[Chapter Selection]
CHAPTER SIX
The Sidewalk Child’s Lesson – Reflections on Culture
I was alone one day, walking a dull, dirty street on an overcast, featureless morning in Hankou, the commercial center of Wuhan. The puddled sidewalks were crowded with ancient or middle-aged people bustling about their morning activities and shopping in the dark, concrete warrens that sometimes spilled over into the sidewalk with blue splintered mirrors, rusty plumbing fixtures, hardware, electrical wiring, ladies’ underwear (a pastel assortment of hugely padded little bras and insufferably paneled pantyhose that left two prominent parallel seams down the derriere). On one block alone were two Muslim noodle shops fragrant with lamb soup and baking bread; outdoor shampoo parlors with suds spilling into the gutter; cooks pouring huge vats of steaming gray water on the curbs; fruit vendors; nut vendors; baskets, brimming with vegetables or spices, that were slung on impossibly small shoulders of wiry men and women; confusion thick and conversations loud.
The usual cacophony of taxi horns, ear-splitting motorcycles, bicycle bells and distant jackhammers combined with the chaos of traffic in the streets, where pedestrians jostling one another inexplicably preferred to walk. There seemed to be no form to it at all, but the elemental civility of it amazed me. No one got angry. If a bicyclist collided with a car (and if no casualty ensued), he would simply right himself again and smoothly pedal on. It seemed like a perfectly impossible peaceable kingdom.
But it was the daily ballet of life, seamless and smooth in a way imperceptible to me, abashed and alone as I felt. The intensity of activity and general upbeat mood of the crowds punctuated my own torpor with small bursts of energy, like exclamation marks in vanishing ink that had marked and then left an empty page. I craved something to alter my dismal mood.
And there he was: the inveterate sidewalk scholar, seated at a tiny, weathered wooden desk in the middle of the sidewalk, next to the lunch shop’s equally tiny plastic red stools and table. It was the little child scribbling – no, not scribbling, but intently drawing – his meticulous Chinese characters.
Pretending to be interested in lunch, I had to find some way to sit close to him. The friendly cook, whom I took for his grandmother, smiled at me, and I smiled back. She was boiling water for noodles and had laid out bowls of red hot sauce, thick peanut sauce and scallions on an old metal stand. I got out the slowly toned words for “Please, I want” in Chinese and pointed to the noodles, her vat of boiling water, and the bowls of sauce. She nodded knowingly as she held up two fingers, “Liang kwai,” indicating two RMB or about twenty-five cents, and graciously set about fixing me lunch.
The little boy looked up at me quizzically. I sat down next to him and opened up a small notebook. Immediately I fell under his tutelage. He was impatient. He could write “cat” and “mouse” in carefully fashioned letters, he showed me. When I penned what I thought were a few careful Chinese characters, “America,” “China,” “university” and “Julie Kou-fu-le” into the notebook, he responded censoriously with a resounding, “No!” in clear English. With his crumpled, dirty clothes, food-stained face and grime-laden fingernails, and with all six or seven of his robust years of experience in life, he confounded and delighted me at once.
His grandmother brought me the welcome bowl of pungent noodles in hot peanut sauce, which I devoured not very neatly with chopsticks. She seemed radiant that her boy was tutoring an American teacher. I gestured toward the boy and said “tsong ming – very bright,” trying desperately to reverse position the tip of my tongue against my palate for the right sounds. She seemed to understand me and beamed, chattering at me in incomprehensible Chinese. She did not know that I had just exhausted my vocabulary.
I felt very nourished. No, more than that. The experience seemed again otherworldly, because the old awe and terror at the inscrutable, impossible language, its mystery, its impenetrability, and the paralysis I felt made me seem very tiny indeed, smaller and more soiled in some way than that clever young teacher who knew more worlds at his age than I could know in half a century. I left them as a light drizzle started and released the heavy humidity of the atmosphere into fine needles of rain on my skin.
Later in the day the sullen mood crept back over me as I wandered aimlessly through the ugly streets so bursting with vitality and life, despite the depressing Wuhan weather. My mind was trapping me.
I was annoyed to bursting with my linguistic incompetence. My geographical ignorance. The disorientation that stole over me and plagued me at the deepest level, since I continually lost my way even in streets that should have been familiar after many, many visits. I was angry at my useless education, at the fifth-grade geography teacher (why did I recall her crabby, kindly features so vividly now?) who squashed the unknown world of the East into the same category with ancient Mesopotamia. Angry at my stupid childhood prejudices about rickshaw drivers.
Without any will power, I thought of Dickens and the London fog he described, and of Wuhan’s polluted brown air. Of Dante’s aer perso, lost air, gray-blue air of the Inferno. Of Mrs. Jellyby’s kitchen in Bleak House and the shrimp-heads in shoes that spilled out of her kitchen closet. Of Jo the crossing sweeper and of neglected, dirty children in Dickens’s novel. Of the little scholar who, despite his grimy appearance, was far from the illiterate Jo. Of my own confusion. Of the disorder of my mind. Of mourning for the death of the sun, another image in Bleak House. Of the cheerfulness with which Wuhan people ignored the weather, did not even mention it as a manner of greeting, but seemed mildly amused at our weather-obsessed small-talk (fairly untranslatable into Chinese – unless you say, “Have you eaten today?”). Of how my moods were the playthings of nature or else of the polluted, denatured air. Of how my mind cried out for metaphors and images to make the day comprehensible, if only to land me back in my closed, inadequate categories. Of literature as a defense against raw experience.
Those fifteen times I had read Bleak House in preparation for class seemed to supply ready furniture to interpret the day, but it was furniture that I kept tripping on in a room that somehow trapped me. I wanted to get out of the room and to find some cheer in the relentless gloom of the day. Maybe the aer perso was inside me, not in the environment. I hailed a battered red Citroen taxi and climbed in, dreading the noisy, lonely, insufferably long ride back to campus through windless air thick with immobile soot and automobile exhaust. I still heard the little boy’s “No!” in my ears and found myself smiling.
