| One evening, Summer invited her sister and several of her friends to eat hotpot at one of the restaurants on the Walking Street. Summer and her sister were very close, which sometimes interfered with Summer's relationship with me because she easily became jealous of me. She once started crying in front of me because she was afraid of her sister becoming closer to someone else. She apologized for her stubborn behavior the next day, but I told her there was nothing to apologize for. One of Summer's close friends and classmates who came with us named Yan Li was also Jackie's girlfriend. She couldn't speak English, but she always had a sweet and charming smile on her face with her hair done up in a ponytail, and was highly enthusiastic all the time. About eight or nine of us walked down some stairs into the underground restaurant on The Walking Street, where there were many hotpot tables all across a large dining area. Some of the smaller tables were arranged neatly up against walls and railings and sometimes had swing seats built for two, while other larger family sized hotpot tables were arranged more randomly across the center of the floor. Near the back end of the restaurant, the floor dropped down into another area where there were more tables, and there was a walkway that curved around and through the hotpot tables and went into an entrance in the side wall where the public restrooms were. The restaurant was full of hundreds of people busy chatting about many things that I couldn't understand as the steam rose up from the center of their hotpots, and everyone helped themselves to the cooked food using their chopsticks. We sat down at one of the large circular hotpot tables on the upper level of the restaurant and ordered food from the menu. It was all written in Mandarin, so I had to trust everyone else to order the food. Summer's sister Amy sat down next to me, and Summer sat down next to one of her friends on the other side of the table. She saw Amy and I talking to each other, and Summer's eyes became wide, possibly with jealousy, and she quickly came to sit down on the other side of me. Amy had volunteered to begin teaching me how to speak Mandarin at her home every weekend since I had decided to stay for at least a year. During the meal, Amy taught me how to say several things about food and body parts in Mandarin, and my pronunciation was off most of the time. Some of the words she said sounded exactly like how I thought I was saying them, but she always found a problem with my pronunciation. Mandarin is usually spoken with the mouth used in a different position than many western languages. The mouth isn't opened so wide while speaking, and there are sounds that are not used in some other languages. Summer looked like she was getting jealous of Amy and I, but she wouldn't admit it. She had a double standard of being able to talk to and sit next to anyone she wanted to at any time, yet there was a problem when I did that. There was a table of older men who were eating hotpot and drinking Snow beer that came in huge green bottles across from us. Bottles that big are usually meant for people to share. They kept looking over at me and saying something I couldn't understand. I thought they had a problem, so I kept watching them carefully. They said something to one of Summer's friends who was sitting closest to their table, and she told me that they were wondering what country I was from. They also suggested that they help me retrieve the cooked food from the hotpot because I appeared to be having trouble using the chopsticks. So their intentions turned out to be friendly, and they welcomed me to China. After dinner, some of Summer's friends split off in a different direction from us as we walked down the Walking Street, and Jackie, Summer, Yan Li, Amy, and I walked to a fountain in the center of the city just outside of the beginning of the Walking Street. At the fountain, which was surrounded by a circular street where buses and taxis drove around and many people waited at bus stops, there were several perimeters of water spraying jets built directly into the ground that were timed to spray off high into the air every five minutes or so. There were benches all around the fountain beyond the reach of the water, and some people sat down and talked with each other while others were casually walking by the fountain or walking their dogs. The most popular dog for people to own was the Pekingese Dog, and some people had their dogs so well trained that they didn't need leashes, and there didn't appear to be any laws about it. On many of the buildings that surrounded the fountain, there were electronic billboards that displayed names of different companies and brand names, some of them with English letters. To me, it place felt like a miniature version of Times Square in New York City. Many little children were playing around and in the fountain, running through the spraying streams of water as their parents watched them from a safe distance. Before I knew what was happening, Yan Li and Summer grabbed each other's hand and ran through the fountain's many powerful jets of water, and emerged on the other side completely drenched. I thought they had completely lost their minds, until Summer grabbed my hand and ran with me through the water once again. Yan Li also took Jackie and brought him through the water as we ran carefully between the children who were playing in the few open spaces between the rings of water jets. I thought it was fun, so I ran through the water at least several times after that with the others, all except for Amy, who was waiting for us quietly on the outside holding Yan Li and Summer's purses. After playing around the fountain, we all got our water-dripping bodies into a couple of taxis and went home. The taxi driver never complained. My birthday came up in the middle of August. It felt a little strange to be celebrating my birthday in a foreign country for the first time, but my new friends made sure that I had fun that day. First, Jackie, Summer, Amy, and I went bowling. The bowling alley was quite small, as were the bowling lanes themselves. We had to wait for a lane to open for about 15 minutes, and sometime during our wait, I saw Summer and Amy whispering to each other and looking at me. When I came over to find out what the secret was about, they both jumped at me and started tickle-torturing me. Then they started calling me silly names. I was like, "How are you guys gonna do me like that on my birthday?" Amy's favorite thing to say to me was, "You are a stupid man!" I hoped she was joking, but at times I wasn't sure because I knew she was resentful about Summer and my relationship. Summer liked to say to me, "Taoyan!" which means something like "I'm disgusted with you." In my experience, my birthdays have usually been one of the greatest days, one of the most unfortunate days, or both of them combined, but Summer and Amy's antagonizing behavior wasn't so bad. Jackie was probably the least physically motivated of us, so he didn't put much effort into his athletic abilities once we started bowling, which was reflected by his final score. Summer had been bowling once when she was little, and she liked to play sports a lot, so she started getting arrogant in the middle of the game and said, "I would like to thank my mother and father and ..." I think I responded to her with the throw up gesture and a spare to help keep her mouth shut. I had the most bowling experience out of everyone, but I did poorly on that day. Amy had never been bowling before, and they say that people who bowl for the first time have an unusual amount of luck. It was true in her case. She would just drop the ball in front of her, and the ball slowly rolled into the pins and knocked many of them over each time. She ended up with the highest score, followed closely by me, then Summer, and finally Jackie at the low end. I was disappointed in myself for not winning on my birthday. After bowling, we went to a restaurant to eat noodles. In China, many people like to eat noodles on their birthday because they believe it gives them a long life. They also bought a cake for me with a candle that once lit, opened up like a flower with candles burning on each petal while playing the Happy Birthday song. The problem is that it never stopped playing until the battery ran out. Summer started looking sad and said, "Somebody stole my heart. I don't know if I want to leave such a handsome man behind." I was hoping that she was talking about me since she didn't mention any names. She had just a little more than one week before she would have to go to Korea and study extremely hard for three years because her whole family was depending on her, and she wanted to set an example for her little brother and sister. Summer drove me crazy on the last day that she was in Hefei. When I called her on the phone late morning, she said, "I'm not Summer. This is Summer's friend. Summer is with her boyfriend right now." I said to her, "Oh really? I would like to meet this boyfriend of hers so I can make his face change colors." Then she said, "Oh no! You can't do that! It would be terrible!" Then she said to me, "Maybe we should stop talking to each other now since this is my last day." And she hung up on me. I didn't know if she was still joking or was serious at that point, so I called her back and asked her to meet me. She told me to meet her at KFC later because she had to meet a friend there who was going to go to Korea and stay in the same city as her. Jackie stayed in my apartment to let me have some final alone time with Summer. I took bus number 122 from Hu Po to the KFC at San Xiao Kou. I waited at the door outside, and then Summer ran up and opened the door and pulled me inside. They both had already been there for at least several minutes, and I sat down with them at a counter seat near the back wall. Summer introduced me to him, and then she started talking to him in Korean. She was doing a lot of arm touching with him as he smiled back at her, and she seemed to forget that I was even there. The thought popped into my head that maybe she was telling the truth on the phone before, that maybe she really was with her boyfriend. So I whispered a question to her, "Is he really your boyfriend?" I'm naturally very suspicious of other people, so it doesn't take much to set me off. She looked at me and then turned back to him and started talking again without answering my question. I had all I was going to take of Summer's irresponsible behavior, so I stood up and was about to burst out of KFC when Summer grabbed my arm and tried to persuade me to stay. The young man got up, said a few words to Summer, said goodbye to us, and then left his own self because he could see that I was angry about something. I told Summer that I would have left instead, though it was doubtful that I would have ever come back. She got disappointed, and I explained my reasons for being upset. Summer is not a very centered or disciplined person. She lives in complete freedom of action, which comes across as flirty to me sometimes. She values freedom sometimes to the exclusion of responsibility. That is completely opposite from me because I hold myself accountable for every thought, word, and action that I make. I see such carelessness as disloyalty, and have often been criticized for being too serious, though I like to laugh perhaps more than most people I have met. We both tried to put the situation behind us and walked to Pizza Hut on the Walking Street a couple miles away, because Summer liked pizza very much and made me promise to take her there for lunch on her last day. While we were walking towards the Walking Street from KFC, Summer had a slight disagreement with me, and then walked very quickly ahead of me like she was very upset. After some time, I couldn't see her anywhere in the crowds of people in front of me. I thought I should just go to Pizza Hut and find her there, but when I got to the entrance, she wasn't anywhere that I could see. I probably should have checked my blood pressure at that point because Summer's childish antics were bringing forth the volcano inside of me. I found a public phone in one of a few small shops in a small back alley near Pizza Hut and called Jackie back at my apartment. "She left me!" I said to Jackie while trying not to put my anger and frustration on him. Jackie laughed at me, and that added to my frustration, but he tried to assure me that it was all just a misunderstanding. I didn't know how to get back to the apartment from The Walking Street, so I asked Jackie to meet me there by taxi. Then I went back to Pizza Hut and found Summer there looking quite innocent as though nothing happened. I still had an explosive combination of emotions boiling just under my skin, and Summer could see what she had done to me. She apologized for it. "I hid behind a wall and tried to follow you after you passed in front of me, but I lost sight of you after a while because there were so many people." We quickly called Jackie to keep him from making an unnecessary trip to the Walking Street. I finally calmed down after eating some pizza with Summer. I said to her, "You are trying to make me crazy on purpose today, aren't you?" "How did you know what I'm planning to do today?" she replied in a sarcastic manner. As though I wasn't sad enough that after this day was over, I wouldn't be able to see her for at least four months, but she also had to make sure I suffered in extra amounts before she left. |
| China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling Last days of summer |
 |