on the other side

I had a really interesting taxi ride back to Beida tonight. Our driver was super talkative, and had a lot of opinions on why China sort of sucks and America/other Western countries are much better. When he found out we were from the U.S., he said,“You must be crazy for wanting to come HERE to go to school! All you’ll learn is bad manners, like spitting on the sidewalks and cutting in line. And you'll get a whole stomach full of polluted air.”


He kept talking about how much he admired the transparency of the American press ("They talk about that time when a student went to school and shot a bunch of other students, and then killed himself...in China, people kill each other all the time, people get drowned and there's corruption in the government and in doing business, and the press is quiet."), and how happy he was when he saw on the news that former VP Cheney got a speeding ticket, because it showed that Americans value equality. He also talked about how in China, people don’t really follow the law, but everything is based on “关系,” or having the right relationships with the right people (sort of a more corrupt form of networking, I guess). And how in China, it’s customary to just “被人害” or take crap from other people, whereas in America, it’s more customary to “害别人,” and his example was that if a teacher at a Chinese university harasses a female student and she complains, he’ll just flunk her and the school won’t punish him, but if the same thing happened in the U.S., the teacher would be fired in a minute.

Finally, he told us that his own daughter is currently in England. I was surprised, because he’s only a taxi driver—he obviously doesn’t have money to spare, so how could he afford to send his child to England? When I asked, he told us that when he was about our age, he became friends with a foreign exchange student from England. After this student went back home, they became pen pals, and have been friends now for more than 30 years. When the taxi driver got married (and he told us that he married late—I don’t really know what he means by “late,” but apparently his child is only in 4th grade now, and he looks like he’s in his late forties, at least) and had a kid, this British friend offered to pay for her school tuition. But in China, not only is tuition very expensive if you want to go to a good school, you also have to bribe the teachers in order to make sure your child will be looked after as well as the other children. So when the British friend found out about this, he offered to just bring the taxi driver’s daughter to England to live with him and his family (he has three daughters around her age). And the taxi driver, of course, accepted. He said that his wife was really sad about it, but he convinced her that it would be better for their daughter to leave China.

“She’s been there for a year now, and now she doesn’t want to come back! I can see why—she sent me a picture of her and her friends at the park, and the grass was so green! I don’t know if the grass is like that in America. Have you seen grass like that? So green, you can't even see the dirt underneath it. When I saw that green, tears came to my eyes. I think if I went to England and saw that green grass, I would never come back to China.”

Then I tried asking if his daughter ever came back to visit, except I forgot how to say “visit,” so instead I used the word “return,” and he immediately burst out saying, “I would never let her come back here! I don’t want her to come back to China. I want her to stay in England, or maybe go to America. Of course, it’s up to my friend, and if he says he can’t support her anymore, she’ll have to come back. But then, I’d try and find a way for her to go to some other country. After all, she knows English now, so she would be okay.”

“But doesn’t her mother miss her?”

“No…when she misses her, she can go online and talk to her and see her. And of course it would be okay for her to come back once in awhile, maybe for ten days or a month. But I wouldn’t let her live here again.”

When I got out of the cab I thanked him and tried to say something like, “I hope your child has a really good future,” but I couldn’t think of how to say it in Chinese fast enough. Anyway, it really moved me. It reminded me of that movie, “和你在一起,” when the guy’s dad pretends to kick him out of the house, because he wants his son to go live with the violin teacher so he can get better at violin and become famous. I wished I could plant a huge green lawn in China for this man.