A Chinese Wife

I’d traveled to China to find a wife. They were certain of it: every eligible American male in China sought to barter wealth and a visa for happily-ever-after.  So my students bragged about women in their work units who would suit me perfectly.  A few of my female students were perhaps a bit too giggly, coming to my apartment for free talks in their safety groups of five or six.

I sought many things from that year, but a wife was not among them.  In fact if I came to understand anything about China, it was how greatly the Chinese worldview differed from mine.  Communicating across that linguistic and cultural divide was tough enough without mixing in matrimonial demands.

These thoughts flashed through my mind the moment I recognized the voice on the line.  It was Janet, which was strange – students rarely called.  Each dorm had just one phone for about a hundred students, right in the main lobby.  Of course by this point Lin Da was practically deserted, which made me wonder why Janet had stuck around.  Apparently to insist: “I need to talk to you.”

“Umm, okay …”

“Can I come up?”

Bye Bye Bunnies

My lack of an endgame strategy for my rabbits had finally caught up to me.  Pauline had been wise in ducking this responsibility.  I knew Tie Die and Disco wouldn’t make it in the wild, and the prospect of their complementing a stir fry was unacceptable.

Lack of alternatives forced me to weigh an offer from one student.  Carly, an unmarried woman about twenty years old, had always adored Tie Die and Disco during free talks.  Better yet, she tongue-lashed anyone who picked them up by the ears or joked about cooking them.  The daughter of Lin Da staff members, she lived on campus with her parents, so my rabbits wouldn’t need to travel far.  When I insisted on a promise that they wouldn’t be stewed, she seemed even more determined than I was to protect them.

So before I headed west I packed my white puffballs in a box, bungeed it to the rack of my bicycle, and rode to Carly’s apartment. 

Farewell Gift

Powdery dodgeball pink, inner tubes sported a unique valve, neither Schrader nor Presta (the two valve types used in America).  At a bike supply store I picked up several spare tubes, as well as a tube patch kit, a backup air pump, and extra brake pads.  Then I noticed a bin of metal gadgets, sort of a cross between a carabeaner and a bottlecap.

“Zhe shi shen me (What are these)?” I asked the shopkeeper.  He charaded his answer with a gesture: spoke tightener.  An ingeniously convenient one, able to be used with just three fingers.  I added one to my purchase.  Then as I mounted my bicycle to leave, an idea occurred to me and I hurried back to buy another.

Mohawk

Two days until the biking trip.  Aside from fellow cyclists Chad and Chris, for six weeks I would see no one I knew.

Perfect time for a mohawk.

A little rebelliousness, a little casting off of responsibility — why not?  After the summer’s growth I could revert to a buzzcut, leaving photos the only evidence.  Something to tell the grandkids.  Plus I’d get to freak out a lot of Chinese people.

Aware of the difficulty of describing hairstyles across the language barrier, I drew diagrams: front, side and rear, both before and after. 

Karaoke

“Come on, Mistah Hobison!  You can sing it!”  They dragged me stageward and slipped some scribbled lyrics into my hand.  Disco ball spraying colors above me, I began:

Xie xie ni gei wo de ai
Jin sheng jin shi wo bu wang huai
Xie xie ni gei wo de wen rou
Ban wo du guo nei ge nian dai

The refrain was tricky (the verses even worse), yet they asked me to sing it enough times that I remember it to this day.

To celebrate semester’s end, my students had pooled their money to rent the modest karaoke room on campus. 

Composition

Assignment: Describe the perfect spouse.

Female student:

If I marry, I hope my spouse is a perfect person like my father.  I like my father because he is not only a good father but also a good husband.  He is a great man.

My father is a teacher who teaches mathematic.  He devotes his life to the education.  So I think my spouse will work well.  In the future, with the development of the science and technique, the society will need the person who works hard and has technical skill.  Of course, he will adapt to the society and have the courage to compete with others.  But I don’t hope he is a leader in the factory or company.

Dao Chang Cheng

Over two Saturdays I built up biking endurance through excursions farther and farther north of Beijing: two hours out, then two and a half.  Determined not to repeat my heat stroke fiasco, I paced myself and carried a ludicrous amount of water.

The third Saturday it was time.  I would pedal to the Great Wall.

I could see it on the map, lingering way up there.  My students had mentioned that the Olympic cycling team biked to the Great Wall regularly, so it was doable.  Rather than aim for either of the sections I’d already seen, I targeted a different area, where a pencil-line road snaked up and seemingly intersected the Great Wall – sans label.  That’s what I wanted: a section of wall unrestored, without guards to curb my exploration.  Four and a half hours out, four and a half back.  It’d be a long day, but then I needed to accustom myself to long days if I was going to cross western China.  So out I went.

Bike Bag

Where to find a bag big enough to carry a bike?

For the summer trip I’d need to take two train rides each way.  It was possible to pay to have my bike stored on the cargo car, but I feared that my poor language skills wouldn’t be enough to negotiate this, and was uncomfortable leaving my very expensive bike out of from my immediate influence for an extended period.  Stealing it out of a cargo car seemed all too easy – and then no trip for me.

So I was determined to break the bike down into components and slide it under my seat on the train.  How I would get away with this without alerting attendants would come down to a combination of hyper-friendliness, clueless foreignerism, and downright sneakiness: a challenge I welcomed.  But first I needed a bag.  A big one.

None of my students had ever heard of such a bag.  Come to think of it, neither had I.

Ambiance

One of the stores at Wu Dao Co began piping Nintendo music into the street, presumably to attract customers.  I’d never noted the place before but was surprised to realize it sold video games.

Out of curiosity I peeked in: racks upon racks of women’s clothing.  Not a single video game anywhere.

So why the blippy computer music?

Read next ->

Mornings

4:30am.  Head out.  Bike loaded with two two-liter water bottles, two hand-size bottles; backpack stuffed with bananas, beans, bike tools, spare tubes.

5:45am.  Rest on the far side of the nearest mountain range, in a wooded cove near an isolated intersection.  Eat bananas, beans.  Refill smaller bottles from one of the two-liters.

7:00am.  Return to Lin Da.  Cool off, shower, dress.

8:00am.  Arrive at Foreign Language Building to teach.

After a lonely brown winter and what had become the drudgery of teaching through the spring, Beijing bored me.  Was that all there was?  Was China really so uninspiring?

Then fear of the upcoming expedition drove me out of bed at 4:30 every morning, and I was circling mountains.