I Can't Help Being Shy, Okay

[masterofmidgets]

Our writing exercise for Monday's Fiction class was to write about something we've done that we were really ashamed of - that time you shop-lifted, or wrecked your dad's car, or said mean things about your friend behind her back. I think this was one of the hardest things I've ever written. You guys, I don't do non-fiction, as a rule. I bitch and moan on here, but when it comes down to writing writing, I don't like putting myself out there for other people to see. I'd rather stick to hiding behind my characters, revealing bits of myself through the way I tell their stories. And when I do write about myself, I tend to deflect and distance myself from it with humor. But this was a subject I couldn't really make a lot of jokes about, and that was...hard. I don't know how well I did.

 

There are maybe a dozen black people in Qingdao, and three of them are sitting in the hall with me.

The hall I’m talking about is a fifth floor corridor in the Qingdao da xue International Hotel, and for the last month it has been our sanctuary of Americanism in an alien city. The hotel has a lounge, a dining room, and a café, but this is the only place we don’t feel like intruders, awkwardly large and unmannerly, speaking in broken, fragmentary Chinese, so this is where we gravitate. After all, the hallway is ours, by virtue of occupation – our group of thirteen confused and uncertain students and the Ole Miss professor and grad student chaperoning us takes up all but one room, and that’s been only sporadically filled since we got here. There’s no one to complain if we speak loudly, play music, stage games of tag and wall tennis – and we do.

In the morning we have class, four hours of Chinese; in the afternoon we have cultural lessons – history, cuisine, calligraphy. Sometimes we go downtown, in groups of four or five, dropping disconcertingly bright bills and oddly weighted coins into the box on the city bus and riding it until the skyscrapers surround us like neon-lit canyon walls.

But that’s daytime. At night I stick to the hotel, and almost everyone else does too. We study, shuffling through flash cards with the Chinese words for mother, home, yes, go scrawled on them in pencil. We watch DVDs on the cheap movie players we bought here, the girls in Sarah’s room to shriek over Lost, the boys intent on Band of Brothers sitting on Jenson’s floor. We crowd into Mama Mei’s suite to email family and facebook friends. And we cluster in the hall, sprawled on the nubby hotel carpet and leaning in doorways to talk.

So this is where I am: I am sitting on the floor in the hallway, back against the wall and legs stretched out in front of me, one side of a small circle of people. Elizabeth is all self-assurance and Southern charm, and I’m a little bit jealous of the ease with which she laughs. Michelle is nicknamed Sked, because she’s the only one who knows our schedule from day to day, where we should be and when. Morris and Jarvis are twins, and I’m embarrassed to admit I still can’t tell them apart; besides Chinese, they speak Japanese, albeit with heavy Mississippi accents. Hana is my roommate, and that we have little to talk about has less to do with her being from Sudan and more to do with her passion being molecular biology while mine is English lit.

I’ve spent every day with them for a month, but I don’t fit in with them. I’m too awkward, too geeky, too self-conscious, I know too much about science fiction and not enough about pop music. I try too hard. Which is what I’m doing now – trying to be interesting and witty and well-liked, but I know I’m only coming across as odd and a little desperate. Doesn’t stop me from trying, though.

So I’m telling a joke – a story, really, an anecdote of my aunt’s from when the Marines stationed her in Central America, one of many, most of which are about chasing frogs with machetes and tormenting her commanding officer. When I start telling it, I’m not thinking; it’s just one of an endless arsenal of half-joking, half-horrified stories about my family I pull out at every occasion (this was the time my mom set a bush on fire, this was the time my dad drove his truck through a brick wall, this was the time my cousin shot his best friend in the foot).

I sit there and I say, “So the base my aunt’s on is out in the jungle, right. Like, the actual jungle, everything’s growing like crazy, their clothes keep rotting, and the whole place is full of giant toxic snakes and stuff. And one morning this guy in her platoon comes up to her and says the frogs are keeping him awake.”

It’s a dumb story, but I’m hoping they’ll laugh.

But halfway through, I realize this was a horrible mistake.

It is abruptly obvious to me that when I finish this joke – and I am going to finish it, I don’t want to but I cannot. Stop. Talking. – When I reach the punch line, everyone in this hallway is going to be looking at me and thinking that I am a thoughtless racist jerk. There is no way they aren’t going to be offended by what I’m saying.

I’ve never thought about this story that way before; I’ve never had any reason to. I don’t have any black friends, or even black acquaintances. Out of 3000 students, my high school has a black population of about 100. I’m used to being aware of what I say about Latinos, Mexicans, immigrants. I know what stereotypes will get under the skin of someone with the last name Martinez, what jokes I shouldn’t make, what words I shouldn’t use – even if I wouldn’t use them anyway. I’m used to that conscious self-censoring.

When we first got to Qingdao, I told my roommate that if I said anything that came across as stupid and offensive, she needed to call me out on it, because it probably wasn’t intentional. That I knew what was blatantly unacceptable, but the subtler elements of racist speech were just beyond my experience, for all my good intentions. I hoped that would be enough.

And now it isn’t.

I stumble through the end of my story. No one laughs. I bite my lip and look down at my hands, my face burning. I know what they’re thinking, and I don’t blame them for thinking it. I keep quiet for the rest of the night, unwilling to risk drawing attention to myself, or worse, misspeaking again. I run the story through my head again and again, wondering how I could how told it differently, how I could have made this not a disaster. How I could not have noticed what I was saying.

I always thought I was better than this. I thought that I would never be just another stupid white girl.

I was wrong.

Comments

[truly-wished.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that happened, even by accident. Sometimes, we get so comfortable with people, or we want to fit in so badly, we trip and land right on our faces.

[telyanofcelore.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

You did really good on this story.