Beijing, China
I think the most common encounters with Chinese people are made through stares. When we walk around Beijing, we often catch people starring at us, people ask to take pictures, or just randomly sneakily take pictures. Sometimes people start talking to us. Most of the interactions are a little odd because I feel observed and it is a little uncomfortable.
One day, I was taking the bus with two friends to go from Beihai Park to Sanlitun, the modern, business district. The bus is very convenient, when there is not too much traffic, which is not a common occurrence in Beijing. It is often pretty crowded and a little slow but when you have the time, it is an easy way to watch the Beijing landscape. That day, we struggled to find the bus stop; it was hidden further away than Maps indicated. We finally got on the bus. It wasn’t too crowded that day. We were standing on the bus, talking in our broken Chinese, as we would usually do. After a couple minutes, we felt the stare of an elder man, sitting in the seat next to us.
He started talking to us, asking us if we had gone to Nanluoguxiang, the newly renovated, most famous Hutong in Beijing. When we said yes, he asked us where we had gone and if we liked it. I thought it was very pretty, although very crowded and a little too pretty to be an accurate description of the typical Beijing Hutong. Hutong are traditional neighborhoods, made up of one story houses, with a square courtyard on the inside. They are the image of an older Beijing, which is a nice step away from the noisy and busy streets of the city.
Most of the time they don’t have bathrooms integrated so they share a public bathroom on each street, easily recognizable from the smell, meters away. The man told us he used to live in one when he was a kid. From the looks of it and the words I understand in his sentence he didn’t like it. ‘太小，没有空间’, it was too small, there was no space, too crowded. He thought they should be destroyed to build new housing. Luckily for us, we had studied construction related vocabulary so we were able to express ourselves. I told him I thought they were pretty and they created the charm of Beijing, the mix of old and new, that makes Beijing so peculiar. The man seemed very amused by our conversation and attempted to convince me to move to Beijing to live because opportunities were endless for young foreigners.
For some reasons, the conversation drifted to beauty standards. Our friend group was made up of a Vietnamese American girl, a White American guy and me, a White French girl. The man seemed to think Elliott and me, looked very similar. He thought we were brother and sister. That sounded very odd to the both of us because Elliott is blond and I am a brunette. In my opinion, we look nothing alike, but in the old man’s opinion, all White people look
alike. Our stop was approaching and we had to say goodbye to the man. As I stepped of the bus, I was struck by how different perspectives are in different countries and I was glad this old man started talking to us because he allowed me to see from his point of view for a couple minutes.