The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 when compared with housing for the local Chinese, it’s a veritable palace. The guards live in a nearby bar- racks. Stroll past, peek through their gate, and you’ll see clotheslines strung between squat brick build- ings, hung with T-shirts and blankets. Bicycles are propped near dormitory doors, where the guards sleep several to a room. You might see one of the guards in his shirtsleeves, rocking back on his heels and smoking, waiting for his shift to start. Every four hours or so, the guards all line up, one behind the next in their crisp olive uniforms, and march across the street from their barracks to our villas. On our side of the wall, the streets are tidy, swept as they are by an army of workers; hedges are clipped neatly and trash cans are emptied. I can’t tell you where these work- ers live, exactly. Probably in the nearby hutong, a collection of ramshackle houses clustered together in cramped, dirty alleyways just down the road from our compound. That’s where many of the ayis live — the women who cycle onto the grounds daily to help us clean our houses, iron our clothes and mind our children. And I wonder: What do they think of us? Their little hu- tong houses seldomhave running water, so they have to pay to use a communal shower. I’ve seen many of them cook- ing outdoors, stirring noodles in pots over Bunsen burner contraptions just outside their front doors. How did I ever imagine I was going to fit in here, with my microwave oven and my hot water heater? Back in the States, I’m solidly middle-class, an everyday wife and mother of four. Back home, we struggle to make the payments on our tiny townhouse, to fill the car with gas, to buy an occasional meal out. But here, because I have a house and a car, people assume I’m rich. I’m a foreigner, a laowai, drivingmy car past their columns of bicycles, spend- ing obnoxious sums of money on imported cereal, butcher- ing their language every time I open my mouth. Even my four children serve to set me apart: they’re the ultimate sta- tus symbol in a country with a one-child policy. The English-Language Bubble My world is almost entirely separate from that of my Chi- nese neighbors; not just because my house has a heater and amicrowave oven, but because I live in an English-language bubble. I struggle to speak the local language and to pick up on cultural cues. There’s no such thing as a casual conversation: every word out of my mouth has to be planned in advance, plotted gram- matically, finished inmy head before I can toss it off my tongue. “Ni hao,” I say to the guards as I pass, “ni hao ma?” Even now, after almost three years, many of them stare at the ground when I greet them. Am I somehow insulting them by addressing them? Am I being overly friendly? Is the fact that I even acknowledge them — many of my neighbors don’t — simply too odd? I don’t know. Still, I keep at it, greeting them daily, and some have finally begun to respond. “Xie xie,” I say when someone holds a door for me, and I instruct my children to say thank you, too. “Chinese peo- ple really don’t say ‘thank you’ as often as Americans,” my Chinese teacher tells me, but still I keep at it, a habit in- grained since childhood. Better to err on the side of cour- tesy than to make a bad impression, after all. I’mpolite; I’m friendly. I want people to likeme, despite the linguistic, economic and cultural barriers between us. They see a tai tai, but I want to be a regular person, just as I am back home in the States. I want to blend in. I’ve got- ten to know the manager at the little shop down the road, and we struggle to chat in Chinese. In talking with him, I feel as though I’m carving out a place for myself within this community as an ordinary shopper, there to buy milk and bread like everyone else. That’s the image I strive to proj- ect — ordinariness. I don’t want to live and work in one unheated room like the old tailor down the road, but neither do I want to give the impression that my air-conditioning unit somehow makes me more important than that tailor. How, then, to strike that balance, to make people understand that while I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate, I’mnot in any way extraordinary? A Tricky Balance The Foreign Service attracts adaptable people, but it can’t create chameleons. I’ve learned to adapt in so many different ways, to laugh at the strange events unfolding around me, to swallow my fear and leap feet-first into new situations. But I haven’t yet learned to blend in. Instead, I’m struggling to stand out with grace: to smile for the pic- F O C U S Even my four children serve to set me apart: they’re the ultimate status symbol in a country with a one-child policy.