Home / Life
I walk past two women who are having a pop-up fashion show, modeling the contents of their designer shopping bags for each other right on the sidewalk. I enjoy their giggles, but I can't understand a word of what they say.
Later, I'm strolling through a Christmas bazaar, where a woman looking at a display of Iranian jewelry can't figure out if the price is for the earrings or the necklace - or both. At least, I think that's what she and the vendor are discussing. I can't understand a word of it.
Still later, I'm in a bar, where four students at the next table next are having an amiable debate about soccer. I can't understand a word of it.
As an American who only speaks English, ting bu dong (I hear but don't understand) is kind of my natural state, surrounded by 1.3 billion Chinese.
But what's happening today is something different: The two women shoppers are Indonesian, the woman coveting the earrings is Russian, and the students in the bar turn out to be from Mexico.
I work across the street from the University of International Business and Economics, which is teeming with foreign students, but that doesn't make my neighborhood different from many others.
This is one of the things I love most about living in Beijing. I arrived more than five years ago expecting to be an alien fish in a Chinese-speaking sea. What I didn't expect was to be in a gloriously international pond, where people walking past may be speaking Serbian, Kazahk, German, Arabic, Tagalog, Hindi and Danish in turn. It's what I imagine walking the halls of the United Nations would sound like.
I adore it.
I grew up in Houston, which has big populations of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Chinese, Koreans and others. But they are geographically clannish, as I find ethnic groups to be in LA, so I never felt like I was walking past the Tower of Babel as I so often do here. New York, perhaps, is the only place I've been that even comes close.
In the city's best restaurants, German aerospace executives will be hosting Sichuanese customers at one table, Moroccans will be chatting up Beijing tour operators at another, and Brits will be trying to explain cricket to dairy operators from Heilongjiang at yet a third.
Occasionally the babble can be wearisome. But much more often it's so stimulating, especially at holiday times, when people of different cultures mix more often for the occasion.
You'll see a group of foreigners thrashing around in a dragon boat during that August festival.
They can't understand each other or the laughing Chinese man telling them how to row, but they are all laughing together.
At the German embassy Christmas bazaar, Chinese and Uzbeks are elbow-by-elbow, trying to figure out how to wear lederhosen or eat currywurst.
At Spring Festival, Azeri and American ladies may get a group lesson on making Chinese dumplings.
Because I have a beard and seem to be roughly Santa's age, I find myself donning a red suit here in December most years, though I don't really have the figure for it. My rented Santa suits tend to be designed for big-bellied dudes, and a class of 5-year-olds got the giggles last weekend when they realized a pillow was trying to escape from my pants.
It's an experience I'd never have if I "went home" to Texas. But most of all, I savor the sense that my holidays have become their holidays (just ask those kids to sing Jingle Bells). Likewise, the holidays of other people here - whether they are Chinese or other laowai like me - have become mine.
