What my foreign friend taught me about our tradition

I have an American friend whose name is Jim. But we all call him Ji Mu (toy bricks). Jim lived in Philadelphia before coming to Beijing five years ago for study and then work. His mother came from Poland, his father from the Czech Republic. There is not a drop of Chinese blood in Jim. But he doesn't think of himself as laowai (foreigner) at all.

Besides speaking perfectly fluent Chinese with a distinctive Beijing accent, and being an especially discerning judge of Chinese restaurants, Jim has also sought after the soul of China with a perseverance that few Chinese display.

Every night, he winds up three alarm clocks to ensure that he'll get up early to play taichiquan, a traditional form of shadow boxing. "White crane spreads out the wings" and "wild horse dividing the mane" are just two of the 72 postures he has mastered.

Jim has learned to play mahjong strictly by book. When he sits by the real mahjong table, he will "set off canons" (a mahjong term meaning accidentally providing the pieces that opponents need) with the consistency of Olympic fireworks.

Recently, he has fallen in love with pingshu - storytelling. Wherever he goes, Jim listens to Romance of the Three Kingdoms by the famous storyteller Yuan Kuocheng on an MP3.

Chinese written characters fascinate Jim more than others. He has a small dictionary in his pocket, which he consults whenever a new word pops up along the way.

Once he asked me to explain why there is a Chinese fruit named "16" (shi liu). Why is it not "15" or "17"? I didn't quite catch his meaning at first, but then I saw him carrying a big pomegranate (shi liu). Well, Jim had just encountered one of the homophones that make Chinese both interesting and baffling for learners.

Later, Jim learned about Zheng Banqiao, a painter from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). He was especially excited by the artist's name. He said it was superb, because we should all support copyrights. I didn't understand until he said if the painter had been named Dao Banqiao, it would be terrible.

Well, in Chinese, zhengban means works with legal copyrights, while daoban means pirated works. But qiao means bridge. Oh, yes, I suppose bridges must also have copyrights somehow.

The most important trait that makes our dear Jim a true Beijinger is his kindheartedness. Once I was waiting for Jim and he was late. Then I heard an old man saying: "What a warm-hearted laowai! The broken glasses would easily pierce the tires."

There in the middle of the road, a laowai was picking up shards of a broken beer bottle and carrying them gingerly through the traffic toward a trash bin.

Another time, we saw a girl carrying a huge piece of luggage. When she strived to pull the suitcase onto a bus, Jim rushed to her side, giving her a quick boost to help her onboard before the door closed. It took the girl some time to realize what had happened. In the future, I hope she'll extend a helping hand to others -just like our dear Jim does so often in his adopted hometown Beijing.

The article first appeared on Beijing Youth Daily

(China Daily 07/29/2008 page20)