TRAVEL: 中国：有一个问题。(china: there’s a catch) REBECCA LEIB

Almost one month ago, I returned from a month long trip to China and I hope to never. Fucking. Go. Back. There. Again. 

I think I should backtrack for you. 

Pre-China was a rough year for me. My freelance jobs were waning and uncertain. My commercial agent dumped me. My writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had acquired a stalker. The car I had since I was 16 would periodically catch on fire. I broke up with this guy because he was a jerk, just as my psychic told me. 

I mean, I HAD a psychic. 

The year was crazy. 

So, I decided to drop it all and visit my brother in China. He had been there a year, teaching aviation terminology at a college in Tianjin. I figured, this was the time— I’m basically unemployed, broke, and no pesky awesome love of my life is holding me back. So, why not? I loved to travel. I fancied myself a great traveler, one who was open to change, reconfiguration, and enlightenment. I would go to the Great Wall. I would interact with the people. I would try lots of foreign foods. I would learn, love and eat. And maybe pray. Just like that book that I never read, and won’t ever read.  Because that book, like China, is shit.

I arrived in Beijing on the 4^th of July and with my fancy backpack and my Lonely Planet.   

I was ready.

The first thing I realized was that China was hot. Really hot. When I landed in Beijing, it was approximately 94 degrees and smelled like hot garbage. Oh Rebecca, I thought, my dumb American olfactory senses aren’t used to how others live!  Surely it’s just the initial shock of being in a foreign land. Then, I tried to catch a cab from the airport and realized quickly that there were NO LINES ANYWHERE IN CHINA. And I don’t mean no lines like, water park fun-time no lines, I mean strangers en masse pushing each other like cattle. Lines. The Chinese? They don’t believe in them. A line to catch a train? NO way. A line in a fast food restaurant? Why bother? Lines were for people who want to get where they’re going faster, and in an orderly fashion.

The Chinese were having NONE OF IT. 

With more than a billion people in each city I visited, feeling the hot breath of a Chinese person on my neck or their shirtless bodies haphazardly pressed all up against mine became routine. Also, I had not gotten my period in two months, which irritated me. 

OPEN your MIND, REBECCA, I thought to myself, as a Chinese person jammed their umbrella right into my collarbone, taking my cab and spilling open my carry-on bag. These people don’t have Facebook, or blogs! They barely have Fresca or free press! Your body is soft, sensitive, and American. HARDEN UP! Of course, I did.

Then, there was the food factor. Most of Chinese food is weird animal parts, deep fried and in gravies. I ate it with gusto, thinking that my palette was too narrow if I didn’t like what I was eating. Chinese food also wreaked havoc on my digestive system. I had the worse diarrhea you could EVER IMAGINE. THAT YOU COULD EVER FUCKING IMAGINE. I MEAN, near CONSTANT. 

This is the point in the piece where shit gets REAL.

IT’S FINE, I told myself. Your. Body. Will. Get. Used. To. This. Just find the public bathroom, and shit n’ vomit in this HOLE,  like everybody else. You see, eastern toilets are just holes in the ground, and its BYOT and S, which means bring your own soap and toilet paper. If you don’t have it, no worries.  NOBODY does. NOBODY FUCKING DOES. The COLLECTIVE POPULATION OF CHINA DOES NOT WASH THEIR HANDS. NOBODY. AND DEFINITELY not that shirtless smoking dude who just served you your deep fried scorpions in orange gravy peach sauce.

Rebecca, I said to myself, it’s COOL. These people survived the Cultural Revolution. They have thousands of years of oppressive dynastic rule. You can handle a couple pieces of rabbit cat sate served to you by dirty Beijing fingers. GET USED TO IT. 

By week two, spitting and shitting in public were other elements of China that I was “EXPERIENCING.” Mothers would hold their children over garbage cans in parks (and in corners, if there were no garbage cans) to let their kid piss or shit. At first, I thought, that’s weird— there are holes for such specific purposes, as I just mentioned. Because of all of the pollution and the food, which is high in fat and oil (the food, not the pollution), the Chinese people were oozing liquids CONSTANTLY. It was a normal day in China to see a kid shitting in the grand ballroom of a train station, or to be sitting on a jam packed train and feel the spit of the old man next to you as he hacked a fat loogie onto the floor of a bus, then wiping it around with his foot. 

We were both ashamed.

I still didn’t have my period, either. But, luckily, according to fourteen Chinese pregnancy tests, I wasn’t pregnant.   

Even the things that were supposed to be beautiful just seemed ugly, and I blamed my narrow American self. In Qi Yan, I saw The Terra Cotta Warriors. They are these statues— each one unique, built by thousands of craftsmen. They were recently excavated and are BREATHTAKING. These craftsmen made it  their life’s mission to complete The Warriors, and after they did so, they were SYSTEMATICALLY SLAUGHTERED BY THEIR DICKHEAD 21-YEAR-OLD EMPEROR (as my tour guide proudly told me). I went to see the Pandas in Cheng du, who are in captivity because they BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR NEWBORNS, ALMOST KILLING THEM BEFORE THEY REACH MATURITY (Pandas should be extinct, my tour guide proudly told me!). In my brother’s city of residence, Tianjin, we saw the famous Tianjin opera. The theme: RAPE. 

There was no tour guide to explain this to me. Loud and clear, CHINA!

I kept thinking about how I was a terrible human being. How I must not be appreciating all  that this wide world had to offer. What was wrong with ME? I was also super anxious about, you know, MAYBE BEING PREGNANT. And if not, maybe the lasting and perhaps permanent damage China had wreaked on my reproductive system.

One of the last nights of the trip was a particularly long night of travel— we missed our flight because the Chinese airline just decided to CHANGE the time the plane was leaving, so we had to take a total roundabout way. We had booked a hostel, but the booking didn’t go through because the Internet wasn’t working, so we went to a shitty hotel with barely any walls and a bed that was a glorified mat. I was thirsty because the water in China is undrinkable and I was out of my bottled water. I was hungry, had been shitting up a storm, and just wanted to sleep. So, I got into bed and started drifting off… when I heard in the next room, a man spitting, just hacking up a storm.

I snapped. 

I climbed on top of the bed and screamed at the top of my lungs: GUESS WHO  WOULD LOVE TO GET THIS SHIT BED COVERED IN THEIR DISGUSTING, STICKY MENSTRUAL FLUIDS?!! GIVE UP? ME! ME!! I WOULD LOVE TO BLEED ALL OVER THIS GODDAMNED BED RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE UTERINE LINING AND THE BLOOD-ENGORGED EGGS FLOW THROUGH MY BODY, OUT OF MY THIGHS AND ALL OVER THIS BED— ALLOVER IT. DID YOU HEAR THAT? HAPPY FUN TRAILS HOTEL? DID YOU?!! 

But rarely in this life do we get what we wish for. 

My brother rushed into my room to calm me down and bring me clean water. And no, I did not menstruate all over the bed. The last part of the trip I combated my ethnocentrism with quiet resignation. I was ignorant. I was white. I was privileged.  And, I was probably pregnant with a definitely unwanted child.

I was everything I hated in travelers, and in mothers. And yeah, as I read this I realize that I sound like a total dick.

Maybe I am a total dick.

BUT—

WHEN I GOT BACK ONTO SWEET, SWEET AMERICAN SOIL, TO MY DELIGHT I BLED ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY! I have never been so happy to buy tampons, like, ever. Even now, I think— man, I ’m pretty thankful for newspapers. And, good cuts of meat. And, my right to vote. And, for soap coming standard with western style toilets.

感谢，让我明白我妈的生活！我没有怀孕！(Thanks, China, for making me appreciate my shit, child-less life!)

Rebecca Leib was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She has her BFA in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFA in writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also an alumni of the Second City Conservatory, IO-West and UCB. Rebecca likes to teach, draw and perform and can be seen performing regularly at iO West, The Moth Storytelling Competition and UCB-LA. She has been published for art writing in Beautiful/Decay, Art Ltd., ArtNews, Artillery and writes pop culture pieces for TVgasm, Girls Talkin’ Smack and Gawker. She has a weekly column for the Los Angeles-based humor blog, http://www.saysomethingfunnybitch.com/ that you can check out, if you’d like. 

**All photography in this piece is provided by Rebecca Leib or her brother— on location, in China.