Cultural Meltdown Number Two



I sent my friend Leah an e-mail today, which among other things, contained a description of what I have termed "Cultural Meltdown Number Two." It won't make you laugh, so read no further if you just want to be entertained. Here's an excerpt from my e-mail:

"I didn’t tell you about my cross-cultural meltdown number two. Last Saturday, Mikayla and I took the bus downtown to meet a Chinese English teacher named Lily. We met in the square, had lunch in the basement of WalMart (strangest thing ever! They have a Wal-Mart here that is sardine-can crowded. I haven’t actually been inside that part, but we did go up to the fourth floor where there’s a movie theatre...surreal to find it. The basement is like a little food court except it’s all Chinese food. What?!) Then we walked down the main shopping street and wandered in and out of stores. On one street corner there was a little girl, maybe five or six, wearing a yellow sweater and pink shoes. Her hair was in two perky pigtails. She was squatting down to what looked like a tripod on the ground made of thick steel pipes. On top of the tripod was a piece that spun around in circles, covered with a dirty washcloth. The little girl put her mouth over the spinning piece, bit down on it, and lifted herself up off the ground so that she was balancing. All the pressure was on her mouth around the washcloth. Then she kicked her feet up over her head so that her bellybutton was pointed up at the sky...remember, her face is still looking out at you, while biting the washcloth...and from that position she started to make the rotating piece she was clamping onto spin around. Every bone must have been out of joint, especially the vertebrae in her neck, which was impossibly doubled over. There was no one with her that we could see, but the Lily said that the girl was probably a child from the country whose parents had sold her to a sort of manager and that he was probably nearby. I couldn’t stop crying. The street we were on is the busiest shopping street in the city and people were streaming by us and staring (because they always do) and I was crying and I didn’t care.
I don’t want to turn away from atrocity and pretend like it doesn’t exist. I know horrible things happen in the world, and most of the time I hold that abstract thought at arms’ length, fully present in the ordinary details of life. To some extent, maybe that’s necessary. Maybe it’s a cop-out and I should pour myself out to break the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke. Regardless, being confronted with this little girl and my own imagination of what her life must be was overwhelming in that moment, and I cried, hard. I don’t know our father’s purposes. There was nothing for me to do in the situation but think for her, and I did, and I have been, and I believe those thoughts are powerful and effective. --Sigh— I didn’t mean to say so much, but it is good to write these wrestlings out."

That was Cultural Meltdown Number Two. I'll tell you the story of Number One another time...it's more lighthearted, but it was a meltdown at the time.

And the ordinary details of life continue without regard for the weight of the world's suffering. I'm teaching a full 16 hours a week...Oral English to four sections of freshmen. I'm still discovering my team's quirky delightfulness with joy. Here are some pictures of us eating noodles Chinese-style. The idea is that you pick up a sheaf of noodles with your chopsticks, engulf them with your mouth, and bite off the dangling excess so that the extra falls back into your bowl of soup. It's best to guide the falling noodles back into the bowl with your chopsticks so that broth doesn't splash on you...I have not mastered this skill yet.


Mikayla and I



Emily and Dan