Conrad Dispenses Advice (And Gives a Gift)
Conrad is enjoying a meal of Uighur noodles when another foreigner interrupts him.
Conrad rolled his own cigarettes. He bought the tobacco from a small dispensary down the block from his apartment and his mornings consisted of dumping the right amount of tobacco on the paper, rolling it and stocking up for the day. He didn’t trust the cigarettes from the store — too cheap or too expensive, the 7 RMB packs full of the unwanted leaves, the 100 RMB packs not worth the money. A smoke was a smoke, and Conrad struck a match on the table and lit a handrolled cigarette, blowing a thinning smokecloud at a motionless ceiling fan.
He couldn’t lean back and relax. There were no chairs in this restaurant, only pink plastic stools. He couldn’t drink either. A sign in Chinese asked you to respect the store’s customs and not bring in alcohol, no English translation, none needed. Conrad read the sign left to right and right to left. Hard to believe there was a time when he couldn’t read a single character. So different, then versus now, and Conrad took a quiet drag and waited for his food.
A chubby man in a square hat brought his plate with a small bowl of soup. Conrad thanked him and grabbed a pair of disposable chopsticks from a box between two bottles of sauce. Conrad hated the sauce. Dry noodles with fried eggs, sliced tomatoes and green peppers, Conrad wouldn’t dare taint its natural taste.
He ate, taking his time and savoring the flavor. Wuhan was different everyday but this place, a favorite since coming to China, had outlasted everything else Conrad cherished about this city. Much of the Wuhan Conrad loved existed only in his mind, soon to join the rest of his Wuhan as flawed memories and as he plucked the last bite of eggs off his plate, Conrad was thankful he wouldn’t be around to see it.
With a few onions remaining, he laid his chopsticks on his plate and lit another cigarette. He always picked the table in the back. At the front of the store a thin man in the same square hat swung ropes of dough and slapped them on parchment paper, stringing fresh noodles to cook. Other people came in. Some hauled their food away in plastic bags, some stayed. The space between tables was big enough for one person to fit through at a time and a little girl came toddling out of the back with her schoolbooks and sat practicing Chinese characters at the table across the aisle from Conrad.
The foreigner who strolled in nodded at Conrad as if they had a meeting. He was all smiles, trimmed blonde hair, in a blazer, the Chinese storybook picture of what a laowai should look like. The foreigner sat across from Conrad without permission and raised his right hand in a wave, Ni, and then his left one, Hao, and launched into his life story, in Mandarin.
Conrad went easy on the cigarette, savoring the flavor and the fruits of his labor while the foreigner prattled on. Conrad pegged him right away: underground missionary, Mormon or Christian, refugee from Mr. Mai’s or one of the many illegal churches which persisted year after year despite local laws and regulations. Respect Chinese law? With God on your side, why would you?
The foreigner finished — if the son-of-a-bitch ever stopped to take a breath, Conrad couldn’t tell — with a question, the same question Conrad had entertained in many classes, the deceptively simple question that plagued him day by day and over seven years later he still couldn’t answer.
“Why did you come to China?”
Conrad finished his cigarette. The foreigner’s smile looked painted-on. He didn’t exude happiness so much as he was happiness, and for most foreigners that didn’t last. The longer you stayed in China, the more obvious it became, and you could either face it and move on, or hide and long ago Conrad had chosen to face it. His mentor had taught him everything he needed to know about China and Conrad had surpassed his mentor. He knew China — the place laowai like this refused to acknowledge. Conrad looked it right in the fucking eyes.
Mister Happiness never would, assuming he bothered to stick around longer than a year. They tended to rotate quickly, the missionaries, and Conrad placed him in the class of every wealthy Ivy League dipshit writer who gazed at Beijing through the comfort of their hutong flats, writing boring shit the blue checkmark douchebags on Twitter would slobber over. Foreigners in China were a low, undignified sort, fully aware of where their bread was buttered and Conrad hated every fucking one of them.
Conrad lit another cigarette. At the tail-end of some smoke, he said in Chinese, “You speak Mandarin like a woman.”
The foreigner chuckled.
Conrad blew some smoke at him. “It’s the ahs, you pepper them throughout your speech which you obviously rehearsed. How many people have you given it to you? Am I the first? How long did you search for some sad sack of shit sitting all alone, and are you satisfied to speak Chinese like a woman?”
The foreigner’s smile faded and Conrad gloated. He held out his cigarette to the side like a child holding his hat out a car window and making sure the foreigner was watching, he dropped it on the floor.
The foreigner’s smile faded further.
“There’s something else you’ll realize,” Conrad said. “If you leave the church long enough to actually live, you will come to understand no one cares about you here. What, little friend? You think the banquets, the smiles and hellos, the looks from girls, you think it all means something? That you, the modern day Marco Polo, are Charisma Man in the Middle Kingdom?” The foreigner’s face dropped more and Conrad licked his lips. “Let me put it to you this way: You’ll be their entertainment for a few months, six tops. Then they’ll move on to the next zoo animal.”
Conrad scooted back, plastic stool scraping the concrete floor. The foreigner winced and the man in the small hat approached, asking him in deeply accented Mandarin what he wanted to eat.
“Wo,” the foreigner said. “Wo…” He repeated it twice more, the tone worse each time, and shook his head. “I’m not hungry,” he said in English.
The man trotted off to the next table.
Conrad smiled. “Why the long face? Cheer up, little friend. Zheshi zhongguo. Every day’s an adventure, every shit worth tweeting about.”
Conrad slapped the table with both hands and rose from the stool, chest puffed out. At the entrance to the restaurant he interrupted the young man making noodles and paid for his meal. He then handed the young man an additional 12 RMB with instructions to bring the same meal of dry noodles with fried eggs, sliced tomatoes and green peppers to the table where the foreigner was still sitting, his head slumped.
Conrad walked out onto the backstreet. He adjusted his hat, a Chargers cap still identifying them as San Diego. This backstreet served his first school in China, where his mentor had met him on a day not unlike this one, not unlike all summer days in Wuhan: hot and smoggy. 12 million people, slow boil in a gray metropolis and Conrad had once thought he was honored to live here, in this time of great change, as China reasserted herself on the world stage.
He sniffed. He pinched his nose and blew a pair of snotropes, taking care not to hit his shoes. Then he wiped off the leftovers with his hand and rubbed it on his pants.
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