The mission:
Chinese milk tea complete with chewy tapioca balls. Hot or cold... as you like.
The method:
Take a bus to the edge of town, walk until your legs begin to tingle, hum Chinese pop songs that you can't actually sing along to, squint until you see off in the distance a tiny little speck of a shop with the Chinese characters for cha do do (tea much much), race to the counter, wait patiently as the person in front of you buys her weight in hot dogs, order three teas, enjoy while squatting on the filthy curbside.
The menagerie:
One American foreign expert of nothing. One Chinese student expert in snacks. One Tibetan student who was guilted into tagging along for the ride.
************
Chinese milk tea complete with chewy tapioca balls. Hot or cold... as you like.
The method:
Take a bus to the edge of town, walk until your legs begin to tingle, hum Chinese pop songs that you can't actually sing along to, squint until you see off in the distance a tiny little speck of a shop with the Chinese characters for cha do do (tea much much), race to the counter, wait patiently as the person in front of you buys her weight in hot dogs, order three teas, enjoy while squatting on the filthy curbside.
The menagerie:
One American foreign expert of nothing. One Chinese student expert in snacks. One Tibetan student who was guilted into tagging along for the ride.
************
In my two years here I had never undertaken so random a mission using so haphazard a method with so diverse a menagerie. As step one of our method chugged along I found myself sandwiched between the profoundly Tibetan and the quintessentially Chinese and felt a little claustrophobic as both stared me in the face. What had I done?
It wasn't until we were squatting on the curbside before my anxiety over the potential disaster that I had orchestrated subsided. There's something alarmingly equalizing about squatting, not to mention squatting side by side on some stained pavement slurping tapioca balls through wide straws as flecks of garbage trundle past in the breeze. Though I tried not to show it, it struck me continuously how the three of us represent all of the conflict and beauty that this city suffers under. We chatted in English, I clarified in Tibetan, they exchanged in Chinese, and the world became three dimensional as the layers of language swirled around creating a conversation that was nearly impossible to follow due to the fact that perhaps only two thirds of us were understanding any given exclaimation. Everything repeated three times with the only variation the order. It's delicious! Shimbodu! Hao chi! Slurp slurp slurp. Di johkma ribe? Is that an ant? zhege mayi ma? Slurp slurp slurp. Wo hen shui jiao. Nga galeh cahgbodu. I'm sleepy. Slurp slurp slurp. On and on and on... round and round and round.
But not everything can be translated.
When the paper cups were dry, the breeze icy at our backs, the wide straws useless, the ground more disgusting than we could bear, and the lady returned for her second order of hot dogs... we stood up to leave. Mission completed, we retraced our method back to the school.
After a threefold declaration of pleasure in our outing and a good bye, zai jian, chu-oh to the girls, I crunched through yellow piles of leaves with my mind reeling from our triangular conversation and proximity to the complexity that I always knew was here but had never sat between on a bus, had never wandered amidst down the street, had never partaken of tea among.
I have a lot to learn... and there's no one and no way to translate it.
