Today I stopped by the Asian market in Amherst (Mom’s House on College St., not the one on Route 9 near the bridge) , planning to pick up some cheap noodles and fresh veggies for dinner. When I went inside, I smelled that familiar siren call of soy sauce and oil, and before you could say “total hypocrite”, I was asking the price of the ready-made food, and bringing a white carton home.
American Chinese food is totally different from Chinese Chinese food.
Although I’ve recently written a lot about it, I don’t want you to think that Chinese businesses have a monopoly on consumer exasperation.
This is the locked pharmacy counter at a nearby supermarket… because no one would want to buy condoms at night.
(Fortunately I was just picking up Gatorade, bagels and other much-missed Western food.)
There are so many great things about being back in the US. Seeing Harry Potter 6 with other English books, instead of being the English book.
And Dunkin’ Donuts. Wow, I love Dunkin’ Donuts and their amazing French Vanilla coffee. The smell of chocolate glazed donuts. The Neanderthal grunts of the guy working there. The amazing realization that after being tai peng le! for a year, I’m not the fat girl anymore, which is followed by the realization that most of the other patrons are hugely, massively, out-of-breath-walking-from-the-car overweight. It’s enough to make me a Krispy Kreme devotee.
And Stick. Somehow this sounds like paperbacks and coffee is more important than seeing Stick every day. It’s the long-awaited triumvirate of literacy, decent food and the boy… even if he did kinda slip in there in a Crassus or Lepidus kind of way.
We’re in the car, in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot when when it happens.
“Are you sure we can make it by ten?” I ask, expecting to be reminded that the MassPike is Stick’s personal Autobahn.
“You said your interview is at eleven.”
“If by eleven, you mean, ten.”
“And if by ten, you mean eleven.”
And that’s how No-Sense-Of-Direction Girl and No-Plan-Ahead Boy began their adventures.
Back in Massachusetts, I’m delighted by a paper cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, by having friends in the same time zone and by the stunning realization that in an entire day of repatriation errands and then a dinner with friends, I didn’t hear a single mei you.
I’m so happy to be back in an English-speaking country that I’ve become the chatty person you hope to avoid. Hi! How are you? How’s your day? How’s the weather been? How’s business? Do you like working here? Which is better, the strawberry margarita or the mojito? What do you think of this phone?
Being suddenly half of a couple is even weirder. Fortunately, being broke, looking for housing, looking for work to afford said housing, having one car (and I’m not on the insurance until we get a permanent address), reactivating everything that we closed when we left the States, totally takes the focus off any reacquainting awkwardness.
This morning I signed up at a local (Western Mass is local for me now) temp agency. It was extremely annoying, trying to fit my Yantai experience onto one of their little application forms.
Fortunately the real interveiwer asked me actual questions, and I talked so much about how much I loved Yantai and what a great time this is for China and how interesting daily life is that the interveiwer finally asked me why I left.
The folks at Faster Than The World asked me to do a game-girl column (Did y’all hear that? The part where they asked me?) and my first column is on repatriation and playing the Wii.
I’m not saying I have a nerd family, but I saw this at my aunt’s today.
Yesterday, we went with Scep and Katie, and their dog Midnight, to the dogpark. It’s a fenced-in area with doggie exercise equipment and doggie-sized water fountains. And a puppy time-out area.
Scep, Katie, Stick and I stopped at a local grocery store, looking for snacks, soda and normal gaming food. It’s common to say that Americans are fat… but I don’t think I’d ever realized it so strongly. The grocery store was full of hugely fat people, pushing giant shopping carts full of food.
Katie had to drag me away from the neatly wrapped packages of recognizable meats. I stared at the uniform fruit from around the world, stacked in neat pyramids around the store. Every aisle had something fascinating, new products like squeeable tubes of ginger or new combination cookies. I was boring my friends senseless with my cries of “look, look!” and excitement over a pretty mundane package.
I kept thinking that when I got back to the US, I’d stop feeling lonely and I’d feel like I fit in properly, but even here, even right next to Stick and my friends, it seems that China has changed me. I still see through laowai eyes, and it keeps me apart.
