China Chaotic And Captivating

An elderly couple from a rural Southern province in China visit the big city of Beijing for the first time. There, in the Imperial Gardens, they see something they have only heard about: Westerners.

Smiling and cordial, the man shyly gestures a request to have his picture taken with the foreigners: a souvenir to bring home to his village.

That's how my husband, Mark, and I ended up posing under a pair of 400-year-old intertwined consort pines with a man we didn't know and whose name we could not pronounce.

It marked my first feeling of truly connecting with this strange country where, today, thousands of other first-time visitors are arriving for the Olympic Games. Their experience, surrounded by other Westerners in a city that has been busily preparing for them, may be different from ours.

We visited China for two weeks in May with our daughters Alice, 26, and Carrie, 19, to see another daughter, Lori, 22, who had been living and working in Shanghai since October. Prior to our photo with the friendly gentleman, we had been unable to get any person to agree to have their picture taken - either alone or with us. It was one of many problems we encountered that made China seem especially foreign and intimidating.

We had arrived a few days earlier after a 15-hour plane ride from Atlanta, landing in a culture that was immediately unsettling, even to seasoned travelers like us. The unfamiliar written and spoken language was only the first hurdle. The streets teemed with people who either ignored us or openly stared at us.

Ordering food in restaurants was both daunting and forbidding. As one of our guides told us, the Chinese will eat "anything that walks on four legs except the table, anything that flies except an airplane, and everything under the sea." A certain devil-may-care bravado was required, even when the menu was translated, which usually was not the case.

The hotel beds were hard, the water was not potable anywhere and the air had a thick chemical-mixed-with-sewer scent that was at times overwhelming.

It was enough to make us regret the journey we had so happily anticipated for so long.

And then we started meeting the people.

In Shanghai, a group of children approached us as we walked a street lined by merchants. They wanted to practice their English on us, and we were happy to oblige. Throughout our visit, we especially enjoyed the children, who joyfully approached us with requests and left us with smiles. Once, two children counted to 10 in English and smiled with surprise when Mark counted back in Mandarin. When he stumbled, they shyly giggled and corrected him.

A Land Of Salespeople

It was also in Shanghai that we had our first experience with shopping. I had always found shopping in foreign cities to be a pleasant way to get to know a people and their tastes. But in China, it's more like hand-to-hand combat. Everything from hairbrushes to furniture is priced high with the expectation that you will negotiate it down.

The merchants use calculators, hand gestures and loud moans in their negotiations. We did, too. But we never knew how low we could go, and we never knew whether we were getting a bargain or getting taken.

The Old Town marketplace was filled with aggressive, persistent vendors. We came to call them "hawkers." They seemed to come out of nowhere and often followed us down the street calling, "Hallo lady, baggy, baggy, cheap" to lure us into their shop. Usually ignoring them made them give up eventually. For the harder cases, we learned to say bu yao (pronounced "boo yow") meaning "don't want."

When practicing your Chinese, it's important to not get bu yao confused with bu hao (boo how), which means "no good." One day, a hawker peddling watches was pestering Mark. Weary and not thinking clearly, Mark shouted "bu hao!" several times. The perplexed vendor stopped, looking hurt, his brow furrowed and his eyes questioning.

Then he brightened. "You mean 'bu yao,' don't you?" he asked. Mark realized his mistake. "Oh, yeah, that's what I meant." The vendor sighed, smiled and walked on.

Lori explained that because Chinese is a tonal language, there is no way to convey subtlety or sarcasm. Changes in volume convey strong points or emotion.

We saw this in action in a crowded marketplace in Shanghai, where a civilian and a police officer were engaged in a loud exchange. We would call it angry in the United States, and might even expect the civilian to be arrested. But in China, they worked out the problem by yelling and ended the whole thing peaceably.

After we had been in China about a week, we grew brave enough to sample some of the delicacies offered in a busy alley off of WaFujing road in Beijing. There, scorpions, grasshoppers and seahorses squirmed on sticks. There were also silkworm larvae and other unidentifiable wriggling things in pans.

We decided on the scorpion and selected a stick of four fat beauties for the hot oil. It was clear to the Chinese people around us that we had never eaten fried scorpion as we grimaced and argued over who would go first (Carrie "won"). They watched out of the corners of their eyes, often giggling behind their hands. When the scorpion went down, finally, they cheered.

It really wasn't too bad. Mostly, it just tasted fried.

Beyond The Big Cities

Besides crowded Shanghai and Beijing, we visited scenic Guilin (gwa-lyn), the most rural and least populated of the cities we saw, and Xi'an, the ancient capital of China.

In Guilin, a popular vacation destination for the Chinese, we took a boat trip down the River Li. Our guide was a slim young man with a ready smile who introduced himself as Ryan. Such Western names aren't uncommon among guides, who adopt them for the convenience of us tourists.

Ryan was a Yao (yow), one of 55 minority groups that collectively make up about 10 percent of China's population. (The Han are the ethnic majority.) He came from a farming family in a rural area outside of Guilin, where his many uncles had loaned him enough money to go to university. It's too bad that they forget he has repaid them all, he said, and every time he goes home, they ask again for their money. So he doesn't go home much anymore.

Like our other guides, he said his university degree helped him get his job, a well-paid, highly sought-after career in China.

Ryan told us his wife had recently suffered a miscarriage, something he said a lot of his friends had also experienced. He wondered if many incidents were related to pollution but said no one was studying that.

In Xi'an, I took it upon myself to teach Chinese bartenders how to make a dirty martini.

They knew "dry martini," but add "dirty" and their normally bright eyes went blank. They understood "olive," so I pantomimed pouring the juice from an olive jar into my drink. The resulting smiles, nods and satisfied "ahs" were a crowning moment.

With our tour finished, we headed back to Shanghai, with its crowds of people and chaotic streets of cars, bicycles, buses and pedestrians all vying for space.

That traffic had been one of the things that had made us so uncomfortable when we first arrived. But now, we came to see it as a dance, one in which everyone but us knew the steps. Learning how to connect with the people in China had helped us learn a few dance steps of our own. We felt like we could stay forever.