoo. Our visit to Japan really opened my eyes to what it is to be a minority and an object of constant attention. You have the advantage, though, of being able to speak and understand the languauge. I was just exhausted by trying to pick up visual clues..any clues...to what things were about and how to find what I needed.
Funny, but though you wouldn't think so, I, too, know about being a foreigner, and sticking out, although it's only when I speak. Strangely, except for very broad accents, I no longer hear Australian speech as inflected differently from my own, but I am often acutely aware when I speak in public that there are ears pricking up at my intonations. And while Commonwealth countries are very well represented here, that isn't usually why Australians ask me if I'm Canadian, but rather because they prefer to give me the benefit of the doubt. Anti-Americanism isn't deep or particularly prevelant, but in the city centre (less so out in the western suburbs) the politics run against the current administration. Hard to believe John Howard's PM. I suppose it's because he'll sell uranium to China and coal to North Korea, a bit like his political hero, 'Pig Iron' Bob Menzies, who famously did deals with imperalist Japan even while they were about to launch there full rampage across the Pacific. Luckily, Labor got in before we sold much steel. I digress.
Yeah, I get it about the tattoo, although I float through 99% disguised. I suppose it's why so many expatriates become a little reticent in their demeanor.
Wow. Greg talks about Australian politics even on other people's sites.
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