Ayi

One of the best indicators of our improving Chinese has been our ability to communicate with Ayi.  A migrant from Henan province with a thick accent and little education, she has little in common with us.  However, as we’ve gotten to know her better and our ears have become more discerning, we have indeed been able to develop a true relationship with her, a fact evidenced more clearly tonight than ever before.

 

Generally at our biweekly “Ayi Dinners,” dishes come out from the kitchen one by one.  We begin eating while the food is hot, and Ayi continues to cook throughout the meal.  Once she’s brought out the last dish, she fills a plate and sits down on the couch to rest and eat.  We speak English at the table.  Ayi looks over at us.  We say to her in Chinese: “Hao chi! Hao chi! Delicious! Delicious!”  She says back modestly, “E le ba! You’re just hungry, that’s all.”  Somehow, she only needs three syllables where the English needs six.  When we are all done, Ayi cleans up and puts everything back in its place.

 

Tonight, though, before clearing the table, Ayi sat down with A. and me as we continued picking at the various dishes soon to become leftovers.  I can’t remember Ayi ever having sat down like that before.

 

“Look at all this food!” she said. “When I was young, we just had bread dumplings and corn meal.  Even at my wedding we didn’t have rice.  We were poor.  Really poor.”

 

“How old were you when you got married?” A. asked.

 

“19,” Ayi replied, after which I asked how she and her husband had met.  “It was an arranged marriage,” she continued, “I talked to him for the first time the day we married.  I had never even spoken to him before.  The matchmaker sat us down with our families.  My parents had a look at him, and his parents had a look at me, and that was it.  Then we walked out.”

 

I asked about the wedding:  “At the wedding,” she said, “my mother kept telling me to go over and talk to him.  ‘Just go ask him how old he is,’ she said.  We didn’t really have anything.  We just exchanged handkerchiefs with 喜喜 embroidered in them and then we rode away on bicycles.  Really poor, really poor.”

 

She and her husband moved to Beijing from Henan in 2003.  He fixes walls and floors in apartment buildings and she does housekeeping work around our neighborhood.  Their life is better now than it has ever been. They live in a small basement apartment in our complex and have two sons about our age, one married and one not. “They aren't cultured,” she told us, “not like you.  They don’t study like you.  You are cultured.  You are so lucky.”