Foreign Devils
You are never more of a foreigner
than when you are a foreigner in China.
(foreign visitor in Shanghai,
June 1997)
Fahuazhen Road, Shanghai - Sunday morning walking through the crowded market I am dressed like an American bum, shirttail hanging out of hole-eaten blue jeans among down-at-the-heels migrants from the countryside selling meat and produce from street stalls to snappy-dressed and sneering Shanghainese. In these streets of China I am a foreigner. In these streets little boys with toy guns come running toward me as if they were running off to fight the Opium War, shouting "Waiguoren, foreigner, boom-boom-boom!" In these streets when I walk with my wife she is viewed with suspicion, with contempt as someone who used to be Chinese; who used to be one of us but now is no longer one of us because she sleeps with one of them. In these streets of China I am a foreigner; and my wife is a Chinese whore who sleeps with foreigners.
In this street this morning as I walk foreign through the crowded market, I look up from quivering meat stalls to see another foreigner - a black man - approaching through the crowd. A young diplomat, possibly, or a foreign student he is dressed in traditional African attire, in bright-colored robes quite alien to the greys of Shanghai and is attracting a great deal of attention from people along the street as they sit ripping flesh from the twitching bodies of small animals. In the midst of the disembowling, they nod to each other in whispers as he walks by. He stops here and there to browse at the produce stands, and passers-by turn and stare at him as if there were three heads growing out of his shoulders.
In this street as we pass one another, we are instantly drawn together under the eyes of our onlookers by the shared condition of not being Chinese. Though we have never met, he and I, in the eyes of our observers along the crowded street we have suddenly become a pair: of strange foreign things, of oddities, objects of curiosity. In other places, in America of Africa we would be Black and White; thus differentiated, one would be one of us and the other would be one of them. In this place, however, in these streets of China we are both them; both simply foreigners. Black Ghost, White Ghost, it makes little difference; we are both ghosts, both foreign devils.
In this street as we pass one another, we exchange brief glances, smiling and nodding in recognition of this fact. For just a moment, we share the experience; then continue along our separate paths.
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