R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

So the Chinese have a very different sense of boundaries than Westerners. It’s 9:45 am on Saturday (6/2) morning and I’ve been up for the better part of three hours. I’ve been exhausted this week and had fully planned on sleeping in this morning. However, at 7 am, my cell phone started ringing.

Incessantly.

Concerned, I answered it, still half asleep. I expected it to be news of the Jude who was having minor surgery today. Even if it wasn’t the Jude, it could have been important. Perhaps it was one of my friends. Perhaps it was another family member. Perhaps they were in trouble and needed my help. Perhaps my grandmother, who has been ill in the hospital, passed away. Perhaps I got that job at the local university teaching literature for the summer.

“Hello?” I answered, sleepily.

On the other end was one of countless, random Chinese people who have my cell phone number. As this is a communist country, everyone must have the same everything, including sleep cycle. The Chinese sleep cycle is from 1am to 6am. Before 1 am and after 6 am, the Chinese are perfectly comfortable calling each other because anyone caught sleeping outside of those five hours are lazy. Even on weekends.

And he had the audacity to be angry with me because I hadn’t returned his (literally 6) emails in a timely manner. It was all I could do not to yell, “Are you fucking kidding me?!”

As it is considered exceptionally rude to not give out your cell phone number, I find myself between a rock and a hard place. All the people I meet know at least one person I know so to not share my number with them is an affront that will certainly make it back to a social circle that matters to me. My favorite piece of this all is that the conversation being offered by most of the people who ask for my phone number is not notably interesting; they primarily see me as a receptacle for their desire to express their thoughts in English. They do not see me as person and the singular argument for their frustration when I’m not 100% committed to our “relationship” is “But you are the first foreign person I know.” My gut response is, “And how is that enough for me?”

I really adore being their foreign toy because means my cell phone number is unquestionably communal property and they are free to share it with everyone and anyone who wants proof that they actually know a foreigner. I get lots of calls from people who simply want to hear my “Hello?” And, I’d resort to screening all my calls but often my friends and family call from numbers my phone doesn’t recognize, to say nothing of the people looking to offer me a summer job. And if they’re calling from a number I don’t recognize, they usually can’t text message me. And China doesn’t believe in voice mail. Which means I can’t screen.

And, this lack of Western time sensitivity extends to banging on my front door. At 8 am, someone started banging on my door. As history has proven, only the people I know call me before banging on my door. And, invariably, the people banging on my door without calling first means I have a neighbor desperate to shoot rapid fire Mandarin at me. As I am the first Western they have ever met, I am also the first adult they have ever met who does not speak Chinese fluently. In other words, they have no idea how to handle my minimal Chinese so they neither slow down nor simplify when I am confused; they merely speak more rapidly and do their best to over articulate their concepts. When I ask them to do slow up and simplify, they laugh, thinking me silly, and continue on with their rapid-fire baroque language. Which means, I have to confront a stranger’s great frustration at the language barrier at 8 am if I choose to open the door. The cherry on top is that if it’s a bunch of women (and it usually is) they feel no qualms about inviting themselves into the check out every inch of my apartment. (I reflexively hide all expensive looking items so as not to appear as wealthy or wealthier than the people I’m surrounded by. The last thing I need is to gain a reputation as the place to hit for thieves.)

And yesterday, it was Children’s Day. I got to school at 8 am (despite the fact that, contractually speaking, I’m not supposed to be there until 10) was dressed up to celebrate my babies and was constantly berated with “Wow! Teacher you are beautiful!”

You might think “You are beautiful” isn’t ‘berating’ but trust me, it is. Countless teachers stopped me to tell me that, “I know you for one year and this is the first time you have impressed me.” To recap: I moved to China, didn’t speak the language, wrangled 1600 students every week, manage to get them to improve their English so much the school is being recognized by the government for its excellence, am loved by these children with whom I share no language, was courageous enough to risk a romance with a man while ignoring all cultural boundaries, I survived him breaking my heart/making me nuts, managed to maintain some semblance of my sanity and to top it off, I did it all with so much finesse only my closest coworkers (and then even in passing) noticed just how hard my life must be at times and what impresses them is a nice shirt.

A nice shirt and my newly shrunk ass is what impresses them after a year’s worth of survival.
A nice shirt and a small ass.

The sum total of a woman’s worth here seems to be her taste in clothing and her eating disorder. At least in the states, my closest friends don’t give a shit about my clothes and the size of my ass.

It’s safe to say that today I’m fucking sick of being a second-class citizen (read: woman) in this fucking country. I feel like I’ve worked hard, earned some goddamned respect and it’s about time people fucking heard me when I spoke.