Maybe it was the juxtaposition of what I heard versus the immediate dismissal I had received at the hands of the Cab Driver, or maybe I was just as anxious as he was. Whatever the case, my first experience of Richard, one of my two Chinese roommates, was a frantic, whirlwind phone call in the parking lot of the airport. He explained who he was (my roommate), where he was (our apartment), where the cab would take me (again, our apartment), how excited he was to meet me (very, very, excited), and how long the cab ride would take (forty minutes or so), in less than 30 seconds. His English was good, with only a few mispronunciations and stutters where he searched for a word. All in all, his English was leaps and bounds better than my Chinese. After our conversation was finished I handed the phone back to the crabby cabby and listened to another astonishingly fast salvo of a language I had supposedly been studying for two semesters. She hung up, and then drove me to the apartment, angst coming out of her pores. Her driving was erratic and dangerous (I'll have to make an entire post devoted to Chinese traffic), but we arrived in one piece (after getting lost and calling Richard twice (to her obvious annoyance).
Richard, donning a worn-out Virginia Tech hat, and a Virginia Tech T-shirt much too wide for his modest frame, waved us down and rushed to my door smiling from ear to ear. I got out of the cab and noticed his height, an even 6 foot. We shook hands and he asked me to get my bags and he would show me our apartment. I obliged, and he rushed to grab one of them. I explained that they were very heavy, but he would not take no for an answer. Unbeknownst to him, he elected to choose my huge, stuffed to the rim, hard-shell suitcase, weighing an impressive 48 pounds, leaving me my much more manageable 32 pound duffle bag. I smirked to myself as I watched him struggle with the weight. I offered to trade him but he would have none of it. As we walked from the cab to the door to our apartment building he never stopped speaking for even the slightest of moments, he had much to explain, and Richard is very good at explaining.
By the fifth floor however (our apartment is on the sixth) the combined effort of continuing constant chatter and the physical exertion of heaving and hauling a 48 pound hunk of dead weight, left him, for the time being, speechless. He dropped the bag and rushed up the stairs to enlist the help of my second roommate (Jeremy). They awkwardly two-manned the suitcase the last flight of stairs, much to my amusement.
We had arrived. We dropped my bags at the door, and Richard then gave me what had to have been the most exhaustive tour of a two-bedroom apartment ever accomplished by man. Every nook and cranny, every feature explained in exquisite detail. I asked a few questions, which he would usually begin responding to before I had even finished them. He was impetuous, and as I would find out, that's just a part of his nature.
Over the next two days, Richard took me all over Guilin to show me the sights and get me acclimated to the city itself. I must have had some luck because I got what could have been the best English speaking tour guide in Guilin to show me around for free. Over the course of our excursions I found out that he is 21, is interested in Political Science (he even wanted me to outline the pros and cons of Obamacare as I shared my housewarming gift, a liter of Jack Daniel's Honey Whiskey, with him and Jeremy), and loves the American TV show Gossip Girl. Yup, you read that right. Gossip Girl. He even recites the show motto fairly often (something about your number one source of gossip in New York City..?). His phone background, the main character of the show. When he asked me if I liked the show I explained to him as gently as I could that it was a show watched by a predominantly female audience, but not even this could deter him from his love, he quickly responded that he had heard that, and that he did not care! He liked the show, and enjoyed watching it to practice his English, since the girls on the show talked so fast. In our first discussion about dating, he even said he needs to find a girl like the show's main character.
Richard is an English major at the local university, and loves hanging out with me to ask me how pronounce certain words, or to have me correct his grammar. He had particular trouble with the word, "symmetrical," and would turn and ask me during lulls in the conversation if he had mastered it yet. We developed a sort of barter system. My struggle word for that day was DuoSiuFeng (Solitary Beauty Peak, where the pictures in the last post are from, and where Richard and I took our first picture together).
I look forward to learning more of the Chinese language and culture through Richard, helping him to polish his English, and discovering any more interesting foibles he has hidden away. Just not through Gossip Girl, sorry Richard.
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