Making Friends

It was just last week that I begun teaching class. After three treacherous days of nothing going wrong and waking up at my normal time, national holiday began.

Since I teach all freshman, I didn’t teach any classes the first four weeks at site. Instead, all my students were busy practicing goose stepping, military chants, and doing countless pushups as part of their freshman military training. This is all part of a regiment of social cohesion exercises that begins in middle school. The first chunk of time at the start of your first year in middle school, high school, and college is devoted to these military drills. They range in length from one week to five weeks, getting longer as you get older (though the exact durations vary between schools and provinces). 

So the first four weeks I spent “integrating” into the community per Peace Corps goals. It was my conscious mindset and I made new friends. Kinda.

The first new friend I made is also a teacher on campus. She also frequents the same lunch spot on campus and invited me over once to join her. The conversation quickly veered in a direction of personal interest for me: modernist literature. It found its way to just such a splendid junction at the mention of her teaching a poetry class on campus. “CONTEMPORARY POETRY” I repeated to myself in a booming voice the first time I heard her say it (in Chinese). And then we really connected when she brought up her interest in modernist literature—soo my jam. And then the imaginary scale in my head that balances a relationship between acquaintanceship and friendship plummeted to the ground when she said her favorite author was Borjes. I didn’t even know this literary mastermind was known in China. But here he was, a man who had his first translated work published at seven, has written some of the most mind bending surrealist short fiction, and has more than once sat atop my shoulder playing a muse-full jig from a flute. I don’t know if he ever played an instrument, but a flute would match imaginary-him well. 

This would be the first of many lunch meet-ups we would have. The second time she invited me to read a poem she published on her wechat (a do-everything messaging app). After working through it line by line with Na on the phone so that I didn’t have to spend too much time staring at a dictionary, I found it quite the intriguing poem. After talking to her some more I found that somewhere amidst our conversation I agreed to translate it into English for her.

One of the fun tidbits about making friends in a foreign language is you’re not always sure how things happen. This was one of those moments. We were talking about the poem and then I was agreeing with her about something I didn’t understand and then a few more paragraphs into our conversation and I realized I had already agreed to translate it for her.

In the end, I had loads of fun doing this and it worked to feed our next couple conversations. As it turned out this poem was deeply personal for her and she was revealing a secret about herself to any who were willing to devote the time unpacking her metaphors, symbols, and loaded rhetoric. I was not one of those people but she seemed all too thrilled to share her secret with me.

It’s interesting, this last bit, secrets. It’s not the first time an HCN (host country national, AKA a Chinese person here) has gutted themselves and placed it on the table for me to see. Something about being outside the system, I hypothesize, makes me seem less judgmental. Nonetheless, on several occasion HCNs have been willing to make themselves vulnerable and put in my hands knowledge that could literally destroy a portion of their life. This is not me being hyperbolic. I really mean this and is also the reason I haven’t typed out the specifics.

So there I was, with a 31 year old women talking poetry and literature over lunch and learning about her. And yet, for all the depth of the information and the great relationship I have with this friend, I would not say we’ve connected. And this is where things get more complicated.

Making friends at site has been challenging for several reasons. Not the least of which is due to an unrelateability of life issues. She’s married, has a kid, has a professional life, comes from a different culture, and is an over-30 women in China—30 bears a certain significance here as far as what you’re expected to have achieve, the most important of which is marriage. I’m just not any of those things. This isn’t to say we can’t connect over literature but the way we relate to literature is so vastly different as we come from such different places that we spend most of the time understanding each other more than connecting.

While I’ve previously made other friends one evening conversation deeply muddied all of my relationships. 

A quick background tidbit: Here in Tianshui at my college I have a host family. While I don’t live with them, they’re tasked with helping me understand local customs and social norms. A well spoken, intelligent, and loving family of three; mom, dad, daughter. 

One evening I was at their place for dinner and I brought up to the father—who is himself a teacher on campus in his mid thirties—the questions of male teacher-female student relationships and how to ensure these don’t get muddled. This is particularly relevant to me as 95% of my students are females. What ensued was a long winded conversation on how to set boundaries with students and what is appropriate and inappropriate for teachers. He simplified things with a short anecdote: their cousin school down the road hired a foreign teacher one year. The foreign teacher got romantically involved with a students and maintained this after he finished. They no longer hire foreign teachers. As a Peace Corps representative that is tasked with ensuring a continuing and sustainable relationship with my school, you can understand why I so clearly wish to delineate boundaries.

The reasons were simple: you are a teacher, they are students. Socially speaking you are at different levels and do not intermix. So long as you’re a teacher you interact with other teachers. Simple. This further corroborated a story told by another teacher: a previous peace corps volunteer fell in love with a student BUT he didn’t act on these feelings until after he finished service at which point the student had also graduated. Happy ending since no social norms were broken in the process of the growing feelings. 

Either way, my situation is slightly different as I’m already in a healthy relationship with Na and only wish to avoid any confusion. Solution, according to him, don’t socially associate with students. You teach them. Done.

This is where things get muddy since the day before I had made plans with a student I had met in a very similar manner to the teacher (they had invited me to join them for dinner) and we had made plans to travel a little bit over the break I am now on. I asked him about this specifically and he said I should tell these students I have a matter to attend to—which is a catch-all and socially acceptable way of saying never mind with the other party not knowing for sure if you really do have a matter to attend to. So I did this and skipped out on what might have been a fun day visit a local site called the cliff of the immortals (right? awesome name!).

Over time, due to attending the same lunch/dinner spot at least once nearly every day I’ve become familiar with the staff and, in particular, one of the male cooks. He’s 23 which puts him one year younger than me. Today, I finally sat down and chatted with him for over an hour after I finished my meal. It was great. Although we had no literature to bond over, his disposition is simply fun and comfortable. We get along well. He also had a friend sitting with his. She was one of the students I had previously made plans with to go to the cliffs of the immortals. So, sitting with a female students and a male who had already graduated from college, it seemed like the perfect audience to bring up this topic again.

And I did.

After the first hour of chat about food and culture and language learning challenges, I cut the conversation with a serious faced “can I ask you a culture question?” I got a yes and proceeded to ask if it is appropriate for a student to be friends with a teacher. Short answer: yes. Long answer, he told me an anecdote of his life in which high school teachers were friends with students and if it was even okay then, it was certainly okay with college. In fact, while he was in college he saw it happen frequently and thought it appropriate.

At this point, I brought the female student back into the conversation and away from her phone. “Oh, yeah, yeah.” She smiled and nodded her head once but it never quite made the return sweep as her gaze dropped once again deep into her cell phone. 

The conversation went on like this and the female student eventually chimed in with a more long winded and attentive answer that gave me the clear opinion that from their perspective (student and recent grad) it was ok.

Feeling brave I made a bigger leap and asked about male-female friendships. I wanted to know how it’d be perceived and how to draw the lines clearly. Both respected the question and seemed sincere in the replies that they thought nothing of it. A guy and a girl could be friends just fine without it being unclear that it was a friendship and nothing more. I reiterated my question several more times focusing on different aspects and got a resounding feeling of “chill dude.” This was also me sending undertones to the girl of “hey, lets be friends. Sorry for bailing on you the other day.”

Getting late we parted ways. I walked downstairs with the girl where a guy was waiting for her (the distracting texting and abrupt need for her to leave suddenly made sense). Apparently I was known to her friend as “the handsome foreigner” (yeah, I’m handsome). They both walked me home and then went off into the dark of night together with a middle-school six inches between them in a fine show of the conservative mannerisms here. 

I think my next step will be entering into the same conversation with my counterpart, who is a teacher assigned to help me with all things teacher-related. 

Where I’m at now, though, is recalling a lecture during training about finding a balance between local customs and personal culture. Find a spot that isn’t all the way local customs and dishonest to the self but is also not entirely personal culture and disrespectful to the locals. Recalling this I ponder if for me the balance will be one where I recognize befriending other human beings who are the same age as me and happen to also be students may not be the local custom/norm but is more honest to myself. Where I don’t adhere so strictly to the clearly divided social hierarchy and associative circles and shake hand with all willingly. Perhaps this will be the mark of “he’s different.” Not just the color of my skin or the way I speak, but a mannerism that I find comfort in. The question I must further explore, though, is; will making friends with some students be too inappropriate or just a little inappropriate? This is all set to a backdrop of knowing that many previous volunteers at other schools have made great friendships with their students. 

This journey of balance certainly is convoluted, resting like a scale in flowing muddy water; balance is not always found according to a balanced scale but rather balance is formed amidst changing conditions and must constantly be adjusted. But I can’t quite see what’s even on the scale at the bottom of this darn muddy water.