One evening during my second week of classes, two of my best students, Ann and Catherine, visited me at my apartment to chat. They were young teachers from the countryside who had come to the university as part of a continuing education program for primary school teachers from Dàtián, one of Sānmíng’s outer counties. It would have been unusual, and verging on inappropriate, to invite two younger undergraduate students to my apartment in the evening, but Ann and Catherine were about my age, and married with children. Their life experience made them way more mature than my 18-year-old undergraduate students—obviously, more mature than me, too.
Case in point: When they visited, my apartment was still as filthy as when I had moved in. Everything was covered in dust and grime, there were rust stains in the tub and toilet, and a layer of grit covered the kitchen counters. The place must have sat vacant for months before I arrived, and in Sānmíng dust accumulated quickly. The factories downtown pumped out huge clouds of smoke that flowed down the Shāxī (pronounced “Sha-shee”) River valley and blanketed Sanming University. Also, the villagers burned garbage outside the school gates. Sānmíng’s air quality was about as good as the dust bag of an old vacuum cleaner. Hence, an empty apartment quickly became a very dirty apartment.
A few days after Ann and Catherine visited, Ann sent me an email:
Dear Will
I’m very pleased that we can have conversation and go shopping with you, I found that I have more confidence to learn English now. I really can’t believe that I can speak to you so much words with my poor English, Even though that has lots of mistakes, but I’m using it!
We know, you have put a lot of effort into our English course, and you live here alone, So we really would like to help you for something that we can do, We think your home is a little untidy. As a man, Maybe you have not enough time, and you can’t do the housework so well. Next weekend, We won’t go home, so Catherine, Cindy and I plan to tidy the house for you, If we do that, Maybe it can make you more comfortable, and we can offer more chances to talk to you for ourselves, I think we can learn more from the conversation, Of course, We’ll wait for your respond.
Fresh rat droppings had been appearing on the floor of my apartment every morning—once, I woke up to find a small puddle of sticky rat piss on my computer’s keyboard, with a raisin-sized special delivery next to it—and the wall in the living room was home to a huge, grotesque patch of black mold. The filth was whining in the back of my brain like a dentist’s drill every day, accompanied by a jackhammer of self-censure: Why isn’t your apartment clean yet, Will? Two weeks isn’t enough time to pick up a mop? Huh, Will??
But I had no experience with moldy walls or rat excrement. So a few days after getting Ann’s email, I sheepishly called her and admitted that yes, it would be great if she could help me clean. That weekend, Ann and her roommates showed up at my door just before sundown, rags and buckets in tow.
The mothers were tremendously sweet. Most of them taught in deeply rural areas, where subsistence farming was common and there were almost no frills—few cars, no buses, no restaurants or glitzy shopping malls. Hence, they were excited to be back in college, studying English for a year with a foreign teacher. A few of them told me that coming to Sanming University was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to them. The women seemed to want to take care of me compulsively, which I desperately needed.
And yet niceness alone does not a friend make: Ann was the only Dàtián student with whom I became truly close. She was enthusiastic about English, which was part of the reason she went out of her way to befriend me. But she was also curious and sensitive to cultural differences in a way that other people weren’t, and she had character and a willingness to talk about herself with a foreigner that almost no one else possessed. In my first few weeks in Sānmíng, I was pretty much all on my own; after Allen gave me my class schedule and textbooks, he stopped contacting me. Ann sensed that I was isolated, and helped me.
It took less than 30 minutes for the mothers (with my dithering assistance) to clean my apartment. When they were done, I asked if I could pay them, but Ann made it clear that they wouldn’t accept money. I tried to compensate them by chatting with them in English, but they hadn’t come to chat either. Apparently they were doing this just to be nice, and they didn’t want me to ruin their niceness by giving them anything in return.
In general, Americans don’t expect help from anybody, and on those occasions when we do accept help we feel obliged to offer something in return, almost as payment—a big, gratuitous “thank you” at the very least. It’s striking, visiting the U.S. after a long stay in China, how anal-retentive Americans are about their personal property, time, and space—even between family members. It can feel alienating to outsiders: it seems as though even close friends and family members are constantly tracking each others’ intrusions on their lives, like coworkers who can hardly stand one another.
Chinese people, on the other hand, generally say thank you only to strangers. It’s not rudeness; rules of etiquette in China are equally as complex as those in America, if not more so. Instead, the lack of thank yous is itself a form of etiquette. If you’re really close with someone, there’s a degree of careful nonchalance with which you’re expected to treat them, as a way of expressing your intention to keep nothing private between you. Hence, thanking a friend or family member is usually viewed as too formal—a distancing maneuver, sometimes even hurtful.
But I am American, and I was feeling exhausted by how grateful I felt all the time, and how people looked at me suspiciously when I tried to thank them. I really wanted Ann and her roommates to take money or a free English lesson so that I wouldn’t have to feel so bad. Instead, they refused money, showed no interest in practicing English, and when I offered copious thank yous, they blinked as if I was offering to count the hairs on their heads.
There are times when you have to accept help, and accept that you have nothing to give in return and that the universe is nonetheless fair. Now—in my third week in China—Ann was teaching me that in times like this I just had to accept, and not feel bad or indebted or guilty, because those feelings did nothing for anybody.
Before the ladies left, they reminded me that they wanted me to visit them in Dàtián sometime soon, and I promised I would. Satisfied that they had adequately rescued me from squalor, they squeezed out their rags, dumped out their buckets, and filtered out the door to go back to their dorms. I hadn’t even realized how filthy the apartment had been until they finished cleaning.
Boulders of stress fell forthwith from my shoulders. I had a clean apartment; I had gotten over jetlag; I was getting to know my students; and my anxieties about teaching had begun to subside. I was checking things off my list and getting used to life in China.
There was just one thing left that was still causing me anxiety, whose resolution was going to take more than a mop and elbow grease—a problem that had been occupying at least half of my conscious thought since I had left the U.S., and that for the past three weeks had been a source of near constant internal conflict, which I had struggled, and failed, to turn off. It was, of course…
My girlfriend.