ANATEVKA, 1905

It would appear that in Anatevka, even Nancy Drew needs Yente. (For those of you unfamiliar with that reference, Anatevka is the town in which "Fiddler on the Roof" is set, Yente is the matchmaker and Nancy Drew is the naÔve girl-detective who stumbles into success with each case despite her Pollyanna lack of reality.)

So, Z had been avoiding me because "fighting" is seen as an incredibly intimate thing to do and to put a woman you’re not officially involved with in the position where she needs to fight with you is seen as very rude. Z is nothing if not a sweet, well-mannered man. Consequently, it was going to take more than me to fix what only me had sown.

Because I’ve found myself trapped in a "conveniently timed" Meg Ryan romantic comedy, it would appear that I was in fact clear about going trying to go to the museum again that next Saturday. Z works a part time job on Saturdays (he’s a Pilates trainer at a nearby gym) and was so busy he forgot to call me. He wasn’t at lunch on Monday and then I bumped into my boss leading to my freak out.

When we both saw each other later, we both had our respective bullshit issues going on and he did the Chinese-right thing by leaving me be. The issue with the Chinese-right thing is that he must have down my schedule as he manages to avoid me completely when trying to avoid me… and I tried hard to find him.

Which meant all I could do was employ my lunch-mate/Yente to fix it. Yente went to find him at lunch on Friday (12/22) and told him to come to our lunch table.

Now, the thing about the men around here is that they don’t apologize. I know this may come as a shock to most women to read but the men around here don’t like to apologize. (I would venture to take the wild guess that the men from around here don’t ask for directions either but I’ve yet to be lost with a dude from around here.) "If a man [around here] apologizes to you, he puts you in the position of being ‘the boss.’" Or so it has been explained to me on many, many occasions. I know, WILD, CRAZY country this China. Next, they’ll tell me the men have penises, the women have vaginas and that candy is bad for your teeth.

Crazy, whacked-out cultural differences aside, Z sat down and immediately turned to Yente and said (in Chinese) "Please, please tell her I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please tell her. Speak, say it." And so on and so forth.... in front of the room full of teachers, all of whom were watching us. Here was a man so desperate to have it known that he was sorry for fucking up, he didn’t care who witnessed it despite the fact that "saving face" is even more important in China than it is in the States. And his words weren’t a show for my benefit as he was still under the impression I speak NO Chinese and he did his best to be cool about his physical mannerisms.

Yente was as surprised as I was by his outburst and so she didn’t explain the apology to me. To be totally honest, we were both struck dumb.

Immediately, Z turned to me and said, slowly, loudly, desperately and clearly, "Dui bu shi!" The look on his face was so earnest, desperate and indifferent that there were several tables full of colleagues silently watching us that I really couldn’t be pulled from my being-struck-dumb state.

When he finally broke eye contact with me to implore Yente again to explain he was sorry I did all I could think to do, which was shake my head and hand (like you’re waving "hello" with limp fingers) both of which indicate "No." Words still failed me but I did remember body language. I remembered that both heartfelt apologies and heartfelt thanks are to be dismissed as redundant, not to be accepted.

I stumbled about in trying to find the right way to explain that it was okay but I think I didn’t explain properly. Nevertheless, the conversation moved along and somehow it came up that he doesn’t teach yoga but he teaches Pilates. He wanted to know if I would like to join him in a class of Pilates. So I said, "Yes" because I enjoy being humiliated by my lack of coordination in front of the boy I like.

Actually, I said "Yes" because there’s no way I could say, "No" to that boy, especially after the inadvertent scene he made.

So, we talked a little, he in his stilted English and I in my stilted Chinese. Both of us were rendered multi-lingual-challenged by the attention we were getting but we managed to muddle through it. I must say, my favorite parts of our conversation were where he forgot what he was saying simply because I was looking at him.

At one point, he was stopped so long that several of the tables of women near us who had been spellbound and wrent silent (no joke, no one is ever silent for anything, so the silence around us was staggering) by our episode of "As the Lunchroom Serves" all fed him the next line in unison the way people tend to do when the cinematic, suspenseful silence becomes too much to bear.

Upon hearing countless female voices say simultaneously, "’Saturday,’ tell her" in breathless Mandarin, I turned from Z to see tables of women wide-eyed, mouth agape, chopsticks-stopped-in-mid-air-with-food-still-pinched-between-them enraptured by the shenanigans of our table. I know I’m a sucker for romance but wow, I’ve got nothing on these ladies. I couldn’t help but giggle from all the attention we were getting and respect Z all the more for being able to muddle through anything with me.

As we wrapped up lunch, he did the possessive-guy thing of first making sure I had enough to eat and then carrying my things as we left. He even went so far as to carry Yente’s things too but made sure he had all my things first.

I must say, the schtetle does have its finer points.