Travel Karma: A Family Recounts their Experience in Nanjing
By Jason V. Zeitler
My family and I seemed to experience one mishap after another on our recent trip to Nanjing. First we missed our flight out of Tucson, Arizona, because a taxicab failed to turn up at the scheduled time. By some miracle later that morning, we got to the airport with 45 minutes to spare before our flight departed, but then American Airlines took so long to help us at the check-in counter that ultimately we weren’t allowed onto the plane. The next affordable flight out of Tucson wasn’t until the following day, and to have to wait that long to start our trip would have felt like such a let-down after all the preparations we’d made, we decided to rent a car, drive to Los Angeles (which is 700 kilometers from Tucson), and fly from there to China. It was an impulsive thing to do, but it turned out to be worth it. Not only did I, my wife, and my son start our vacation the day we’d originally planned to, but also by being in Los Angeles, we got to visit the Long Beach aquarium and to eat good international cuisine, for which Los Angeles is known.
Something equally unfortunate happened on our return trip from China. Our flight out of Nanjing was cancelled because of severe thunderstorms in Guangzhou. China Southern Airlines put us on a later flight, but there were so few connecting flights out of Guangzhou that we ended up getting stuck there for over half a day. By the time we finally arrived in Los Angeles, it was midnight, and there were no more outgoing flights to Tucson. So once again we found ourselves renting a car. It took another eight hours to get home, and when eventually we did, we were completely exhausted.
All told, we spent between three and four days getting to and from China. My wife, who’s a Sri Lankan Buddhist, thinks that these experiences suggest we weren’t meant to go to China in the first place. But I disagree. Too many good things occurred during our time there for the airport mishaps to have been the result of bad travel karma.
The main reason we went to Nanjing was to improve my nine-year-old son’s Mandarin. Dilan has been learning the language since he was four at the International School of Tucson (IST), an Asia Society Confucius Classroom. Hanban, an organization affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, had arranged for him and other IST students to attend Nanjing Pukou Xingzhi Primary School (NPXPS) for a few weeks. (Hanban also made it possible, through a grant from Asia Society, for IST’s head of school and an IST teacher to be at NPXPS with the IST students. Hanban’s and Asia Society’s collective generosity, in fact — with donations of grant funds, books, and other educational materials — is the reason why IST’s Chinese program has blossomed the way it has.) My wife and I didn’t feel comfortable letting Dilan go to China on his own, so we accompanied him. Also, we’d never been there before and wanted to experience the country for ourselves.
It was raining the day we arrived in Nanjing. Through the mist as we approached Lukou International Airport, we could see, from the windows of our plane, clusters of homes dotting the rural landscape below and the winding branches of what we could only guess was the Yangtze River. Outside the airport terminal, a van was waiting to take us to our hotel on East WenDe Road, where Mr. Yang, the head principal of the Pukou district schools, had graciously arranged for us to stay while the dorms at NPXPS were under repair. No sooner had we arrived at our hotel than we were whisked away to the campus of NPXPS.
Mr. Yang was there to personally greet us. He was a handsome middle-aged man, soft spoken and with a pleasant smile. “Nǐ hǎo,” he said unassumingly as we approached, a softness in his eyes as well in his voice. Then he shook each of our hands in turn. We exchanged small talk through our interpreter and took a liking to each other immediately. On one occasion he spoke to Dilan directly and afterward said he was impressed with Dilan’s level of Mandarin.
A little later, Mr. Zheng, a teacher assigned to assist us during our three-week stay, turned up and gave us a brief tour of the campus. By now it had stopped raining, and the air smelled sweetly of damp earth. As we made our way to the classrooms, we passed a beautiful stand of bamboo and conifers and from high up in the surrounding trees heard the loud and distinctive call of an Asian cuckoo. It was a familiar sound, one I’d heard frequently in Sri Lanka, and I viewed the bird’s presence now at NPXPS as a good omen of sorts for our trip to China.
For the next three weeks, Dilan attended school between side trips to Xian and to Shanghai, and everywhere we went — on airplanes, on buses, on subway trains, at train stations, at restaurants, at hotels — the locals opened their arms to him. The Chinese people appear to adore children, Western children included. Before my family and I arrived in China, we weren’t sure how we’d be received as foreigners. Unlike populations in American cities, which are multicultural with citizens of many different ethnicities, populations in Chinese cities are more or less homogeneous. Shanghai has a large expatriate population, but even that amount of diversity is small by American standards. The group of IST students recently attending NPXPS illustrates this: of the twelve students, one was African American, two were of Chilean descent, two were Caucasian, three were of Chinese descent, and the remaining four were of mixed race. Dilan himself is half-Sri Lankan and half-Caucasian. So it wasn’t unreasonable for us to think beforehand that the Chinese people we’d meet in public might be standoffish toward us. But they were nothing of the kind. Throughout our stay in China, the locals treated Dilan and the other IST students with affection. They also were very friendly with IST parents. Any hesitancy on the part of a local Chinese person would dissolve the moment you made eye contact with him, gave him a warm smile, and said nǐ hǎo.
I’ll never forget the reaction Dilan got at the train station on our way to Xian one day. As soon as we arrived at the station, three or four workers approached him apparently out of curiosity, discovered he was fluent in Mandarin, and then with much enthusiasm proceeded to have a several-minute conversation with him. Had we not insisted that Dilan come away with us, the workers probably would have gone on talking to him indefinitely. Shortly after this, we were sitting at a departure gate waiting to board our train, and Dilan was watching a man demonstrate the Despicable Me minion helicopter toy he was trying to sell to passengers, when a woman came up to Dilan and asked if she could take his photograph. He said yes to her in Mandarin, and the next thing we knew, she was sitting with us for the duration of our time at the departure gate and in the most heartfelt way asking question after question about Dilan. How old was he? Where was he from? How did he come to learn Chinese? What had brought him to Nanjing? This wasn’t the behavior of someone who was afraid of foreigners, and the genuine interest the woman showed in Dilan made me feel proud to be his father.
Another memorable encounter we had was with an old man on a subway ride from the Shanghai train station to an Airbnb apartment we’d rented for the weekend. The old man happened to overhear Dilan pronounce some of the subway stops and gleaned correctly that he knew Mandarin. He was instantly enamored of Dilan, and with a little coaxing got Dilan, who’s normally shy around strangers, to sit next to him on the train. The two of them carried on a conversation until the old man reached his subway stop, at which point, with seeming reluctance, he said goodbye and told Dilan in parting that he spoke Mandarin better than most Chinese did. He probably was just being polite, but we took the remark kindly anyway.
Dilan wasn’t the only one to have positive interactions with the locals on our trip to China. My wife and I had the pleasure of meeting countless individuals who were generous and hospitable, to the extent that they went out of their way to feed us and to make us feel at home. I personally had photographs taken or exchanged e-mail addresses with several Chinese friends I made while out and about in Nanjing, and I no doubt would have made more had I known Mandarin. Every person I communicated with in English was keenly interested in learning about me and my family and about the American way of life, in the same way that I was interested in learning about China and Chinese culture. I can honestly say — as can my wife — that I made meaningful connections with people during my time in China. And that’s not the sort of outcome one would expect if bad travel karma were mischievously at work.
The evening before our departure from Nanjing, Mr. Yang came to our hotel to say farewell. We talked for a good half-hour about a variety of things: about Dilan’s experiences at school, about the brilliant opportunities he’d had all over China to improve his Mandarin, about the generosity we’d been shown, about the extraordinary lengths to which people had gone to be helpful (one of the staff at the Nanjing hotel, for example, spent 30 to 40 minutes translating instructions for me so I could get a haircut at a nearby salon). As a parting gift, Mr. Yang gave Dilan a book of Chinese stories that were related to NPXPS, and we were very happy with this because as a family we like to read. The next morning, on our way to the airport, Mr. Yang called to wish Dilan well. It was only 5:30 a.m. at the time, and the thought that Mr. Yang may have lost sleep simply to say a final goodbye to Dilan impressed me and my wife immensely. We took the gesture, like so many other gestures we’d received from the Chinese people, as yet another instance of affection toward us, foreigners though we were, that was heartwarmingly real.
我的中国之旅 柴笛兰
这是我第一次到中国旅行,我和我的爸爸还有妈妈一起去了南京、西安和上海。我很喜欢坐从南京到西安的火车,因为我在火车上有自己的床铺可以睡。
这次的行程中,最让我印象深刻的是西安的兵马俑。我在美国的时候就在书上读过他们的故事,但是当我看到兵马俑就站在我面前的时候,那种震撼的感觉是我不会忘记的。
在南京的时候,我在浦口区行知小学上课。我在那里交了很多新朋友,我最好的朋友叫孔泉,我还去了他的家玩。希望有一天我可以再回到中国去找他。