Sara in China

Foreigner

Someone asked me the other day what I’ve learned so far from living in China. The best I could come up with was not exactly a concrete lesson, but rather a feeling that is most discrete and unique to the experience for me: the feeling of foreignness.

I never expected to feel at home in Chongqing, living in a foreign place, in a city that despite it’s historic significance as an inland port, is still opening up to the rest of the world. I knew it wouldn’t be as comfortable or accommodating as perhaps Beijing or Shanghai, for sure. There’s a little history here of foreign visitors, aside from the isolated wartime help from the French and the Americans, back when the city was known as “Chungking.” Perhaps you could count Chongqing a city for national foreigners, when it housed provisional governments (again in wartime). But for international friends, Chongqing only just starting to get used to having us around.

I’ve never lived anywhere outside the East Coast for an extended period of time. And in my limited travels on the relatively well-beaten path, I never stood out except perhaps as an tourist with conspicuous camera in tow. And though I felt the distinct foreignness of a new experience on my first trip to China in 2009, I didn’t hang around long enough to feel the foreignness of not fitting in. And between Beijing, Guilin, and Yangshuo, foreign tourists cycle through with enough regularity that we didn’t attract this particular kind of attention.

But here in Chongqing, even after six months, I have the distinct feeling of not belonging. Sure, I am greeted with nods of recognition from the baristas when I visit the Starbucks or a friendly wave from the ladies at my nail place when I pass by on the way to the grocery store. But aside from a few friendly faces I’ve come to know, the gazes I meet still make me feel like an alien when I’m out walking in Three Gorges Square.

And it’s not just a feeling. It’s a greeting. I can bet with certainty that each time I go out I will overhear observational commentary from passersby remarking to their companions, “laowai” (老外) or “waiguoren” (外国人). It is essentially the equivalent of excitedly calling out “punch buggy” for each rare occurrence that one should pass by, and with a similar playfulness - “Did you catch a glimpse of that one!?” Nick and I did the same when we first got here, pointing out white people we saw to each other, but it was more as a reassurance and recognition of the familiar as we explored a foreign place.

When the denizens of Shapingba aren’t audibly remarking on my foreignness, they are mockingly shouting, “HELLO!” as if they finally get a chance to show off their nominal English language skills. Now amused by the frequency, I play along by shouting “HELLO!” back with as much vigor and ridicule to rival their delivery, and sometimes I’ll shout “NI HAO!” with just as much force to show them that I, too, am capable of greeting people in a foreign language. Though hilarious to me, the irony of equivalent retort of “Zhongguoren” to it’s “waiguoren” prompt is sadly lost on the locals. 

The same treatment comes from all walks of life. When it comes from the older laobaixing men, they giggle as if little school boys wearing red scarfs on their way home for lunch. It’s much cuter, not to mention more permissible, when it comes from actual kids who can be excused for their genuinely innocent curiosity. Like our seven-year-old neighbor who remarked to her mother upon seeing us in the elevator that “Beijing has a lot of foreigners.” She was right, it does, and comparatively more so than Chongqing. Unlike the overt “laowai” shout, I found her abstract comment marginally more polite, as if she were trying to make note of our strange presence without directly addressing us. Perhaps the close quarters of the elevator inspired her oblique discretion.

I am only now able to articulate this feeling of foreignness by way of contrasts. On our most recent trip to Hong Kong, I realized walking around the city that our presence wasn’t eliciting the greetings or overheard mutterings from passersby that we’d come to expect in Chongqing. Though Hong Kong still feels like a new and different city to me, to the residents of the city I’m just another white person and not necessarily a foreigner who doesn’t belong there. Perhaps this is a feature of a truly international city. Sure, in New York you can tell the tourists apart from the regulars by how slowly slalom from one edge of the sidewalk to the other, but among those walking briskly and with purpose, you couldn’t say for sure where one is from until they open their mouth, and even then they still are likely to call New York “home.”

The uncanniness of feeling alien, in both the “unfamiliar” and the “extraterrestrial” sense of the word, stems from the intrusively inquisitive behavior people exhibit in my presence. The Chinese aren’t shy about poking and prodding their foreign specimens. The girl next to me peers over my shoulder to see what color polish I’m getting on my nails, customers go out of their way to stare at foreigners are ordering at Pizza Hut (with great satisfaction that the foreigners are in fact eating at this foreign establishment). Thankfully, the spirit of these behaviors is rooted in unabashed curiosity, as opposed to a less-friendly distaste for the unfamiliar.

Still, it’s not just people we haven’t yet met that remind us of our foreign status. It continues even with proprietors of establishments we frequent; namely, the boss at the front door of the hole-in-the-wall fried noodle place we like never fails to bellow “HELLOOOO” each time we pass by, whether we’re going inside to eat there or not. He does not greet other customers in this fashion.

Though I may not feel at completely at home in the UK next year, and my accent will give away my Yankee roots, I don’t think I’ll ever have occasion to live anywhere else that so relentlessly reminds me that I am so conspicuously foreign. And each time I catch a pronounced “waiguoren” directed at me, I can’t help but take it at it’s most literal meaning, I’m an outsider.