a nice bit of writing

[amanda]

This was written and sent to me by a friend who lives in Suzhou, a city in central China.

It's a nice bit of writing- thought I would share it with you.


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Spoiled Rotten in Suzhou

I am the lucky employer of a one-night ayi...an ayi being sort of like a maid (often a child care giver too), usually in the employ of foreigners. I don't normally refer to her as an ayi- that job is usually full-time or live-in, and I only get her one night a week-every Thursday. The history of foreigners in China is littered with horror tales about ayis, but I have definitely been blessed on this one.

Her name is Liu Yan ("Leoo Yen") and I call her "Lauren" or her Chinese nickname "Xiao Liu". She is married but her husband and daughter live elsewhere in Jiangsu province; apparently he travels around China a lot in search of work- a bad way of life in these days of SARS Madness. I think she's early thirties and very tiny...the top of her head hits me at about my diaphragm. She once showed me her photo album...she can be cute now but was once staggeringly beautiful; a few years of hard life have taken their toll. When they say "hard life" in China, it _means_ something.

But she is sweet and funny (considering she speaks no English at all) and unfailingly cheerful. I've only seen her down one time- the night her bike got stolen at my apartment while she was working. Losing one's bike here is a direct analog to getting your car stolen in the States, except there is no insurance and little chance of ever getting it back. It was as if she had had all the wind knocked out of her...painful to watch. I waited a few weeks and when she was still arriving on foot, one night while she was cleaning I walked over to the nearby Auchan supermarket and bought her a beautiful new one complete with all the trappings, including several strong locks. (Bikes are by our standards dirt cheap in China- the entire ensemble cost less than 300 RMB/$38.) She was disbelieving to the point of speechless...I don't think she has encountered a lot of kindness in her life. When she left I stood outside long and watched her pedal into the night, her smile illuminating the street better than all our shoddy dismal streetlights combined. I might have paid off a few minutes in Purgatory that night.

No, guys, I don't sleep with her...I think the most physical affection I've ever shown her is a pat on the hand. I pay her 150RMB/$18.75 a month, primo wages for the kind of work she does. (I once took her for her first-ever pizza, and she was flabbergasted when our bill came to about her monthly salary from me.) She spends about 3 hours a week in my apartment and leaves it spotless- washes clothes, washes dishes, cleans the kitchen and bathroom, mops floors, everything. When I travel she comes and washes my bedclothes. She has also started cooking dinner for both of us- tonight's menu was spicy fried pork, beef with onions and mushrooms, cucumber with garlic, hong cai (a tasty but rather odd kind of greens- must be related to beets, since it cooks out a similar blood-red juice), some kind of egg-and-green-onion dish, egg-and-tomato soup, and, of course, rice. (Not eat rice?? Are you insane??? ) It was all absolutely wonderful, and she made sure to cook enough to feed me tomorrow, too. She's also assembled floor fans (the instructions were in Chinese, OK? ) and fixed electrical systems and taken care of me when I was sick. She looks out for me. Despite our language gulf (She speaks no English, and we both speak bad Chinese- see below), she is my dear friend.

One way or another we always share a meal on our Thursday nights together; often we go to one of the many neighborhood cubbyhole restaurants where we can both drink beer and eat 'til our little eyes bug out for about 20 RMB/$2.50. I am also trying to teach her English, and we do this over our dinner. Bless her heart, she is struggling mightily with it- she is obviously working very hard to try and learn. She isn't very well schooled in the first place, and she speaks a very obscure rural Jiangsu province dialect that even other Chinese here often find hard to penetrate.

Among other things, she can't hear the letter 'N'...I thought at first she might have some speech impediment, but I am assured it's just her dialect. It makes finding reference points for our sounds difficult to find. She substitutes 'L' for most instances of 'N' and 'R'. For the standard Mandarin Chinese phrase "Ni ne?" ("And you?") her dialect says "Ni le?"; for the standard Mandarin word "niu nai" ("milk") her dialect says "niu lai", and she simply cannot hear the difference. She always wishes me a warm "Good light" when she leaves...I always arch my eyebrows and point at the lamp; she always giggles and waves as she skips down the stairs.

It's a struggle, but I wish every student worked so hard and wanted it so badly. I wish every student got so much joy and pride out of mastering another word, another difficult sound. It makes teaching a joy.

And I wish everyone was so joyously simple, and had such a warm, generous, guileless heart. I wish everyone was so quick to care and to help, with no thought of return. It makes living a joy.