Perfect

"My English...mmm...not so good."
This is a phrase that very often indicates something crazy is about to happen.
Every Wednesday and Friday at 1:15pm I am picked up at the school gate and driven to Chinese class with the other Longgang foreign teachers who go to class. The three involved schools are supposed to take turns driving us there, and when my school is not driving, I'm the last person to be picked up. A little before 1:15, yesterday afternoon, a nice black car pulled up to the gate and waved me over. I walked up and saw that there were no other people in the car, "Me?" I ask. "Yes" he replies with more waving. I got into the car and he proceeded to say something about my classes, so at this point I figured he must be taking me to the right place...well, that or I've been quite easily tricked into being sold into slavery.
We wound around to the main road, merged into traffic and then more or less parked right there in the right-most lane. For some reason this is perfectly legal in China, the rightmost lane of any road can be driven in unless someone chooses to park there, then it becomes a temporary parking lane. Anyway, as we come to a stop he explains that the other school's driver can't bring us back from class so he's going to, and since he doesn't know where the building is he needs to follow the other driver into town. Getting this explanation was no easy task because his English is very broken and he often wanders off mid-phrase to talk to himself in Chinese. Eventually we got it figured out, and eventually I find out that his name is Luo, but only after we exchanged phone numbers and I needed to save his into my phone. With a big toothy grin he states that his English name is "Peedy". He looked so confident in this that I hated to do it, but it made no sense so I said "what?". "Peedy" he said again. "Peedy?" I tried to confirm. He shook his head, picked up his phone and typed in 'Perfect', explaining that his Chinese given name means 'perfect', so that is his English name as well. About that time the car we were supposed to follow appeared, and as we pulled away he told me, with slight embarrassment, that "Um, my English is...mmm...not so good." Perfect.
As we drove to class, zipping in and out of lanes with only inches to spare between cars (which is the way everyone drives here) we talked about the differences in getting a drivers license in different countries, the other foreign teachers in Longgang, what we studied in college, how old we were, he showed me a picture of his 6-month old son (very cute!) and told me about his wife. He asked some odd questions about marriage in the US and seemed quite perplexed when I told him (totally guessing) that it was pretty common for people to get married around the age of 25. This was baffling to him because "you graduate from university when 23, then one, two years after you marry...so young!" Good point Perfect, but then again, he's 29 and has been married for two years. I guess 25 is really young, but 27 is not. I tried to explain that some people get married even younger than that, and that I have a cousin who got married when she was 19. I'm pretty sure I lost him on that though, because I got no reaction.
After going through the two toll booths (where I had to give the lady the money. Apparently Hong Kong cars are driven on the right side, so they have booths for this...though I don't know why Perfect picked that booth) and the checkpoint we made it to class and I told him that we would be back down in a couple hours.
After class we called him and he showed up pretty quickly. The drive back was pretty uneventful: the other two foreign teachers chatted and I read my book. They were making dinner plans and asked me if I wanted to come along. I declined because I knew there was free cafeteria food at the school and I was ready to have some food, read my book, and call it a night. We dropped them off and it was just me and Perfect again. He asked if I wanted to go to the grocery store, well, sort of. After some confusion and nearly stopping in the middle of the street I figured out what he was asking and said that I didn't need to stop, I was just going back to the school to eat at the cafeteria. It took a while for this to get established, but once he figured out my plan he decided that he had a better idea. He insisted on taking me for some xicai, which neither of us knew the English translation for. We again temporarily parked in the street so I could look this up. Xi means 'west' and cai means 'dish'. He wanted to take me to eat western food and he insisted on paying. Perfect.
There are two kinds of "western food" restaurants in China: ones that are actually western-style because they are run by expats and ones that are a Chinese persons interpretation of western-style food. This place was the latter. There was a French phrase on the place mat, but one of the categories of food on the menu was "Nosh" (I tried to tell him that "nosh" is a colloquialism so it was funny to see it on a menu...blank stare). There was certainly a lot of meat on the menu (very western), but there wasn't a potato to be found and we ordered something called 'eight fingernail fish' (which was octopus, as it turns out). He really wanted me to order because I'm the westerner, but because I wasn't sure if this place was family-style or not and because he was the one paying, I insisted that he order. After a long Q and A with the waitress (who was staring at me most of the time) he eventually got some food ordered and before long the soup showed up.
They set one kind of soup in front of him and one in front of me. He asked me some question that I couldn't decipher, but I think he was asking which one of the soups I wanted. I said "what kind of soup is this", which was met with a blank stare. Then I tried the soup in front of me and said "oh, it has corn in it." Another blank stare. Now I don't know what to do so I just stare back. He said "it's good?" I said yes, and he dove right into the soup in front of him. Before long a HUGE sizzling plate of some sort of rib meat and noodles is set in front of me. The waitress picks up the corner of a napkin and holds it in front of me. I though that maybe I was supposed to tuck it into the front of my shirt like some people do at restaurants. Luckily I (correctly) decided this was not what I was supposed to do, just in the nick of time. Instead, I was supposed to hold the napkin in front of me so that the sizzling sauce she was pouring on the meat didn't splatter all over my clothes. Eventually the sizzling settled down and I was allowed to put the napkin down, but I wasn't sure if I could eat yet because I still wasn't sure if this was family-style or not. Mercifully his food showed up and I knew that I was expected to eat this by myself. As he went through the protective napkin procedure he gestured for me to go ahead and eat.
His plate was decidedly more Chinese than mine, so he pointed to his rice and asked if we make "mice" or corn in America. I told him that we grow a lot of corn and soybeans, especially where I'm from. He asked if we ever ate "mice", and I told him that we do, but we have a lot of different types of rice and some are different colors. "Different colors?" "Yeah, black and brown and white" Perplexed look.
Eventually we finished eating (including the 8-fingernail fish) and the waitress brought our coffee. Of course, because this is China, there was some sort of cream in it, but luckily no sugar this time, so I was a very happy camper. He paid the bill and we left. As we got in the car he asked me something about the park: either he wanted to know if I've ever been there or he wanted to know if I wanted to go there right now. Apparently my answer indicated that I wanted to go for a walk in the park, so off we went.
We got to the park and had to circle the whole thing to find a place to park the car. As we drove he mumbled things like "no space, no space, no space" and "oh my god, no place to park" and kept trying to call someone on the phone. I'm not really sure how people know if there is a place to park or not; in America all the parking is relatively neat and tidy with people generally parking between the painted lines. In China, a row of parked cars looks like some giant child dumped out a bucket of match-box cars: people apparently just pull up and stop. Anyway, eventually we found a spot that was about one and a half car lengths long (no challenge for an experienced parallel-parker), and after an approximately 15-point maneuver, we were satisfactorily in the space.
By now we had been hanging out for about three hours, so we had settled on a sort-of pidgin English-Chinese that enabled good-enough communication. Basically we used English, but there is a lot of "zenme shuo" ("How do you say") going back and forth. As we got near the lake he said "there is the lake". "Lake", I repeated. "Who!?" he almost yelled. "Lake", I repeated again, then asked "Zhongwen zenme shuo?" ("How do you say it in Chinese?"). "Who" (hu 湖) he repeated...apparently he already tried to tell me...
As we got around the lake we neared a pavilion, which was full of people moving around with some music playing. He told me that these were "womens who are 40 to 80". "Middle-aged?" I asked, to which he triumphantly exclaimed "They are old ladies!" We walked up the the edge of the pavilion and watched these "old ladies" doing a very traditional dance that I'm sure is very beautiful when everyone knows what they are doing. It was a little chaotic, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. It sort of looked like line-dancing, only slower, which I tried to explain to Perfect. Blank stare.
After a while we got tired of that and kept walking. We eventually wound around the lake and walked across a zig-zag bridge to a pagoda in the middle of the water. In one corner there was a group of men sitting around playing instruments: a Peepaw (pipa 琵琶) and two Ah-hus (erhu 二胡). We watched for a little while and he laughingly told me that the old ladies danced over there and the old men sat over here. I guess old men and old ladies get tired of each other in China too...
It was a very moving experience to stand there watching and listening to those men play their music. It's a simple combination: very old music played on very old instruments among old friends. It's something that these men have probably done for years and something that their countrymen have been doing for millenia. Some people noticed me and stared, but most people were too wrapped up in their own worlds to care if I was there or not. It was so paradoxically Chinese: crude but beautiful, simply complex. It was perfect.
A little while later it was time to go. Perfect told me that if I ever need to go anywhere, just call him and he will make sure someone takes me there. He dropped me off at the school and I thanked him for dinner. I laughed to myself as I climbed the stairs to my room; only in China can a drive to class turn into a night like this.