Small World Syndrome
The woman sitting next to my wife in the Honda service center waiting room had thick reddish hair, looked (to my eyes) Irish-German. She cooed at Michael, who was buckled into his baby seat, smiling again after the trauma of the pediatric center and the four vaccines. "Hey pumpkin," she said. "Aren't you cute."
We struck up a conversation. Turned out she was neither Irish nor German but half-Chinese, half-Spanish. So much for on-the-spot ethnicity-guessing. Her father was from the mainland, Henan province.
"Henan province! That's where my family lives!" Y. said. "What part?"
"Dad's from Anyang," she said. Anyang is about four hours by train from Yucheng, my wife's hometown.
"It's a small world."
"No kidding."
We talked about her background and about China. "I only speak a little," she said.
Later Y. told me "she was being humble. Actually, her Chinese must be excellent. She studied at Beijing University. And she knows the traditional writing. Many people my generation only know the simplified form, post-Mao."
I have never been to Anyang, but I did visit Yucheng. My wife's family joked that so few Americans ever come to this part of China that I must have been taken for a Uigur. It's possible that Uigurs, a Turkic people, bear a resemblance to people of Mediterranean background, though I can't say I saw this. I have listened to Uigur music, though, and noticed an affinity with music of the Mediterranean and Near East. The melodic patterns are unmistakably similar to those found in Greek songs I grew up with.
Yucheng, at the height of summer, was stifingly hot and crowded, built up around a long boulevard which also functioned as an outdoor market. Several Western-style grocery stores had opened, staffed by sleepy-looking teen girls with a distinctively "country" look. Farmers sold fruit from the back of trucks, women circled around on old bikes hawking goods, wielding electronic megaphones which shouted out their sales pitches for them. Incredible quantities of dust; you could feel it coating skin, eyelashes. Runnels of water; flies; mixed aromas of food and garbage. In the police station, which opened onto the street, several young cops sat playing cards.
In the very center of town the boulevard intersected with another one that ran north-south; they met at a circle, in which was erected a dusty granite statue of a woman warrior atop a horse.
"Who's that?"
"Mulan."
"Mulan? As in Disney?"
"As in Yucheng," my wife said. "This is her birthplace."
5:32:13 PM 
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