Chinese First Date

As those of you who pay far too much attention to my facebook profile have noticed, there has been a change recently. My “relationship” status has not actually changed so much as simply disappeared. Perhaps this seems like a strange thing to do and maybe it even seems insulting to whomever may have prompted that change in my status. Fortunately for me, I’m fairly certain that the girl in question (1) doesn’t have a facebook profile (2) probably wouldn’t care one way or the other and (3) already knows why our relationship has to stay in a slightly secret place. Our relationship hasn’t exactly been what most people would define as “normal” from the beginning anyway. I would guess that the official relationship part began when she sent me a text message one day that read: “Can I treat you as my boyfriend?”

As you may have guessed, she is Chinese and knows some English. However, she doesn’t always say quite what she means to say. She often confuses the words “hungry” and “angry” which has led to some comical exchanges. She misuses phrases as well sometimes, like the time she sent me a message saying that she was about to “hit a shower.” At least she was close on that one. It’s funny how even one word or letter can change the entire meaning of a sentence. This was wonderfully demonstrated by the message I got after I placement tested a girl for EF one day: “Is there a sex girl you test today?” I’m not entirely sure why she sent me that since the girl I tested wasn’t really very sexy at all. I suppose this was just her fishing for compliments and reassurance, but at least it was funny. My personal favorite was one I got recently when she had a day off and apparently had nothing to do: “Honey, I’m a little boring.” I think I actually laughed out loud in the office when I read that one. I have to respect her for her efforts though. I’m sure I make far worse mistakes when I try to speak Chinese.

Anyway, back to the story. You could say that my reply to her request was a little strange/not the appropriate romantic reply: “You may treat me however you wish.” But then again, I’m not exactly known for my Oscar-worthy performances when dealing with women, Western or otherwise. In retrospect, that was probably the least awkward way that situation could have unfolded. It prevented a face-to-face meeting with me over-thinking about what to say and then executing it so clumsily that it backfired in that way where one or both of you look away with a slightly horrified expression on your face while you secretly wish you were somewhere else. You know, that feeling where you wished you were mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, or doing some other mundane task that would prevent you from actually being in front of that person staring down, scraping your toe on the floor, and thinking furiously, “Oh great, what could I possibly say to fix this?” Almost any guy who has been in a serious relationship and has a tendency to say stupid things (I can think of at least one of you aside from me) has faced this situation before. So, having mercifully exchanged this major form of awkwardness for a relatively minor one, we became a couple.

Of course, many girls would claim that the “relationship” starts at the first date rather than the day that they officially become boyfriend and girlfriend. And having learned long ago not to argue with girls no matter how right you are and how wrong they might be, mostly because they could do absolutely anything in an argument including throw a knife at you (you may have forgotten about that, Lauren, but I haven’t), I suppose I should take the few of you who actually read this thing back to the night of my first date with this girl. Admit it, you want to hear about it. Many of you remember my brief posts in college detailing my encounters with various women and the inexplicably awkward things that were said on both sides of the equation. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ll never, ever live down the “live strong” remark. Well, this is basically an extended version of one of those experiences. The only thing I can say in my defense is that it’s been a pretty long time since I was on a date, and an even longer time before that one, so if you combine “lack of practice” with my already naturally diminished romantic capabilities, the result of the equation isn’t going to be George Clooney or anything. Oh, and throw in the fact that I’m in a foreign country on a date with a girl I don’t really know and who doesn’t speak a ton of English, and you just know that the chances of having this thing go off without a hitch are painfully slim.

I guess the actual date process started when I timidly asked a certain Chinese girl if she wanted to have dinner with me sometime. With absolutely no trace of emotion on her face, she told me she needed to check her schedule, proceeded to do so, and said she was free Wednesday (or maybe it was Thursday; women are better at remembering these things). I said okay, I’d send her some messages about a time and place where we could meet, and then I walked away feeling like I had just made an appointment to see the dentist or something instead of setting up a date with a girl. Eventually we decided that finding a place to meet that we were both familiar with would be better than trying to meet at the restaurant since neither of us really knew of a place that the other could find. So after some back and forth, we finally settled on a place. I had passed by it a couple of times before, so I was pretty sure I knew where it was. Of course I’m aware of my own utter incompetence when it comes to directions and finding places, even when I’ve actually been there before, not to mention the obvious tendency of things to blow up in my face at the prospect of meeting or talking with a female. With this in mind, I called a friend and confirmed the location of the building in front of which I was supposed to meet this girl. I also figured I would set aside some time and get to the area early, just to give myself some time to wander in case I couldn’t find the place immediately. I thought I was pretty clever, but I should have known it would take more than human ingenuity to shake the monkey on my back. I should have known the magnitude of this monkey from the expression of the last Chinese girl I met and talked to the first time, a girl I had absolutely no romantic feelings for whatsoever, but whom I somehow managed to terrify completely. But some little part of me hoped that maybe just for once fate would leave me alone and everything would go as planned. Naturally, I wouldn’t be writing this entry if such was the case.

I took a taxi to the area in which I had seen the designated building before. I didn’t see it immediately, but I was still fairly confident of the direction I needed to walk, so I checked my watch and set off. I still had about ten minutes or so to get to my destination. I had originally planned to give myself more time, but I also suffer from a tendency to be late, which struck again in this case. Cut me a little slack though, I was trying to look nice for the first date I’ve had in a really long time. Anyway, I started walking around the area where I had seen the building previously but, not surprisingly, I couldn’t find it. I started to circle the block in case I was on the wrong side of the block or something. However, unbeknownst to me, the building had just recently started to undergo some renovation and so was covered by a big scaffold and a green tarp. Considering that a good 20% of the buildings in China are currently covered in these scaffolds and tarps, it blended in fairly well with the surroundings. Needless to say, I missed it. This sent me in an ever-widening search circle that in reality took me farther and farther from where I was supposed to be. In the midst of my frantic searching, I realized that it was past the time I was supposed to meet the girl, so I sent her a message explaining that I couldn’t find the place and asking for a little guidance. I didn’t get a response for about five minutes, so I sent another message just to see if she was there. I started to get a sinking feeling when I didn’t hear from her for five minutes after that. Well, a sinking feeling in addition to the disappointed/incredulous feeling I had gotten earlier when I couldn’t find the building. I figured it was possible that she had stood me up as part of the cosmic joke that my love life had largely become or as part of a real, tangible joke that someone may have played on me. I mean, if someone had actually pulled this off on me, I would basically never have a response to them in any sort of argument. No matter what I said, they could always say, “Hey, remember that time that you thought were going on a date with that girl you liked, but instead she didn’t show up, and you ended up wandering around downtown for like an hour?” and that would be the end of the argument. These are just some the things that were going through my mind at the time.

Well, fortunately for me, it was no joke. However, unfortunately for me, the cell phone network had chosen that particular time and place out of the whole time I’ve been in China to scoop up my messages and send them to message limbo, where they were condemned to wait until they were no longer urgently needed. I finally did what I should have done long before that and simply called her number. After the requisite confusion and some more wandering I managed to finally meet her. She was already upset because it was getting late and she was really hungry from not having had lunch. So now not only was I late and had been wandering around frustrated for about an hour, but I had a hungry, slightly sulky/whiny girl on my hands. And to make things worse, I couldn’t even blame her for being mad at me. Frankly, I was trying not to be mad at me.

Anyway, having managed to clear the disguised building and vanishing messages hurdles, I thought maybe my troubles were mostly out of the way. As usual, my optimism merely served to set me up for greater disappointment. After walking around for a little bit and finally receiving the messages she had sent me about 25 minutes earlier in the process, we began to realize that nearly every restaurant was closed. The only restaurants that seemed to be open were noodle places. And as it happens, I was on a date with the one Chinese person out of 1.3 billion that doesn’t like noodles. I’ve often accused her of not being Chinese after I learned this fact, but she keeps insisting that she is. Her appearance combined with her ability to speak Chinese would seem to support her claim, but I still have my doubts.

By the way, my inner monologue at this point looked something like this: “HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE! WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THE BUILDING AND THE MESSAGES AND THE ONE GIRL OUT OF 1.3 BILLION WHO DOESN’T LIKE NOODLES! WHY? HOW!? THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE!! AAAAAAGGGGGH!” Luckily for me, I hadn’t been recently unfrozen from a cryogenic state through an unnecessarily long and comical process, so none of this found vocal form. But it was definitely going through my brain on a big banner for the next half an hour or so.

At any rate, what this meant was that we had to go from one restaurant area to another looking for a place that was still open that didn’t serve just noodles. Considering that Wuxi is similar to Charlottesville in that practically everything in town except the bars closes at about eight or nine, the odds were very much against us finding a place. But we were both starving since neither of us had eaten lunch, so we were desperate. I figured our situation was pretty bad.

And then I got lost. Again. She kept asserting that I must know where I am. I kept saying, “I assure you, I don’t.” I told her that it was her city, not mine. She should know where we were. To this day, I really don’t know if she knew where we were or not. If she did, she wasn’t helping. In fact, instead of helping, she was now complaining that her feet hurt. She had some grounds for complaint I suppose since she had worn high heels, expecting that she wouldn’t have to walk far. Clearly she didn’t know me well enough at the time that she made that decision. At some point during our wanderings, I started to see the humor in all this and started laughing. She asked me why I was laughing, made a noise of frustration, and then told me, in accented English, “I want to kill you.” I admitted to having a similar desire and we walked on.

After walking for somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour, we spotted a McDonalds. I knew we had reached a low point in the night when she begged me to eat there. I adamantly refused. I had already ruined the date, so I wasn’t about to go make things worse by her taking her to McDonalds. I had at least a little bit of pride left. Not to mention the fact that I knew full well that I would never live down taking a girl to McDonald’s on a first date. I mean, I might as well give up if that’s the direction my love life is headed. So, after refusing her request and enduring a repetition of her earlier desire to kill me, we moved on. By this time, I only knew of one other place that we could actually get any food. I had been avoiding it all night because it happened to be a bar. But of course it’s not just a bar. It also happens to be one of the two bars that all the foreigners in Wuxi hang out in. I might as well put up a billboard on the main street of the city with this girl and I holding hands or something. But we had no other choice, so we took a cab there and went in.

When I walked in with the girl, I entered that awkward territory where your friends see you, but they’re not really sure if they should talk to you because you’re with a girl and clearly on a date and they don’t want to be rude. But on the other hand, they don’t want to ignore you because that would also be rude, so they’re kind of sending you toned-down/secret greeting signals. I also had to put up with some knowing glances and snickers from my friends at other tables during the meal, but that was really nothing compared to the problems I had dealt with earlier in the night. So we ate our meal and I was reminded once again that Chinese women attack their food with the same gusto and table manners of a pack of wolves tearing into the kill. And no, this was not just because she was really hungry and tired. She eats like that all the time.

Anyhow, we made some small talk and such during dinner. I didn’t learn anything earth-shattering about her. In fact, I learned more about her from her behavior after the dinner than from anything that she said. After the plates were cleared, she started wiping down the table thoroughly and organizing all the objects on the table perfectly. Apparently she’s a clean-freak almost to the point of knocking on OCD’s door. The look on her face as she walked around my apartment for the first time was priceless. Her reaction upon walking in was to shake her head, look at me sadly, and then said, “You should clean it.” However, to my surprise (and delight I should add), she couldn’t take the dirt for very long and soon set about cleaning the place herself. I certainly didn’t complain. But I should get back to the date.

The rest of the date after the food mostly consisted of me shaking salt on the table and blowing it to her side of the table to upset the careful balance of cleanliness and order she had worked so hard to achieve. I suppose this stemmed from the childish behavior I’ve always seemed to display at meal tables. Anyone who ate with me or in my general vicinity in high school will remember that when I wasn’t busy eating every piece of food in sight, I was whipping it across the table at someone. But aside from my bizarre behavior in indulging my need to somehow be obnoxious during the date, she was behaving in a way that I thought was a little bizarre at the time. While we were talking and blowing salt all over the table, she was busy playing with my arm hair. I’ve since realized that nearly every Chinese person is curious about arm hair. They just rarely put their curiosity on display by trying to touch it, so I didn’t really know what to think. However, it occurred to me that the very little kids that I teach obviously have no sense of social shame and indeed have no feeling that it would be inappropriate to touch someone without good reason, so they’re always grabbing my arm and looking at my arm hair. But they do it without the knowledge of a social barrier, whereas this girl knew well enough that it’s considered impolite to touch someone out of sheer curiosity. I figured it meant that she felt comfortable enough with me to cross that social barrier. It seemed to me to be the best sign out of anything that she had said or done to indicate that there would be the possibility of a second date. That was really the only thing I could hold onto, because at the end of the night when all was said and done, and we were going our separate ways, there wasn’t even so much as a goodnight kiss. But what can I say? My body hair has never before or after given me so much hope.