Everyday Adventure

Going outside feels risky.

I'm not worried about being mugged or my pocket being picked. I'm worried about the truth of my complete inability to survive on my own in Beijing being clearly seen by all the people I pass on the street everyday. I don't say a word, I try to look confident but I know I'm a sham. I'm a fish out of water praying that nobody notices my gills and fins flailing around trying to find some way to survive. I try to pretend that I know my way around, that I understand how traffic works and when it is OK and not OK to cross the street, that I can manage to get to where I need to go without incident. None of these are true.

I seek to be unobtrusive, to blend in with the crowd but this is a fantasy. I'm a tall white man in the middle of the the capital of China. I am staying in the university district so there are other non-Asians walking about but this doesn't change how I feel. Everybody stares. They're looking for the slightest sign of my ineptitude so that they can laugh or yell at me and let me know that I'm not fooling anyone.

I can't say more than "hello", "goodbye", "thank you" and count to four in Chinese. I don't know if you knew this, but these words don't get you very far in life. Yesterday, with great trepidation and anxiety, my wife and went to a Chinese restaurant on our own to have lunch. We faked our way through the process of getting seated and managed to order food from the pictures menu quite easily. Then the waitress asked a question.

My wife and I stared blankly. She repeated the question and we looked at her and shrugged. We pulled out the phrase book and leafed our way through it, her looking over our shoulders, looking at the printed Chinese translations. After a few more futile attempts, she gave up and left us. Tea and then the food we had ordered came. When it didn't seem that any rice was coming my wife suggested I ask for some. Ask for rice with the meal in China? Really? Well, we did seem to be lacking this key item so I pulled out the phrase book and used bilingual dictionary in the back to find the word for rice.

There is was. That word that she had been saying over and over again. She was asking if we wanted any rice. I flagged her down and foolishly pointed to the Chinese script in the dictionary. She gave us a frustrated smile and in short time we had two bowls of rice.

We are helpless here. Our adventure in eating out ended well, I suppose. We got food, we paid for it and we were only a minor hassle to the restaurant staff. The whole, time, though, I was on edge. How did we pay the check? Is this number on the check our total or our table number? Are they going to overcharge us? How much was each of these dishes again? All of this in what must be one of the most trivial transactions that can be made.

Living everyday in a place like this would be days and days filled with confusion, frustration, anxiety and helplessness. How do you survive in a place where you worry about not being able to buy groceries? It is humbling to have the cultural skills of a four-year-old. It is stressful to be in such a position and have the responsiblities of an adult. Only by the grace of God, could we survive in such a life.