My Destiny

Bamboo

Part 2.....
On her parents' grey concrete balcony there's just room enough for two low chairs, made of yellow bamboo, roughly cut and split. I like the ethnic look but they are far too small for me. There is no way I can fold myself up to fit in them, so I have to sit with my legs out in front of me, my size 11 trainers almost as big as the chairs themselves. She laughs at my awkwardness, her own legs and feet thin and tiny as a child's. When she goes inside, the wire meshed door bangs behind her. I can hear her talking with her mother: their voices are loud and screechy in contrast to their tiny birdlike bodies. She comes back with a plate of 'Lucky Rabbit Milk Sweets', and a white porcelain mug with a lid. Inside it, in the greenish water, a few leaves are unfolding like leeches.

     'Special tea from Jiang Jia Jie, but no milk! So sorry,' she laughs. I've been in China long enough to know it is embarrassed laughter. She'd insisted I come round to meet her parents, even though I wasn't very keen. I knew that visiting people in their homes was disapproved of. I'd been told that 'people would be too ashamed to show a foreigner their low living standards', that was how they'd put it to me. So I expected it would be awkward, and I was right: her father nodded at me and then disappeared immediately into the bedroom, while her mother is still hovering smiling uncertainly in the hallway that serves as their kitchen, with its line of brightly coloured flasks. She would have taken them down to the boiler house that morning like all the other women round here: standing in a queue for the day's supply of hot water for the endless green tea.

     'Why don't you just boil a kettle at home when you feel like a cuppa?' I ask MingMing as she watches me struggling with the tea leaves.

     'Wait till they have settled at the bottom and then sip,' she says. And then, 'Because it would be wasteful of fuel of course.'