People all over the world

This is my third and final installment from my trip to Xi’an. This trip served as a good reminder for me that I need to get out and explore this country. I am in the process of planning more trips before I return home.

I have written before about the celebrity status that I have in China simply because I am tall and white. This was really demonstrated in Xi’an. Over the holidays many people throughout China travel to the larger cities. The people that live in Beijing and other large cities are, for the most part, used to seeing white people wandering throughout the city. In smaller cities though, there are still very few foreigners. Growing up in the U.S. I was accustomed, from a very young age to seeing all sorts of ethnicities. Our cities are filled with African-Americans, Orientals, various European Descent and Hispanics. Here in China it is a relatively recent development that Chinese people have had extensive exposure to non-Han Chinese. This causes many heads to turn when white people enter public spaces, especially someone as tall as I am.

There are times when this extra attention is not appreciated, times when I just want to go through my day anonymously, but there are other times where this attention results in a fantastic experience, one that I am not sure if I could find elsewhere. The fact that I am white means that everyone assumes that I know English, there has been many times where a random person starts a conversation with me for no other reason that to practice their English. I am trying my best to do the same with Chinese people to practice my Mandarin, but I still do not feel like I have enough vocabulary to do this much.

One of the highlights of the trip to Xi’an was when a young girl started to look at Traci and I while we were in a small hole-in-a-wall restaurant near Hua Shan. We waved at her and said ni hao which caused her to smile back. After a short while of this going back and forth, her Mom said to us she is learning English, she loves you! We invited her over to our table where she quizzed us on some Chinese vocabulary and we talked to her about English. Her Mom came over to help facilitate the conversation and to ask us some other questions about us. Through our conversation, she let us know that there was already someone in her class that had her English name, she wondered if we could give her a new English name. Traci and I settled on Emily which she proceeded to repeat throughout the remainder of her stay in the restaurant.

The forwardness of the Chinese is sometimes little much to handle, there are times when I wish that a little more subtlety and restraint would be used, but there are also times where the forwardness results in wonderful experiences, ones that will stick with me for the remainder of my life.