The Power of a Word

I have no idea who any of these guys are, but all of them did not hesitate to scream hello at me from a comfortable distance.

"Hello!" or "Ha Low" is more like it. I swear to god I can't walk more than 100 meters (I'm going metric with dedication to the Olympics) around here without having some 17-35 year old male throwing a heavily accented English greeting my way, most of the time to get a chuckle out of either some girls he's hanging with, or the other 3 dudes he is riding on his motor cycle with. Girls will do it too, though their preferred method is quietly nudging and discreetly (at least they think its discreet) pointing my way while smiling and whispering, and then as I have just passed them one will softly say "ha lou" as all quietly chuckle together. These might sound like a small occurrences, and the fact of the matter is, it is. That's part of why it is so maddening, for when you live in a country of 1,300,000,000 people, small occurrences can have a huge impact on your daily quality of life. Hello, this simple greeting, has become a fundamental part of my life. It has come to represent (for me) the much larger picture of the daily pressures foreigners face, and how the building blocks for discrimination in a society are subtly put into place.

I am always thinking as I walk down the street how I wish that I were a spy, and that my glasses, instead of being scratched and not cool looking, had a spy camera inside of them. Then I could record all of the reactions that I get as I walk down the street in a day. This would be the only way to get a grip on the weirdness of the situation, because stories can't do it justice. Lets make this clear, when I say people are saying hello to me, it is not as though I am buying a newspaper and a man looks me in the eye, smiles and says, "hello." No, this is Hotboys with Sonic the hedgehog haircuts pointing and laughing as they scream hello at me from a quarter of a mile away. It would be like if you were with your friends and saw a man looking to be of Latino origin walking down the street in your neighborhood and you nudged your friends and yelled "hola!" at him and then everyone laughed together.

I will walk by a store selling plumbing equipment and hear rumbling out from the depths of the store a "hello?" yelled out more as if they were asking a question than greeting me. Middle aged men will be standing outside a restaurant talking, and as I walk by one will say "Laowai" (Foreigner) right in front of me, while staring at me, then all will fall silent and look me up and down from head to toe like they are checking me out and then begin talking about foreigners or guessing what country I'm from (I'm always hoping for DeGuo, or Germany) joking one should say hello to me. As I ride my bike down a narrow road a small van with darkened windows will wiz by me at about 50 MPH with a strange voice screaming out the window "Hello!" scaring the living S%#! out of me and nearly causing me to loose control into on coming traffic. Grandmothers walking their grandchildren will point me out and say in Chinese, "that is a foreigner, you see them you can say 'Ha lou'," and the seed is planted.

These are just some examples, and there are so many more. These are by no means the most terrible things I have heard people say. Not by a long shot. But they are the most common things I run into. Common enough that on a 2km walk through town I will almost definitely here at least 5 hello's, and sometimes upwards of 20. I've lived as a foreigner in Europe and South America. In both places you might draw some attention, in South America people with lighter hair and blue eyes are not common. But the overall atmosphere and pressure that one feels being outside in this area of China is incomparable to what I have experienced before. Here you can feel people prodding you with their eyes, and verbally hear them talking about you. And this is me we are talking about here, not Justin Timberlake, or the more popular band in China Westlife. Some of my greatest skills include eating Reese's peanut butter cups until I get sick and a lack of fear of public nudity (which, strangely enough, is generally frowned upon in most cultures, most especially China). There is nothing exceptional about me to bring this kind of attention other than the lack of exposure this area has had to people of differing color.

Now, its not as though one has to continually deal with out and out racism at all, most of the attention that I am getting is completely benign. But when you know that every time that you just want to go out of your apartment to the corner in order to pick up a deliciously refreshing corn flavored ice cream treat that you might have to deal with some 15 year olds laughing and yelling at you, you'll think twice about going. When you know that if you go to the track in order run a few laps that there is a good possibility that on lap number 5 some kid is going to run up alongside you and say "hello, I think you are very strong," and then want to talk with you to practice his extremely deficient English, you are probably going to hesitate to go jogging. Slowly but surely you find yourself spiralling into the dreaded territory of isolation, which anyone that has lived abroad can understand, isolation in a foreign environment can spell disaster. I even find myself consistently listening to my MP3 player when I go out in public, wrapping myself in a protective sphere of sweet ass techno pop... which is awesome... but not exactly what one wants to do when trying to absorb the culture and atmosphere of a region.

Yet the environment is such that isolation is almost inevitable, and I blame the word hello as the starting point for this problem. Back to that granny teaching their child to say the word hello. When a child is taught from birth to look at someone of different color and to communicate to them in a different way from other people, that child has a built in mechanism to see foreigners and truly believe that they are "different," or separate from themselves. So different you can only communicate with them in strange tongues. Not only does this hinder ones ability to study Chinese language (people here are 100 percent more likely to just make hand gestures at me rather than actually speak vocal language) but it also fundamentally adds to the general idea that Chinese have of foreigners as being mysterious and somehow something very different from themselves, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. This type of thought is ingrained in the subconcious and is the most enormous stumbling block that I have to overcome in trying to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern cultures through my classes, or daily interactions. Saying hello in itself is a small act, often done with a friendly thought, but what it does is draw lines between what is Chinese and what is not, and that makes it more difficult to make genuinely close human interaction with people.

And the children, oh the children! I honestly fear children while I live here. Why? Because they are totally innocent of what they do, yet are the most brutal in their actions. A group of 8-12 year old boys to me is like a pack of wild jackals (is that a fearsome animal, it sounds good, what with that Bruce Willis movie and all) and I will go to great lengths to avoid interactions with them, making me officially the biggest wuss on the planet. They will run after me screaming hello and laughing, and drawing laughter from the crowd around also, who will either be embarrassed but not say anything, or think that it is cute to see the kids practicing their English. Some of the more daring boys have even gone behind me and boxed with my shadow thinking I couldn't see, or pretended to fire an imagined machine gun at me like I was their enemy. This is all very disturbing. Children are a reflection of society since they haven't yet learned that actions like these aren't appropriate. One has to wonder what is going on in the minds of the older men that are looking me up and down as I pass by. The fact that children at that age not only instantly recognize me as a foreigner but then also have these sort of reactions merits reflection for sure.

The fact is that words and language are a very powerful thing. Living abroad allows a person to feel this very acutely, as it is mainly language that keeps you on the outside of the society in which you are living. Hello, one word that should have a positive connotation, has the power to annoy, embarrass, and even alienate a person. It's something that is important to remember when interacting with anyone anywhere. Something that I wish would be taken more seriously in this place and not shrugged off as something to be ignored and endured.