Foolish by the Beijing Zoo:
A Cultural Exchange
by Peter Linsley
“We—my family—we don’t have much money, but I am happy, Peter.”
I can usually tell when Zhou Yao wants to emphasize a point he’s making because he chooses to speak English, perhaps to make sure I understand. Usually I can, despite his heavy Beijing accent, that guttural “rrr” with which every sentence inevitably seems to trail off. “It’s no problem,” he says, “I’m happy.” He grins as he wears the Boston Red Sox t-shirt I gave him on the first day. Afterward he lights a cigarette.
It’s almost 11 p.m., and a mist hangs over the Beijing skyline, illuminated by the distant glow of blinking antennas and flashing billboards. Over a nearby rooftop I can see advertisements for Motorola and the Olympics, a McDonald’s logo beside the entrance to a traditional dumpling restaurant. Curving, florescent letters are mounted along the sides of two converted office buildings. One reads “KTV” and another “Ito-Yokado,” which is a four-story Japanese department store where I often buy my groceries. Down the street from us is a new Kentucky Fried Chicken where Zhou Yao will start working on Monday afternoon.
Even at this hour you can hear the faint buzz of traffic, and I wonder if I, too, will need to join the traffic and flag a lonely taxi ride back to our dorm at the Beijing Institute of Education. I have yet to finish memorizing the night’s vocabulary and already regret putting the grammar off until tomorrow morning before class. But I know this is the last thing on Zhou Yao’s mind. “Foolish,” he would say. “Foolish, Peter. No worry.”
Tonight my roommate has brought me to a place quieter than most, and this, of course, is saying a lot. We are in China’s capital, a little less than three weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics. The streets are anything but peaceful despite government crackdowns on city traffic and the recent completion of three new subway lines. Tonight, however, we’ve found something of a hideaway from the chaos—a little park that stands adjacent to the Beijing Zoo. It is an odd spot where a canal floats in from behind the tiger exhibit to form a pond, and the whole place is enclosed by winding brick paths, bamboo groves, and drooping Peking Willows.
Zhou Yao says he’s come here before with his friends from school. It’s one of his favorite spots. Chinese people don’t like to go to the bars, he tells me. Too expensive. “That’s what the foreigners do, not us,” he pats his chest as he speaks. “Us, we sit. We talk!” And I nod and smile as I do a lot with Zhou Yao. It’s not the first time he’s told me this.
Somehow a month has passed since Zhou Yao barged into my room a day late for orientation with nothing but the shirt on his back and a guitar case strung over his shoulder. It’s been a month since that 12-hour plane flight over the North Pole, when I sat fidgeting in United Airline’s coach class, nervous even though I’d been to China the previous summer to teach English. “Peter, Peter, Peter,” he mutters as he comes back each evening, slurring the r’s as he grins, teeth stained light yellow. And this is how our conversations over the past month always start: a trade-off between his broken English, my equally broken and toneless Chinese, and a shameless, though oddly intelligible, combination of the two languages which my classmates affectionately call, “Chinglish.” It is through this cultural exchange that I learn something of Zhou Yao and his life, though the process isn’t always easy.
As is often the case with people from China and the United States, Zhou Yao and I have much in common but a lot that is impossibly different. We’re both college students of course, but we are two vastly different kinds of students. In his eyes, I’m simply “foolish.” Zhou Yao first uses this word on the second night as I attempt to describe the nature of my humanities major and my school. I try to explain to Zhou Yao the value of a liberal arts education. Phrases like “gaining context” and “holistic understanding” come to my mind, but they are hopelessly untranslatable. “But, Peter, what can you do with these things? How can you find job?” And I don’t always know how to respond. But I expect this response from Zhou Yao. His passion is music, but he chose to study mechanical engineering at the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. He studies diligently to find a job because, as far as his family is concerned, there is no other choice. There is no holistic understanding involved.
A little more than two weeks into the semester, I innocently ask Zhou Yao if I can meet his family, maybe get together with some of his friends. It would be nice to get out of this part of the city for a while, I say. But each time there is a different excuse. At first there is some sort of a barbecue planned one Friday night. I was imagining genuine Beijing chuars (skewered meat) and peppers, watermelon, and homemade mianbao (bread)—and getting a chance to talk with the locals, improve my spoken Chinese, and make some real Chinese friends. “Zhen de Beijing ren,” says Zhou Yao, meaning he and his family have always lived in Beijing. But then his mother is sick. Stomach problems, he tells me. We can’t go.
One time, while we eat dinner down the street from school, I ask him offhandedly what his parents do. For a minute he doesn’t answer, just sucks at the miantiao (noodles), in long slurps from his bowl as though I hadn’t asked. I’m looking at my plate for the most part, concentrating on picking up a piece of beef from the rice. “My father doesn’t work,” he answers, and he doesn’t speak of his mother. Though not cold, his tone is quiet and his accent strangely clear. I understand every word, and after that I don’t ask any more questions.
This isn’t to say Zhou Yao never speaks of his family warmly. “My father says as long as I study, as long as I work hard and find a good job, then I can do the things I want to do,” he tells me one day as I practice writing Chinese characters at my desk. And for Zhou Yao I know that means playing guitar. Some day, he tells me, he wants to travel the world.
As we sit in the park beside the Beijing Zoo, Zhou Yao lays his arm across my shoulder. He breathes deeply from his cigarette. As the night goes on, we talk of amusing things and serious things, from working at KFC to the amazing guitar skills of Eric Clapton.
As he goes on, I’m half-listening and half-thinking of home; then, somehow, the two seem to mold together. I wonder what strange combination of elements shape the two of us, Zhou Yao and I, before and now, such different people, suddenly cast anew in the other’s light. Perhaps a bit of Zhou Yao will rub off on me before all this is over. And I think this would be a good thing.
I look at my watch, almost 1 a.m. It will be hard to find a cab. “We should get back,” I say. “Foolish, Peter. Foolish,” says Zhou Yao, and he stands up, though I know he could keep talking all night.
At the time this article was printed, Peter Linsley studied Chinese and Religion at Bates College in Lewiston, ME. He spent the summer and fall of 2008 studying Chinese at the Beijing Institute of Education with the CET Beijing Language Program (www.cetacademicprograms.com). He lived in China once before, during the summer of 2007 as a volunteer English teacher in Xi’an with Cross-Cultural Solutions (www.crossculturalsolutions.org).