Exotic Person

Hi friends/comrades

Here I am in China. I'm getting a little tired of e-mailing everyone individually about my experiences here in China. I love writing to everyone, but I think I should focus more on writing Chinese here.

Today I realized that I am an exotic person in China.

I'm going to school with a lot of international students from all around Asia and most of them have never been to the United States and are fascinated by me because of the fact that I am Chinese, and yet I have an American passport. Hum, weird.

Everyone's first comment to me is something like this, "Wow, your Chinese is really good. Where are you from?" (except imagine this being said in Chinese most of the time).

"Guess!" I reply. (Sometimes I tell them to guess, sometimes they guess on their own.)

"You look like you're from Thailand. No? Philippines? Uh, Malaysia?"

"I'm from the United States."

"What! You don't look like you're American" -- and there is always eye-widening and then eye-squinting and serious mental damage done.

So then you go on to say, oh, my parents came to America, I was born in America, hence I'm American...and everyone gets a big kick out of it.

For example, today I was with one Malaysian and two Thai men at the hospital and we chat happily in Chinese. They could not get over my American Chineseness (the Thai guys say that I have the face of a Thai girl. When the building manager asked me and my mom if we were Malaysian, my mom replied "It's because we're so dark, ISN'T IT, [bitch]?") and the fact that I was in Beijing to learn more Chinese. Flattery, flattery, flattery. It was unimaginable to them that there were people who grew up speaking fluently two languages in America. Of course, this idea isn't foreign to me. Go ahead and look up the racial statistics of Diamond Bar, Rowland Heights, and the greater Los Angeles area in general. With an area so saturated with Chinese and Koreans, it's sort of impossible to not keep your mother tongue alive. I feel like the loser in town because I can't really read or write ze language (but that'll soon change!).

Oh, and I mentioned a hospital. I was in the hospital because my physical in America wasn't thorough enough. My doctor didn't give me a picture of my chest x-ray or my ECG chart and so I had to go to a local hospital to get that done in order to get a resident permit for living in Beijing. So complicated.

I was accompanied with ten other international students and we drove an hour in a van to get to the hospital. Long drive. Le tiring.

The hospital was a mess. There was a section dedicated solely for giving foreigners (like us) physicals to fill out those forms in order to get a resident permit. Chaos ensued. There were lines galore! It's a disgusting site. For my ECG, they didn't even change that paper sheet on the bed I had to lie on and the sticky nodes they stuck to my body were merely pulled out of a bucket of water where they were soaking for a minute in between patients.

I'm just so lucky that they accepted my blood tests I had done in America because I'm not sure I could have stomached getting my blood drawn in China.

(PS since all Blogger is censored in China, I'm writing via e-mail blogging? Let's see if it actually works).