(A Chinese student’s impressions of America 30+ years ago)
My friend Bruce’s school sits on a top of a hill overlooking the Ohio River in Cincinnati. The campus looked even more picturesque than my college back in Indiana, which I thought was quite pretty. I stayed in the men’s dorm with Bruce’s old college friends – young guys like me, some older and some younger. They were all very curious about me and about life in China. They asked me many, many questions about China, such as the foods we ate, clothes we wore, the kind of places we lived in, or the kind of things we did for entertainment. Did we ever eat American food? Did we watch TV? Did we travel? Etc.
This kind of curiosity may seem odd in the technology savvy world today or consider that big urban centers in America today seem to be filled with thousands upon thousands of Chinese tourists, students or Chinese people who have settled here. But 30 some years ago, there was no internet, and there were far fewer Chinese in America, especially in the traditionally more isolated areas like the mid-west or rural America. It’s human nature to be curious I suppose.
I remember during the first week I came to the US, I got invited to spend the weekend at a fellow student’s house. The invitation came from Adam P., a tall guy with a head of curly dark hair from the college choir I had just joined. I was surprised when Adam invited me – we barely knew each other. It is unthinkable in China, to invite someone you barely know to your house. Now I know Adam was just curious about me, the same way we Chinese were curious about foreigners (specifically the white people) years ago because we knew so little of them. We may show our curiosity by staring at foreigners; Americans show their curiosity in a little different way.
That first night Adam drove me to his house in Indianapolis, got a bunch of his friends together and we went to a restaurant. His friends, and Adam himself, asked more or less the same type of questions Bruce’s friends would ask me later. This was my first week in America, I had a hard time understanding plain, conversational English. I tried as much as I could to answer the questions; frankly I am not sure if I was able to make myself understood.
Then it was time to order food.
“Ok, what kind of pizza do you want?” Asked Adam.
“What? Pi…zza? What is it?” I asked innocently.
“What’s what?” Adam shouted back over the restaurant noise.
“This Pizza thing. What kind of food is it?” I shouted back.
“What? You don’t know what pizza is?” Adam raised his voice, sounding incredulous.
“No, I don’t.”
“Really? Are you telling me that they do not have pizza anywhere in China and that you have never tasted or heard of pizza before?”
“Never.” I responded plainly, slightly annoyed that Adam either couldn’t understand me or wouldn’t believe me.
I could hear that Adam and his friends were beginning to giggle.
When the food came, Adam, seemingly unable to contain himself by now, asked again:
“How old are you?” I don’t know why he kept giggling.
“20.” I said, before I could quite finish, I saw Adam standing up, moving about the restaurant, his long body towering over the patrons sitting there, his loud voice could be heard clearly:
“Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen! Sorry to interrupt your meal. But I want to show you something.”
The noisy restaurant all of a sudden became quiet. Adam then gestured in my direction, and moved closer towards me, then spoke slowly but loudly:
“Look at this man - he is 20 years old. Tonight, right here, in this place, he is about to have the very first slice of pizza in his life!”
The whole restaurant erupted with laughter and scream! I think I even saw flashlights from cameras (no cell phone back then of course). I was quite embarrassed and even felt humiliated. I did not feel like wanting to talk to Adam for some time afterwards…
Another incident I remember vividly happened at the office of Dr B., the college physician who did a physical on me. I wanted to join the school soccer team, and I had to go to his office to get physical clearance. Dr B. seemed surprised to see me, and told me that he could not remember when was the last time that he saw an Asian patient in his office. He examined me carefully with stethoscope, otoscope and other medical tools, all the while kept saying, almost to himself, “well all the organs are the same regardless of your races.”
Then Dr B. asked me to undress myself, which I did. He stared at me for what seemed like a full minute, which made me uncomfortable, then used some tool to check, I suppose, whether my organ would move normally. But there he was again, uttering that annoying “well, all the human organs are the same” nonsense while he was doing this to me! Needless to say I was quite released when he finally told me that the exam was over, that I was cleared to go and play soccer.
Anyhow back to the Seminary in Cincinnati. I am sure Bruce’s friends were as thrilled as Adam’s friends were by my story of stepping into my very first McDonald’s, at age 20, on my first day in America, and had my first ever slice of pizza in my life a few days later.
Then one guy, I think his name is Jason, asked me: “The Japanese produce a lot of nice cars, like Hondas or Toyotas. But I have not heard of any Chinese cars. What kind of cars do the Chinese people drive?”
I told him that the average Chinese (at that time) did not own cars but most people were using bicycles as the primary means of transportation, and that roads in China were full of bicycles instead of cars like here in America. I remember Jason was so surprised to hear this that his mouth remained wide open for a while, speechless.
I also had quite a few eye-opening experiences of my own at the school. I was surprised that the guys did not watch TV, and there were no TVs on campus anywhere. In fact, TV watching was banned on campus.
“We are Christians. There’s too much trash on TV. TVs are not good for us.”
How about radios?
No either. “Also, too spiritually corrupt.”
Any parties? By now I have already learned that all important event on the American college scene.
“Only prayer parties.”
I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t ask because there were too many unknown words to ask.
I wondered what other things that normal college kids would do but would not be allowed at the seminary.
“We don’t drink any alcohol – beer, wine, anything; and girls don’t put on make-ups.”
Oh yes, I realized that this was a co-ed school, and there were separate girls dorms and boys dorms (housed in separate buildings). When Bruce went to meet his girlfriend, he had to register at the front entrance. Even after the registration, Bruce was not allowed to enter the girl’s dormitory. His girlfriend – I believe her name was Lisa – had to be paged by the front desk and she came down to meet us.
It was a shock for me to see a “registration” requirement in an American dorm, a supposedly much more open and liberal place than China. This was more conservative than Chinese colleges. At the college back home, the only dormitory with access restriction was the “international building” that housed foreign students. Chinese students had to register at the front desk before we could get in to meet our foreign friends. No such restrictions existed between girls and boys dorms.
When I exchanged pleasantries with Lisa, she struck me as being different from all the other American girls I had met. At first I didn’t know what made her different. Then I realized Lisa had no make-up at all on her – no lipsticks, eye shadow, absolutely nothing on her – very, very different from any American girl I had seen up to that point. She also wore a very modest dress (“prairie dress” I would know later), the kind that reminded me of the type of clothes women wore only in old American movies.
As I got to see more girls on campus, I found out every girl or woman there looked more or less like another Lisa: no make-ups, all in similar conservative, old style dresses. Since very few girls back in China at that time wore make-ups, when I first came to America, it took me a while to appreciate the “beauty” in American girls, with their wild hair and sometimes even wilder make-ups or dresses.
The girls at Bruce’s seminary were different. They brought a comfortable feeling back to me as they reminded me of the girls back home: the conservative dress, the lack of make-up and the modest way they conducted themselves bespoke a kind of femininity that is subtle, natural and at the same time graceful and alluring.
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