Prying and Meddling, the Chinese Way

I was still panting from lifting my suitcase to the overhead storage shelf and shoving it between a bulging sack and a cardboard box, when the train lurched and clanked into motion. I splattered across the white sheet on the narrow and steely sleeper bed. Ahead was twenty-four hours of reading, dozing and watching the wind-whipped barren winter scene at Beijing’s outskirt slowly morph into South China’s balmy lush vista.

“Hey, girl! Do you need your ticket for reimbursement? Because if you don’t, I want to have it.”

I lifted my head and discovered the questioner sitting on the bed across a slim aisle from mine, a woman with a slightly doughy face and anticipating eyes.

“Oh, actually, I do need my ticket. Sorry!” I answered, flashed an apologetic smile and sunk back onto the pillow. But she’s not done with questioning yet.

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Going to college?”

“On a business trip.”

“What do you do?”

“English teacher.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty? I would never have guessed you were thirty. I thought you were a college student.”

By then, I was sitting upright facing her to take the onslaught of questions. She looked my parents’ age, clad in a black sweater and a green fleece vest, hair pulled back into a low ponytail. She leaned closer to me to study my face, which she claimed to be younger than my age.

I thanked her and felt smug. I know my fellow Chinese, especially those my parents’ age, well enough to believe that my inquirer was not interested in flattering me, and the conversation that followed confirmed my conviction.

“Married?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Are you guys going to get married?”

“Yes, when he finishes his graduate school.”

“You need to hurry and get married. You need to think about having a kid soon. Women who pass thirty age quickly. Before long, you would be too old to have kids.”

I had known this woman for less than ten minutes. We still didn’t know each other’s name, but here she was, counseling me on my reproductive capability and with such motherly concern on her face that I felt equally offended and grateful.

Backpacking through my motherland after spending much of my adulthood in the United States, I found myself frequently squirming under the cross-examining of my fellow Chinese and their uninvited advice.

A taxi driver grilled me on my profession, my income, and my monthly expenditures. A fellow passenger on a bus queried if I was making enough money to afford a house and advised that I start saving for a down payment. A hostel roommate suggested that I quit doing pushups because Chinese guys find muscular girls unattractive.

I couldn’t bring myself to simply rebuff them. As the saying goes, when in China, do as the Chinese do. Plus, I am Chinese. I couldn’t snub my own culture just because I had been exposed to a Western concept called “privacy,” which is still a nebulous puzzle in my head anyway.

Questions regarding someone’s earning ability and marital status are out of the question to Americans, I get it. But why no one thinks it’s a big deal that two guys loudly swap tales about circumcision in office?

And there was this time when I asked a colleague whether he voted for Obama or Clinton after the Democratic Primary in Virginia. “Well,” he hemmed and hawed and fidgeted and shifted. “Just so you know, it’s kind of someone’s privacy.” How could I know it was such a private matter after he’d been openly trashing Hillary for weeks!

I learned never to offer unsolicited advice to an American unless I see that person heading to a cliff. Even then, it’s better to start with “I don’t mean to tell you what you should do with your life…” because apparently the other side of being warmhearted is being meddlesome.

But in China, leaving someone alone also means being “cold-blooded.” My mom called me “irresponsible,” when I suggested that my cousin has a right to a Ph.D, because that’s solely her own decision to make. “You cousin will end up an old maid. No Chinese guy will marry a girl with such a sky-high degree.”

So I devised an ethically ambivalent strategy to handle such cultural ambiguous situations—lying. To tell a Chinese that I’m a married woman who’s quit her job and left her husband behind to travel solo, I would likely get an earful about the danger of “not guarding my nest” or “planning my life responsibly.” To say I was single would invite a heap of dating advice, so I became either a graduate student or busy professional awaiting to marry her boyfriend once he gets out of graduate school. I enjoyed the perverse pleasure of reinventing myself into an architect major, a college teacher or a fashion boutique owner. It’s like outfitting an avatar in real life, and when the barrage of questions came, I felt it’s someone else’s life, not mine, being pried open.

I also enjoyed some old-fashioned Chinese meddlesomeness. When an older Chinese woman took me under her wings, because I was this “poor skinny girl on her own,” I felt the warmth of a busybody aunt making inconsequential fusses about my welfare, except that she won’t tell on me to my parents if I don’t follow her guidance.

“You are not dressed warm enough,” my sleeper-cabin mate said apprehensively, after telling me that she has a daughter my age. “Here, put on my coat if you don’t have one,” she ordered and thrashed in my hands a gray fluffy jacket.

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