An Afternoon’s Hello

The building I live in is mostly filled with older women and men, all of whom I’ve come to love. There is no elevator in my building of six floors. So, my neighbors must walk up and down the stairs. They move with a slow diligence, placing one foot above the other and pulling themselves up the stairs. On their way down, they turn sideways, easing their weight from one knee to the next.

Early on, one of the elder women said to me “you always stop and let me pass. You are so polite.” I smiled and let her pass. She hobbled up the stairs, back bent forward, cloth shoes skidding across the concrete stairs and echoing around the hollow stairwell. I didn’t realize it at the time, but little actions like that are what they enjoyed. The hello’s as we passed, the smiles, and my willingness to stop and chat.

“No, that’s not what I said. You didn’t understand.” The widowed women from the fourth floor scolded me with a smile. She repeated herself, but her meaning never made it out from under her localized “standard” mandarin. She was in the midst of recounting the many volunteers that came before me: There was the one who rode a bike everywhere. She was always outside and active. There was the very tall gentleman and some other woman. She remembered them all.

The woman to the far left is my neighbor. The woman second from the left is my coworker.

The sun was high in the sky and I was holding some vegetables in my cloth bag. I was on my way home to cook some noodles with a root vegetable sauce. Happening upon them, I took the moment for this conversation.

She asked me how my wife was doing, “That Chinese woman that came. She’s from Sichuan.” I smiled and laughed. “Ah, my girlfriend. We aren’t married.”

“Oh, I wish you both a long and happy life together! Yes, the one from Sichuan.” She repeated herself.

“Yes, my girlfriend is from Fuzhou.”

“Yes, Sichuan.” Sichuan, which is famous for its hotpot, is the province directly to the south of Gansu Province, which is where I’m currently living.

“Fujian, Fuzhou.” I corrected her. Fuzhou is in Fujian province far to the south-east (the order of places is reversed in Chinese).

“Ah, do you have children?” This is the natural second question after learning someone is married.

“We don’t have any children. We aren’t married.”

“Chinese immigrants in America don’t speak Chinese. The second-generation ones, they don’t learn it.” She changed the topic.

My coworker, with her six-month-old in her arms, chimed in, “why is that?”

“When you raise your kid you should speak in English and your wife should speak in Chinese.”

The conversation went on like this for quite some time. I’m not sure if she was hearing much of what was said to her, but she had fun moving from one topic to the next and I enjoyed hearing her talk. She talked with a smile stretching full across her face while her hands were sifting through some freshly harvested Chinese chives from the garden to her back.

It was just last week that she came and knocked on my door. It was 8 PM and no one ever knocks on my door that late less something bad has happened. I opened the door to her smiling face, her wrinkles telling a story that only time can write, “my sink is clogged. Is you sink clogged?” I told her mine wasn’t but she walked in nonetheless. She walked over to my bathroom to check the piping and then to my kitchen and looked down the drain. She explained that the pipes are all connected and that her sink might be backed up because someone above her has a backed-up sink. I’m not sure how that works but she was such a pleasant presence to be around. She just kind of smiled, hobbling around my apartment.

I went down to her apartment with her and she showed me her sink—it was backed up. “It’s not my fault, I’m so clean.” I believe her. Her whole apartment was clean. The floors were unadorned concrete, her bed pressed against the window in the living room. Everything was covered in flower patterns. She caught my wandering eyes and exclaimed, “ah, yes, come look around.” She was so thrilled. “I live alone here. Just me. It’s a nice place, isn’t it? This is another room. It has a bed, too. Nice, isn’t it? I live here all alone but I take care of it.” I praised her apartment as much as I could as I walked with her back to the door.

“I’ll go check with the 6^th floor. Maybe their sink is backed-up.” I agreed that was a good idea and apologized I couldn’t help her fix it. I turned around and walked up to my apartment ahead of her, closing my door behind me. I never did hear her footsteps on the concrete stairs outside my door.