Backlog -- The Ladies in the Lime-Green Jackets

Originally written: Summer 2010

“By the way, guys, the sex was great.” This is how another one of our American friends, Martha, an English teacher at Henan University, bade us farewell each time upon leaving our dorm for the teacher housing on campus. This despite the fact that we never had sex. She enjoyed referencing the apparent fact that anytime an exchange student had a foreign visitor over to the dorms, at any time of day, it was automatically assumed by the residential staff to be for sex. You could tell because these ladies, aged twenty to forty and usually very somber and stoic in their lime-green jackets, would start to giggle uncontrollably as soon as you escorted your friend up the stairs to the dorm rooms. It was very funny and almost cute, if you could get past the individual embarrassment and apparently promiscuous image you were giving to your race and culture as a whole. But they were perfectly fine with it—there were no limitations on visitation, so long as you met your guest in the front foyer (which I suspect was as much for their own amusement as for any security measures). With Chinese visitors, however, this was not at all the case. Chinese students were not allowed in the foreign dorms past the foyer. We once argued with the lady at the front desk for ten minutes to get visitation rights for a Chinese friend for an equal amount of time, but that was the one exception to the rule and accompanied with much suspicion. Their logic really seemed to be: “Let the foreigners screw all they want, but keep them away from the Chinese girls” (or guys—the foreign dorms were both sexes, so either would apply; and maybe later I’ll relate the views I encountered in China on homosexuality). What made this whole situation even stranger was that, a few weeks into living there, we discovered the foreign “dorms” weren’t really even dorms at all—it was a hotel operated within the university grounds, where Chinese families constantly were checking in and out! Of five floors, only the top two or three were ever occupied by foreign students, and we would share this space with Chinese residents for weeks at a time. How the ladies distinguished between the Chinese customers and the Chinese students I’ll never know, but they did so consistently and were unbending on their rules regarding the latter.

Now, I don’t want to give an image of the residential staff as green-clad goblin wards monitoring the sex lives of their foreign charges. On the whole, they were wonderful ladies to whom we became rather attached by the end of the semester. If you went down early enough in the morning, around 6:30 or so, you would see them all lined up in their lime-green jackets, receiving their orders for the day from their superior who seemed in her thirties and wore a variant of a business suit that was decidedly not lime-green (it was navy-blue, I believe). They would then disperse to their various duties, which included manning the front desk, cleaning on all of the floors, clearing out rooms after customers or students left, and informing you, motherly-like, whether you were wearing enough clothing for the weather outside (this last one wasn’t actually an assignment, they just seemed to enjoy doing it, especially to me). If you came in late enough, after midnight I believe, they would have to unlock the doors for you; and if you came in really late, you’d have to knock hard enough for one of them to emerge from their tiny one-room office/sleeping quarters behind the desk, looking disheveled but often still sporting that lime-green jacket. They were fine ladies, and you went to them first if you had any questions about anything—they didn’t speak a word of English between them (actually, the youngest one might have understood a bit), but they were a tenacious bunch for understanding or being understood despite this. I came to think of them affectionately as our first line of defense in China, and not just against the possibility of Chinese girls sneaking into our dormitories. If we had a problem, these competent ladies had us covered, and if they couldn’t help us, at least we’d have a hilariously drawn-out sign language conversation trying to figure out whom, if anyone, in the city could. (Actually, due to frequent practice, theirs was among the first Chinese I began to understand competently.)

At the end of the semester, I really wanted to find some kind of small gift to express gratitude to our interesting pack of caretakers. I had brought with me from the United States a collection of St. Louis paraphernalia—namely some souvenir MLB All-Star baseballs and St. Louis Cardinals ball caps (I personally have no interest whatsoever in the sport of baseball, but it’s American, right?). They were the kinds of gifts that seemed cheesy and impersonal enough that you’d be embarrassed to give them to your close friends, so they had been sitting on my shelf the whole semester long collecting dust (not entirely true—I gave one baseball to a friend’s father for his birthday; he expressed polite interest in it before setting it aside for I assume the rest of his natural life). But after some reflection, I came to the conclusion that I was just the right social distance from the ladies at the dorms to make the gifts not potentially awkward and maybe even a little touching. So, on my second to last day there, I went down, baseballs and caps in hand; I had to look up the word for baseball first (棒球 bàng qíu), as it isn’t a very popular sport in China and they weren’t certain to recognize the type of ball or the team. I made it down all five flights of stairs without being seen –I felt strangely conspicuous with my cache of baseball paraphernalia in communist China- only to find absolutely nobody at the front desk, or on the first floor at all for that matter. Not willing to go back up five flights of stairs, caps and balls in hand in defeat, I sat down in the front foyer and waited. The ladies I was waiting for were not the first to pass through there, and I feel like I got more stares than usual sitting there with my collection, though that might have been my imagination. Finally a familiar lime-green jacket appeared, and I rushed to explain my intentions and my gifts to her. I’m not entirely sure what happened in this transaction –I was generally fairly proficient at communicating with them at this point- but she said something in a hurry that I didn’t understand and then left; she came back not two minutes later with her superior trailing behind. Asked to explain the situation again, I did, explaining how baseball was an important sport in America and this was the team from my hometown. This time the superior took one of the hats I proffered, and after her the other employee claimed one of the baseballs as her own. Both of them thanked me very graciously and made a point of doing so throughout the day. It was a rousing success. My favorite reaction however came from one of the other ladies, a diminutive and quiet middle-aged one at maybe 5’4”, who was one of the few we had never managed to draw into conversation or much interaction. She was apparently so taken with her cardinal-red baseball cap that she went immediately into the little office to see it in the mirror (it contrasted horribly with the lime-green jacket),came out with the biggest (and perhaps first) smile I had ever seen from her, and I believe she wore it proudly for the rest of the day. I very much liked those ladies in the lime-green jackets, and I somewhat hope that, through all the sign-language speaking and sex-crazed foreigners they host, they remember one bringing baseballs and Cardinal’s caps from St. Louis.