A Tale of Two Weddings
Nothing sums up my experience of being an expat quite like the two weddings I've attended this year.
The first wedding, held in early May, took place in a tiny village in rural south Yunnan Province, not far from the Lao border. All of the food from the wedding came from rice and vegetables grown in the village and pigs and poultry that roamed around prior to meeting their unfortunate end. Each day, guests sat on an outdoor wooden platform constructed specifically for the occasion on small straw stools to eat home-cooked food.
The first wedding had no ceremony; after all, the bride and groom had already been married by a government official some weeks before. Wedding guests wore, for the most part, t-shirts, shorts, and flip flops in the tropical heat.
The second wedding, held last week, began in a Catholic church high in the mountains east of Los Angeles. The ceremony was quite formal, involving a full mass conducted by a priest familiar to the bride's family. The groom and his groomsmen wore traditional black tuxedos, the bride a white gown, and her maids of honor matching pink dresses.
After the wedding, the hundred plus guests decamped to the bride's uncle's house, a palatial lakefront villa with its own dock. In addition to the full bar, wedding guests were treated to a live jazz band and a DJ and were encouraged to dance on an outdoor floor. After dinner, a catered meal with beef, ravioli, and vegetables, guests accompanied the bride and groom to the dock, where a speedboast whisked them off to a private hotel on the other side of the lake.
Both weddings were great fun. But they had nothing in common, except that I attended both. Having a foot in both of these worlds is the delicate balancing act of the China expat. Coming home can be more jarring than going away, simply because we idealize home as our place with our people, as opposed to the foreign environment in which we live.
Yet I've discovered over the past few years that home can feel just as foreign as anywhere else. I noticed this especially this time; people kept commenting that I had a strange accent, certain conversations flew right over my head, and I found it difficult to convey the experience of living in China to nearly all the people polite enough to ask.
I suppose the best way to look at it is that feeling comfortable with multiple cultures is an incredible privilege, one that the vast majority of people around the world do not have. I know full well that when I fly back to China, I will pick up right where I left off, and that makes my bout with culture shock well worth it.
The Beauty of Anarchic Roads
The traffic system in most Chinese cities are frighteningly chaotic, and Kunming is no exception. Several major intersections have no control whatsoever. Red-light running is endemic. Drivers will do anything- anything- to avert gridlock, including driving on the sidewalk or down the wrong way of one-way roads. When you add in silent electrical bikes, motorcycles, trucks, mianbao che, and all other contraptions that pass as vehicles, Chinese roads resemble a Hobbesian nightmare where survival is by no means guaranteed.
Yet for all of its flaws, Kunming's roads seem oddly safe. I cycle on them without reluctance, even at night. Every so often, I have to slam on the breaks. Once or twice, I've bumped into pedestrians, vespas, or other small vehicles. In a city with such a large population crammed into a small area, these incidents are by no means unusual.
The very lack of rules on the roads in Kunming, in a way, explain why they're so safe. Cars violate traffic rules all the time. Pedestrians jaywalk with impunity, bikes go against the grain of traffic, and everybody everywhere do what they're not supposed to. Yet there's one rule that everybody follows in China: try not to hit other people.
Keeping that rule in mind makes everyone drive reasonably slowly. The scenes I witness in northern California, cars zipping by at high speeds, don't happen in China. In California, people follow the rules so assiduously that any deviation seems extraordinary and a cause for panic. In China, nobody drives well, and for that reason there's a certain sense of security amidst the madness.