Sunday morning’s routine again, with everyone in the church repeating their rituals, except this time I could not have been the only one whose vision kept returning to Ann’s pew as I silently wondered who the other Chinese woman was sitting next to Caili. Since she looked about the same age, I puzzled over what her background might be. As far as I knew, any of the young Chinese international students involved with a church group went to the campus Wesley Foundation, and the small collection of Chinese families who lived in town and gathered for Chinese language church met in another Wesleyan church a mile away. Our church was neither Wesleyan nor international, and we had taken no official steps to attract any Chinese people, yet somehow two middle-aged Chinese women were now part of our otherwise constant assembly.
After the formal worship, over coffee and cookies, I was joined at my folding table by Caili and her friend. Unlike with Caili, I was not very receptive to my first meeting with this stranger, having sunk into a very low mood over my fast approaching job’s end, which added heavily to what I saw as my life’s accumulated woe. So, I only lethargically responded to Caili’s back-and-forth Chinese questions as a favor to my good friend. Caili’s new friend, on the other hand, was delighted by our demonstration of my babyish Chinese skills and giggled with my every pronunciation.
While she relished watching me, one of the American natives, try to speak her language for once, Caili’s friend wasn’t much for conversation in return. Everyone who met her that morning, it seemed, could almost instantly pick up that she only replied to questions by happily nodding and saying, “Yes,” or earnestly attempting a semblance of an answer that was nevertheless incomplete, unintelligible, or at best a tin eared stock response. Depending on the question and the clarity of the speaker, she would either let the words pass over her head or try to come back with a rehearsed phrase I assumed she had picked up from a Chinese English conversation book.
Caili, whose English people correctly described as “broken,” had worked very hard on her studies, and it showed to me that, even if her English seemed “broken,” she had climbed remarkably far up the language ladder. Her friend was a true novice whose dabbling with English allowed her to passively listen with barely discernible comprehension and repeat a few words she had committed to memory, yet she very much wanted to talk with me.
The answers came slowly and I wasn’t sure of them, but for starters I learned that she had visiting professor status at the university, like Caili, which meant she was free to study unattached to any coursework or degree program, and her name was Fang Zhu.
“Fang” was not pronounced like a dog’s tooth, but more like “Fong,” so from here on out I’ll write it “Fong.” And “Zhu” was like a cross between “chew” and “zoo,” or just simply it could be rendered “joo” (the pronunciation was pretty fuzzy to me for awhile, and even now I am never completely confident I am saying it clearly, or that it is even possible to say it clearly), but “joo” doesn’t look very Chinese to me, so I’ll keep it at “Zhu.” “Fong Zhu.”
Fong Zhu seemed briefly elated by our meeting, but I thought that would be the end of it. In fact, I was so jaded that dreary morning that I thought very little of it. Fong Zhu didn’t show up the next week or for the next several weeks, and during that time Caili left for California and I lost my job. Fong Zhu didn’t come back until (I would be told by her much later) Ann sent her an e-mail, asking her where she had been and telling her she missed seeing her. Somehow, I assume through an online copy-and-paste translation tool, Fong Zhu understood enough of the message that she was touched by it and returned to church the next Sunday.
With Aunt Fong
After the service, she came right up to me, chatting away in words I sifted through with much mental computation. One sentiment of hers stood out to me: she wanted to invite me over for a Chinese lunch. Now, I still knew very little about this woman, I was unsure of who she was and why she was so interested in me, so I tried to softly decline the offer. Then, I realized she wouldn’t really understand what I said, so I just mumbled something non-committal and let the strained conversation break off like a strand of cobweb as I searched for something else in the room I could focus my attention on.
So, besides my regular trips to the gym, I mostly stayed home that week. Fong Zhu’s dinner date wasn’t even a thought on my mind. But come the next Sunday, Fong Zhu was back in Ann’s pew, and as soon as people had filed through the pastor’s handshake line, she found me and approached me with a wounded look in her eyes.
“Why?” she asked me tenderly, why didn’t I come over to her home? I was stuck for an answer, taken aback that she was not only seriously expecting me, a relative stranger, to come to her home alone, but that she was also insistent on inviting me again. Seeing how much it meant to her by the plaintive tone in her voice and the look in her eyes, I took note of her address and made a firm yet doubtful promise to join her for lunch that Tuesday. Being unemployed, I could not honestly have said that my schedule was full.
Tentatively, I drove over to her university apartment and rang the doorbell. Fong Zhu had a Russian roommate named Olga, who was gone at the time, so after she cheerily greeted me with a “Ni hao!” and invited me inside, all I saw in the unlit interior were newspaper and magazine ads sprawled across the kitchen table and hard floors, a couple lamps on end tables, a world map pinned to the wall with American travel pictures posted around it, and a couple pots boiling mystery items on the stove. For lunch, we had a mound of pork dumplings that far exceeded what we could possibly eat, and Fong Zhu introduced me to boiled chicken feet. The first try left a bad impression- all sinewy and you had to chomp the little toe bones in your mouth to grind off the meat- but I’ve since grown to like them depending on the seasoning.
At a (birthday) dinner with Aunt Fong.
At another lunch at her place, she served me ham hocks (basically, all the meat and fat around a pig’s knee joint) which I honestly found to be exquisite. I asked her where she found all this exotic food, and she told me simply, “Wo-er Ma.”
“Walmart? You found all this stuff at Walmart?”
I checked up on this and found out it was indeed true. It was just unusual to find them on my local Walmart’s shelves because the small number of feet and hocks were snatched up, usually, by Chinese families or other outre diners.
Anyway, Fong Zhu and I chatted away despite our mutual incomprehension, she peppering me with questions and I doing my best to give the simplest answers in the clearest English possible. I would struggle to get her to answer my own questions, but would more often than not become frustrated by her clumsy English and loose, wandering thought patterns. Still, when the sputtering dialogue came to one of its frequent impasses, I felt comfortable enough to sit quietly with my new companion and bide my time. I couldn’t tell why, but she was motherly attentive to me, and I felt fascinated to be speaking at length with someone so completely foreign. Plus, I had no pressing job responsibilities or social obligations, and I was so unsure of how to proceed in our meeting- petrified of trying to break things off and make my exit- so I had all the patience in the world.
That would come in handy, as Fong Zhu and I started meeting about twice a week for intermittent conversation fragments, her cheery and zany speeches that would turn into singing and dancing, and our bumbling efforts at language study. For that last part, we would review Chinese vocabulary lists and Fong’s sheets of simple English sentences with their Chinese translations. I think she was just printing free materials she found online, and we would just jump around the word sheets, but we would spend a whole afternoon doing it, so it gave me the hope that I had the discipline and opportunity to actually learn Chinese- reputed to be one of the hardest languages in the world for English speakers to acquire.
I never complained about the time spent or the indeterminate way we studied. I was just so thirsty to learn a foreign language and enamored with the fact that a new strange person had come into my life and offered me so much attention. The day she told me it was impolite for me, a younger person, to call her by her given name or her family name unadorned, it felt only natural to use the Chinese term she taught me for “aunt.” And when Aunt Fong started proposing to me, “You… come to China?” I felt enough trust in our friendship that I began to put my confidence in coming to China as the opportunity I had been looking for.
Of course, I had my doubts that caused me to hesitate, but I had been set for so long on coming to Asia that I could not turn away from a real and tangible offer that had the benefit of a friend’s guidance. It did not matter so much to me that I had never heard of the university where Fong Zhu’s professor husband was able to get me a job, and it didn’t matter so much that every other detail was foggy either. I had been trapped in a pit of loneliness and unemployment, or wrong employment, for so long that I was ready to rocket out of it, and I felt certain that my hopes would be met. It was almost too perfect that this woman, my new aunt, came into my life right at the time the sagging trough I had bottomed out in broke open and dropped me into a void of thought I could only have dreamed my way out of.
After Aunt Fong left Iowa on a snowy December day, I spent plenty more unemployed time thinking over her offer and hashing it over with her through e-mail. As unknown and exotic as this adventure was, it began to seem more and more real to me, the obvious and only choice to make. And, for years, I had been starving for someone to pay me close attention, mentor me, and give me their full friendship. Aunt Fong was too flighty to be a mentor, and not really the kind of person I would look to for that, but she and I already had bonded inexplicably like relatives, and I trusted her to be my guide in the supremely populous People’s Republic of China.
China had to be the hopeful thing I knew it would be.
The next months passed as a period of waiting and preparation before the beginning of the fall semester in China. I felt ready because of what I had known all along- it was time to leave.
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