Knowing too much

When MTH took his first trip to China, a couple of years before we moved here, he got off the airplane, got in a taxi, and was driven just out into the peri-airport limbo, when his driver turned around, looked at his passenger, and shrugged.  Apparently, he had not understood when MTH gave his destination in English, and had thought it unwise to make this clear until he had driven far enough to eliminate the competition.  A phone call to the hotel solved the problem, of course, but the danger inherent in a complete lack of communication struck us both as something to be avoided in the future, so we set about learning Chinese.

What I didn’t realize was that knowing Chinese--or knowing only a little Chinese, which is where I find myself now--can be just as harrowing.  Take my communications with the ayi, for instance.  It’s important to know that I am flummoxed by the ayi in general.  Nothing in my prior life prepared me to have a servant; it is not something I ever once dreamed of.  This may surprise those of you who have witnessed the astonishing disarray of any of my living quarters, but it’s consistent--I think so little about cleaning that it never occurred to me to imagine having someone do it for me. 

But now I find myself with a woman who is in the house 25 hours a week, basically at my beck and call.  I don’t do any becking or calling--I don’t know how.  I just let her do her thing, and try to gloss over any imperfections the rest of the family identifies.  Sure, the Princess thinks she cooks too much fish, the Rooster would love it if she put stuff back in the same place all the time, and MTH has some spots--invisible to me--that he thinks could be cleaner.  But whenever I suggest that a complaining family member directly suggest an adjustment to the ayi, their volume goes way down, and they quickly find a reason they need to be in a different room.  I sympathize with them; I cannot bring myself to make even the smallest request--it seems so gauche or ungrateful, or just…too damn hard, without access to the verbal softeners and diffusers I need to be comfortable.

What’s funny is that the ayi doesn’t have the same qualms.  Well, maybe she does, but she gets over them in a way I’ve become very envious of.  It started when she realized that I was able to understand her well enough to grasp that the other family she worked for, in the mornings, was letting her go.  Would I be able to help find a new job?  That was easy enough; right around the same time a sort-of friend of mine advertised on an online community of ex-pat moms that I follow, and now she works for both families.

By then, though, the ayi, who had never used a computer before, had started to understand the power of the internet, and immediately began to--via me--harness it.  This, too, was no big deal.  Every once in a while she would come in to the office as I was working on the computer, and ask me “taitai, ni xianzai mang bu mang?”  Which means, depending on translation, “Ma’am, are you busy?” “Lady, are you currently occupied?” or “Boss lady, got a sec?”  It bothers me to not know which one it is, because it would allow me to judge her properly.  But in the end, the answer is that I am never so busy that I haven’t clicked on and viewed least one picture of a cute fuzzy animal on the internet, and I do think that helping another human being out is more important than playing online scrabble, if not always more satisfying.  So I tell her I’m not, and then she gives me the name of one of her friends who is looking for work, and I post it on the Shanghai Mama site. 

Two days ago, though, she asked if I was busy, I said no, and she launched into a tale that my Chinese is definitely not ready for.  Halfway through, she started to cry, which made it even harder to understand, but what I got from her is this:

Once upon a time, when she was just out of high school, the ayi fell in love.  Her paramour wanted to marry her, but her grandmother said that she could not get married, because her older cousin was not yet married, and how would that look? 

I did not understand several sentences after that, but it appears that for some reason waiting or expediting the acquisition of a suitable match for the cousin were not workable options.  Later, both the ayi and her sometime sweetheart married different people.  Whether the original beloved would have been a good match or not is up for debate, but it turns out that the man the ayi married in his stead was not--she has shown me her scars. 

She finally got successfully divorced a few months ago, and you could see the change in her--she appeared so much more relaxed and happy and energized.  She used that newfound energy, apparently, to go about tracking down her high school sweetheart.  How to do that in a country where there are only a couple hundred surnames, people rarely go by their first name, and basically everyone is in the process of moving or has just moved from a rural area to an urban area, is beyond me.  But track him down she did, and, while we were in the US, she went to go see him.  He lives a couple of hours away by plane, and I helped her buy her first airline ticket before we left (My performance on this, as on so many of my proudest China accomplishments, turned out to be less than perfect.  When she came back she showed me a bunch of pictures she’d taken from the airplane window, apparently by leaning across two people’s seats, since I’d failed to realize that obviously someone on their first flight EVER would prefer a window seat.).

She tells me she had a wonderful time, and she returned with an ipad that may or may not have been a gift from her long-lost love.  But she also told me he’s still married, although, she says…well, I’m not sure what she said.  I think it translates as something like “loveless marriage,” but it might have been “she’s a witch” or even “he could do better.”  Whatever it was, it was presented as a mitigating factor. 

I asked her if he could ever move here, she said no.  I asked her if she could ever move there, she said no.  I had to speak out.   “But I want you have better man!  Man without wife, man who lives in Shanghai!” I said.  And then she began to cry for real, and she said “for me, there is no other man.  I have been waiting 30 years for this man!  How could I look for another man?”  And that’s when I wished, just for a moment, that I was stranded in a taxi in an unknown city with a driver I couldn’t speak to.