Line 2 of the Beijing Subway
I think everyone has a moment when they realize their situation has changed more greatly than they first suspected. Let’s call it the Dorothy moment. My moment came a few weeks after Matt and I moved to Beijing while navigating the hated Xizhimen transfer between subway lines two and thirteen. We were the only white people in a sea of Chinese faces, though we stood out less because neither of us are particularly tall.
“I suddenly find that I want to talk to every foreigner I see,” my husband told me. It seemed random to me, but more than that, it seemed crazy.
“All of them?” I asked in what I suspect was a panicked tone. I looked around and could not imagine wanting to talk to more than one or two of the bustling people we were being herded alongside. My husband must have shot me a look because I suddenly realized my mistake: he had been referring to another white person we had apparently passed in the crowd, and he had the distinct desire to ask them why they found themselves living in a foreign country as well.
That last part is the key: we are living in a foreign country. We are the foreigners. More than two years later, I remember that event so clearly as the point when my view changed, when I was ushered into the expatriate understanding that all this crazy stuff around me was actually the norm and that I was the oddity. Though it seems ridiculous and unfathomable at times, the way that I spent my life learning to live means next to nothing here, and the sooner I learn to give up the way I thought was right, the better I will feel about all of this. This starts with the realization that you, indeed, are not in Kansas anymore.
What was your Dorothy moment?
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I’ve always held that if you’re going to do something, you should do it well, to a high standard, and that there are some things which are objectively good or bad: electrical appliances should be largely incapable of killing their user, bikes should have brakes that work, and taxi drivers should definitely not drive at oncoming vehicles in the wrong lane. I think my moment came when I looked at the power strip next to the bed in my friend’s spare room (where I was staying for my first couple of weeks in China) and realised that, were I to accidentally step on it in the dark, I would quickly feel 220 volts burning a hole in the bottom of my foot due to a plastic insert having fallen out which had left the live contacts exposed.
‘How ridiculous’ I thought to myself, ‘that this device is designed in such a way that this insert can fall out and leave the contacts exposed. In my native Australia, you cannot sell a device that so easily exposes the user to lethal forces. Surely this power strip is an anomaly.’
I was to discover, however, that rather than being an anomaly, the questionable design of this power strip was evident in almost every device of its type, and not only that, but it was common for non-double-insulated electrical devices to be ungrounded, for power cables to have removable grounding pins, and for people to generally not be concerned about the potentially fatal consequences of these things.
It slowly dawned on me that the high standards that I had taken for granted meant nothing in this place. I was in a world where near enough was good enough, and to a perfectionist like me, that meant that I was definitely in a foreign land. I was going to have to either loosen up or go insane. So now, I take it for granted that bikes take a few more life-threatening metres to stop than they should, and that my taxi may sometimes be heading towards the front end of a bus. But buggered if I’m going to plug into that dodgy power strip mate, I’ve brought my own.
When I arrived in China oh so many years ago, my first goal was to be able to buy groceries for my family. I learned the phrase, “how much?” and my numbers one to ten in Chinese and off to the market I went, alone. I knew I could do this.
I had heard that vendors sometimes charge foreigners more and I was not going to be cheated. So I walked around the market and finally decided to stop in front of a woman selling peanuts. A woman wouldn’t cheat another woman would she?
I stumbled out my bad Chinese and asked how much.
She responded in a word I had never heard before. In my brain I repeated the words one to ten and this word was not there. I repeated my question and she said the same thing.
This must mean she was going to charge me a bigger number than ten and that was too much. Frustrated I went home.
Once home I told my friend that the lady tried to cheat me. I told her what I thought she said and my friend laughed. Oh I forgot to tell you they don’t use the word two in money transactions, they use a word similar to “a couple”.
The peanuts were in fact quite cheap. I had made the woman into an evil market woman in my head and in fact she was very fair with me.
I knew at this point I was NOT in Kanas anymore. I had a lot to learn, but I did go back and buy the peanuts, they were great.