<A> The Longest First Night in China

Rough Landing

The plane touched down, and I leapt up, the first to grab my bags and dart for the exit. After waiting an eternity for the plane doors to open, I stepped out into the airport, which at 7:00pm was thronging with travelers. Finally, Hong Kong!

In all of my 22 years, I had spent a grand total of four weeks outside the borders of my native USA. As a young man with no desire to join my friends in the slow climb up a corporate ladder, I was eager to strike out on my own and seek adventure in foreign lands. So after studying Chinese during my senior year of college, I found a job teaching English in Baoan, a suburb of Shenzhen, one of the fastest growing cities in the fastest growing country in the world.

The first thing I did upon in Hong Kong was the same thing I’ve done many times since then: I got lost. I had been instructed to take the ferry from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, but I hadn’t counted on there being two ferries: one to Shekou, one to Fuyong. I didn’t have a working cell phone or any Chinese currency, and there were no public phones in sight. With no way of contacting my employer, I gambled and took the ferry to Fuyong.

I gambled wrong. The school had told me that someone holding a sign with my name on it would be waiting to pick me up. At Fuyong, there was no sign with my name on it. There were no signs with any names. No signs at all.

Fortunately, the one vehicle waiting in the parking lot was a free shuttle to Shenzhen International Airport. There, I hoped, I would be able to exchange money and use a phone to contact someone from the school.

At the Shenzhen Airport however, my prospects for making contact with someone from the school looked bleak. The cavernous airport seemed nearly deserted. Summoning my courage, I approached an information booth and tried out my rudimentary Chinese.

“I need to exchange currency,” I said in Chinese.

“Of course,” the female attendant responded with a broad smile. Success! She had understood me! All the long hours of painstaking study had finally paid off. My teachers would be so proud!

“But all the banks are closed now,” she continued, still smiling. “You will have to do it tomorrow.” My celebration would have to wait.

I thanked her and walked away. No Chinese currency, no way to call my contact, no idea where my school was, and no idea what to do next. I paced back and forth, marveling at my ability to get completely lost within twenty minutes of landing in China.

“Hun-ga-lee”

Where could I change money? Where could I make a call? Where could I go?

Overwhelmed by the torrent of questions rushing through my head, I wasn’t aware of her presence until she was only a few steps in front of me: a young Chinese girl wearing a white shirt, cut-off jeans, and a small, sporty backpack.

She stepped forward to speak, “I’m hun-ga-lee,” she said.

“What?” I asked, taken off guard by her sudden appearance.

“I’m hun-ga-lee,” she repeated, leaning further towards me and speaking quietly. I was surprised and relieved to hear that she was speaking English, or at least something that faintly resembled English.

She had big, earnest eyes, which struck me immediately as very warm and friendly. I was happy that she was talking to me, though I had no idea who she was or why she had approached me. In my confusion, I thought briefly that she must be someone from the school, come to pick me up and relieve my suffering. But I dismissed this idea immediately, as no one could possibly have known where I was. More likely she was trying to be nice to a foreigner in distress.

“You’re who?” I asked in Chinese, smiling sheepishly at my inability to understand her.

Speaking in the same hushed voice and looking into my eyes with an earnest gaze, she responded in Chinese, “I’m hungry…KFC!”

She was hungry. Now I got the message. She repeated a fourth time, now adding, “No mon-ay!”

She was well dressed, and we were standing inside a brand-new, brightly-lit international airport in the middle of a thriving metropolis. Not exactly a fitting setting for a beggar, and she didn’t look the part. We had already spoken a few words, and I couldn’t just walk off at this point. Where would I go, anyway? I was still lost and had no idea where to look for help.

I now feared that the first thing I would do after getting lost would be to throw away my money to a beggar or a con artist. Unfortunately for her, however, I didn’t have any Chinese currency. She had picked the only foreigner stuck in a worse position than she is. I explained to her, “I want to help you, but I only have American money.”

Undismayed, she tugged on my shirt sleeve and bade me to follow her toward a flight of stairs leading up to the next level of the airport.

“No good”

After a few minutes of following her through the airport, however, my faith in her as a knowledgeable native quickly faded. She walked into the airport’s KFC and asked if they accepted U.S. currency, which of course they didn’t. But one of the cashiers in KFC pointed us in another direction, and off we went down another corridor, suitcase in tow.

At the end of the hallway we reached an ATM. She pointed to it with an eager smile and asked me if I could change money there. I looked at her in mild disbelief. Doggedly persistent, she asked a few more people and then led me back to the stairs.

Returning to the first floor, she led me to a man leaning against a table by the exit. His small black fanny pack was straining at the seams, presumably bursting with money. He was more than willing to change currency for me.

I asked him how much I could get for U.S. $100.

“720元,” he responded, a figure I knew to be well below the official exchange rate.

In my halting Chinese, I tried to explain to him that the amount should be closer to 800元. We argued back and forth for several minutes, until finally the money changer explained patiently that he was a private individual, not a bank, and thus was not bound by the official exchange rate. So much for haggling, I thought. I handed over my $100 bill in concession, and he placed 720元on the table while inspecting my money.

I had failed miserably in my first attempt to bargain, but I comforted myself in the thought that I had now overcome one of the several obstacles facing me. Equally encouraging, my new female companion had proved herself useful after all. Now that I had Chinese currency, I could…

“No good!” The money changer thrust my $100 bill back into my hands.

“What’s the problem?” I asked in disbelief. The man pointed disapprovingly to a small tear in the crease running down the middle of the note. “No good,” he repeated.

“No good,” the girl offered in explanation.

“Are you kidding?” I asked in English, without expecting an answer. I shoved the bill into my pocket and handed him another. He held the new $100 bill up to the light and squinted, craning his neck for a better view. This bill also had a noticeable crease down the middle, but no tear.

“No good,” he repeated, pointing to the crease and pushing the note back at me.

My female companion waved him away dismissively, snatched the Chinese currency off the table, and marched off, towing me away by the shirtsleeve.

A Taste of China

As the KFC was now a flight of stairs above us, my female companion mercifully led me to the airport’s McDonald’s on the ground floor, sparing me another trip up the stairs with my suitcase. She ordered a chicken sandwich, a hash brown, and a frosty—made in China, but pure American.

Had I really just traversed an ocean and eleven time zones only to have my first meal in China in McDonald’s? This wasn’t exactly the glorious culinary cultural immersion that I had imagined. Over the summer, I had ordered Chinese takeout and practiced with chopsticks at every opportunity, all to prepare my stomach and my hands for the ultimate test: eating in China without dropping a hot dumpling on my lap and disgracing my entire civilization in front of my hosts. Many sore fingers and plates of kung pao chicken later, I was holding a Big Mac with both hands.

I asked my new companion if she liked this kind of food.

“Yes,” she said through a full mouth. “But I’ve never had it before.” I thought at first she meant she had never ordered the frosty before.

“You also like KFC, right?” I asked.

“Yes, but I’ve never eaten there either,” she replied.

Where was this girl from, anyway? She seemed well dressed and very friendly, but she didn’t seem to know her way around very well. She had already asked if KFC accepted foreign currency and if I could change money at an ATM. Now it turned out that she had never eaten at McDonald’s or KFC.

I needed to know more about this girl, to reconcile some of the contradictions but mostly to learn how a seemingly well-off youth had been reduced to begging for food in this prosperous city.

She told me that she was 19 years old and still in high school. She lived with her parents in a district neighboring Beijing, the name of which I couldn’t quite pronounce correctly. She had left home only four days ago and traveled to Shenzhen to find a job.

“What kind of work are you looking for?” I asked. She answered, but I didn’t understand her Chinese and gave here a blank stare. She tried again, tugging on the sleeve of my shirt and making hand motions of sewing, saying, “Make clothes.”

Like so many things about her, this news struck me as odd. I had assumed that as a young girl leaving home to seek her fortune under the bright lights of Shenzhen, she would be leaving behind factory work in search of something better.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

She pouted and shrugged her shoulders, casting her head down and avoiding my eyes.

“Do you have a place to stay?” I pushed.

“No, I don’t.”

“Where are you staying tonight?”

Again, she shrugged her shoulders and looked away. How could she be homeless, I wondered. Does she really have no family or friends in this city? Where has she been sleeping the past several nights? I left these questions unasked.

“Did you tell your parents you were leaving?”

“No,” she said. “They didn’t know. They must miss me by now, and I miss them. I miss my mother.”

Why did she leave home without telling her parents if she didn’t have enough money? Why couldn’t she have looked for a job near her home? “They don’t have money to give me,” she explained. “And there are no good jobs where I live.”

An Indecent Proposal

No money, nowhere to stay, no way home. Her problems certainly outweighed mine. Yet I couldn’t shake the impression that from her appearance alone, I easily could have seen her as hailing from a well-off family that could afford to buy her trendy clothes. Maybe the clothes here really are that cheap, I pondered. Perhaps even the beggars can afford fake Louis Vuitton bags.

“Can you help me buy a ticket home?”

“How much?” I asked, skeptical at this fresh demand for more money.

“It’s about 400 元.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

At my request, she broke down the price for me, giving me the cost and the length of time required for each leg of her journey: a train and then a bus to her home town.

Four hundred yuan seemed awfully steep, and I didn’t want to continue my string of mistakes by losing all my money in a scam on the first night.

But she struck me as sincere. When asking for the money, she had leaned forward and lowered her voice, seemingly ashamed to be caught in such dire straits. At this point, I had already engaged her so much that even if her story was a complete fabrication, I couldn’t just leave her in the lurch now.

“Ok,” I said. “Where do we go to buy the tickets?”

“We can’t today, they are closed. I will have to buy them tomorrow.”

I didn’t want to hand her 400元 only to find myself back where I had started. So I made her a counter offer.

“Look, you don’t have anywhere to stay tonight, and you can’t buy your tickets until tomorrow. I don’t know how to find my school. Even if I find it, it will be closed, and there will be no way for me to get in.” I struggled to act calm as I prepared to deliver the kicker.

“So, if you want, and I don’t want to scare you, but if you want, we could rent a hotel room tonight. Then, tomorrow you can go to your train, and I can find my school.”

She didn’t like that idea one bit. She pulled her head back and scowled at me.

“Nothing bad!” I protested. “Nothing bad! Two beds! We don’t do anything!” She had me repeat some of the details for confirmation, but still she didn’t seem keen on the idea.

Mine wasn’t a very polite proposition in any language or culture. And my broken Chinese certainly didn’t lend it any elegance. But I thought this was a good plan, one that would leave both of us better off. I could give her a safe place to stay tonight and a ticket home tomorrow, and she could help me find a hotel and get me to my school.

“I want to help you,” I continued, painfully conscious of just how slimy my proposal sounded. “So I will help you buy the ticket today if you want. But you don’t have anywhere to go tonight, right? So why don’t we get a hotel room, and tomorrow we will leave. Or if you want, I can just give you the money for the ticket tonight.”

After more prodding and further confirmation that we would definitely have two separate beds, she relented. “Maybe it will be better,” she agreed, “because my train is in Baoan district where you need to go. So we can get a hotel there, and tomorrow we will both be close to where we need to be.”

“Great,” I smiled. “Let’s go.”

On the way out, I asked for her name.

“Xiao Mei.”

On the Road

It was around midnight when we left the airport, and there were few other people in sight. Outside, a man offered to take us into town in his unmarked “taxi.”

“Great,” I mumbled. “From black market money changer to black market taxi. Maybe on the way we can buy some DVDs for movies that haven’t come out in theaters yet. Heck, why don’t we rob a bank while we’re at it?” I kept my thoughts to myself and hopped in. Xiao Mei and I shared the back with a young woman and her baby, and in the front seat sat a man whose face I never saw.

We sped out of the parking lot and onto the highway, where our taxi vied for a place among the men and machines crowding the road. Street merchants pulled carts piled high with vegetables through the middle of busy streets. We sped by mopeds and electric bicycles with only inches to spare. The yellow line dividing the road into halves held no meaning for the bus barreling the wrong way down our lane. It seemed to careen straight toward us, only to swerve aside at the last possible moment.

Noticing my death grip on the door, the driver inquired curiously, “Is driving different in your country?”

“Yes,” I responded in as natural a voice as I could muster from lungs that didn’t want to breathe. “It is…slower.” The other passengers roared with laughter.

“Driving here isn’t easy,” the driver observed with a lazy chuckle. Then, leaving one hand on the wheel, he casually leaned back to get a good look at me. I could feel my heart race faster and faster with every moment that his eyes were diverted from the road. He could probably smell my fear, but he took his time to say, “That’s why you should pay me more!” The car again erupted in laughter.

What a joker. I probably would have laughed as hard as the others if I hadn’t been so terrified of dying in a fiery, multi-car pileup that would leave my broken body strewn across the road.

We made it to downtown Baoan in one piece. The driver, still reeling from his own joke, dropped us off on a street full of flashing lights and sped off with a laugh.

Umbrellas

Xiao Mei and I walked about a block before finding a sufficiently cheap hotel. We checked in, and I dragged my suitcase up the five flights of stairs to our room. Once inside, I sat on my bed and she on hers, and I struggled to make conversation to bridge the chasm between us.

I told her that though it had been a cloudless day, I had seen many girls carrying umbrellas. Why?

“Because,” she explained patiently. “Chinese girls want to have white skin. It is very beautiful.” She clutched her arms, which were tanned dark brown. “You see, very ugly. But this,” she said, inspecting my arm, “this is very pretty.”

This was news to me. “Look,” I pointed to my arms, which are substantially whiter than those of any Caucasian who has been outside at least once in the last year. “These white arms, this pale face – in the U.S. people think I am ill!” She giggled, one hand covering her mouth, the other waving away this silly idea.

“No, seriously,” I persisted. “Being this white looks unhealthy. Friends tell me I should see a doctor. But you,” I pointed to her dark brown arm. “All white women in America want to look like this. You hide under an umbrella, but women in America sit outside for hours to look like you.”

She found the idea of pale women in a far-away land lying in the sun to bake their skin ridiculous, just as I found it strange that women in China shuffled around under umbrellas on clear days to escape tanning.

“Women here want white skin, women there want dark skin,” I began.

“Maybe they are in the wrong country,” she concluded.

Puzzle Pieces

When we ran out of things to talk about, Xiao Mei began looking through my suitcase. Maybe she wanted to know what made it so heavy. Several electronic devices caught her eye, and she pulled them out one by one: digital camera, MP3 player, even my electric toothbrush. As she examined them, she asked how much they had cost in the United States. Embarrassed by this physical evidence of the disparity in our living standards, I told her, “You can get it cheaper in China!”

She was also curious about the handful of books in my suitcase. I tried to tell her what they were about, but they were all about China, and I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain much beyond that. She looked through them and paused at the pictures, asking me what the captions said. Flipping through the pages of a history book, she stopped at a picture of Chinese peasants harvesting wheat with long scythes.

“Have you ever done this?” She asked.

“No, have you?”

She nodded. A piece of the puzzle of her life had now fallen into place. If she came from a farming family, then finding a job in the textile industry would be a step up for her after all. This may also have explained why she was embarrassed about her dark skin. If she had tanned while working in fields, then the color of her body itself was a visible indicator of her social status.

Next, she pulled out a disorganized stack of papers from the Chinese course I had taken over the summer. Flipping through the pages of Chinese characters, she paused on an excerpt from a news article my teacher had me. Underlining the sentences with her finger as she went, she began to read aloud. But the words came slowly. She struggled to recognize and pronounce many characters, and others she skipped entirely. She was barely literate. What to make of this 19 year-old girl who could hardly read? Yet another clue about the background that had landed her far from home with no job, no money, and no friends.

Without ceremony, I leaned over and put the 400元I had promised her on her bed, mumbling, “For your trip tomorrow.” I went to my bed and quickly fell asleep with the pillow over my head.

Falling through the Cracks

Xiao Mei and I woke up early the next morning and checked out of the hotel. She helped me call my boss from a public phone, and he arranged for someone to pick me up. I was to wait at the nearest recognizable landmark: a McDonald’s.

We ate breakfast together in McDonald’s, further delaying my first taste of authentic Chinese food. We didn’t talk much, maybe because neither of us was sure how to say goodbye to someone we had just met. I reconfirmed her travel details, “You’re sure you can get to the train station from here?”

“Yes, I can. It’s very close.” Perhaps I had just asked for my own sake, anyway. She needed her own reassurance. “When the man from your school arrives, what will you tell him about me?”

“I’ll tell him that you helped me find this place and that we had breakfast together,” I replied.

“Thank you,” she said, voice low, eyes downcast. We finished our meal in silence.

When my ride arrived, Xiao Mei and I parted without fanfare. I stepped into the car and waved goodbye. She waved back and watched me leave. In that moment, I thought I recognized something in her eyes. Maybe it was fear of being alone again. Maybe it was sadness at losing a new friend. Or maybe it was my imagination.

Who was she? She was a young girl in a desperate situation, hungry enough to beg for a meal, scared enough to go to a hotel with a stranger. Like millions of people in China, she had come to Shenzhen to take advantage of the city’s booming economy in the hopes of making a better life for herself and her family. But unlike the millions of Chinese who have been lifted up by China’s rapid growth, she has fallen through the cracks and been left behind. What happens in the next chapter of her story is partly up to her, but the odds are already against her.

I sat in the car in silence.

“Who was that?” the driver asked me.

I’ll never really know.