In the supermarket queue a couple of days ago I had one of the beautiful experiences that make my stay in China continuously worthwhile. I heard a voice behind me saying ‘Hello’ and I turned to find an old man with a beaming face greeting me. I said ‘Hello’ back and he asked me where I was from and despite my need to keep turning away to deal with checking out my groceries he asked a few more introductory questions. I felt I was being rude to him and did my best to return his advances but, to my dismay I had to deal with a problem, that one of my items had to be paid for elsewhere (a common inconvenience in Chinese supermarkets), and lost the opportunity to strike up a friendship with this elderly Chinese who seemed so very intelligent. However, he made my day with his open friendliness. He must have lived through so many changes and hard times and could have taught me so much about the daily experience and attitudes of the Chinese people in those days. I hope I meet him again one day.
This is not the first time I have had such experiences in China. In Xiangfan twice on buses I was approached with enthusiastic greetings by old people. By old people I mean people who appear to have been over seventy. I’m fifty-five myself and they all had a couple of decades on me. A woman with sparkling eyes and looking fit and healthy told me how happy she was that I was in China and told me she had been an English teacher and always wanted to go to England. On the same bus route a retired aeronautics professor introduced himself with almost the same message.
Many Chinese are closed and return the stony face to even the broadest, most infectious smile I can beam on them but there are others who are like machetes cutting through the jungles of shyness and fear of losing face to brighten even my gloomiest, most alienated day with as open and joyful a welcome as can be experienced anywhere in the world. I must shackle the remnants of instinctive xenophobic retreat and sharpen my ability to return their hospitality with immediate acceptance and practice the Chinese phrases that will enable me to invite them to spend more time with me. These old treasures are my link to the China of old and knowledge of the lost worlds of behaviour, beliefs and customs that still lie, dormant perhaps, at the base of the Chinese psyche.
I wonder if some might be the lost intellectuals, made to conform to the limited thought world of the Cultural Revolution, prompted to remember some once-forbidden dream by my long curly hair and lack of a suit. To them, am I an idea coming to life again on a town bus? Do they leap forward to welcome me back, though I was never there, for it was really the idea that was back at these meetings and I only a projecting rock for it to hang on to, hoping to come back to earth.