Neighborly. By Paige Kuhn
It was a hot, summer day in 2015, and I’d hardly been in China for more than a couple of months. I was walking up to my apartment building during a break between classes when a woman shouted at me from the stairway of my six-floor walkup. “美女!!!” She waved at me excitedly. By now, the shouting and waving didn’t faze me; living in Nantong, Jiangsu, I heard the word “外国人” several times a day while out and about. But the woman kept waving at me, and started to approach me.
The woman said something to me and I stared blankly, shrugging my shoulders as politely as one can in these sorts of situations. She pulled up a translation app on her phone; “Are you an English teacher?” she was asking. I nodded my head, and she motioned to add my WeChat. After exchanging WeChat information, I said goodbye and headed up to my apartment, thinking little of the interaction.
But almost immediately after accepting the friend request on WeChat she started to send me questions; at first in English, inviting me to her home for dinner, but soon the English became long sentences of Chinese characters that I had to translate before I could read them, and as soon as I translated one message, another line of text would come through: Are you in China alone? You’re so brave. Do you cook? You could come over for dinner sometime. We just bought this house and are renovating it, when we move in you should come over.
It wasn’t long before they moved in. I came to learn more about her and her husband, about their young daughter that lived with her parents in the countryside, and their son in the first grade. They started to invite me over for meals. She was outgoing, warm, and friendly, and I started to realize that she was taking me under her wing.
One day just weeks after we met, I started to feel unwell while teaching a class at the training center I worked at. When I got home, I vomited; I developed a fever and became really sick. I couldn’t make it five minutes without running to the bathroom. I was away from home, still very new to China, and was at a loss as to how to take care of myself. Everything was in a language I couldn’t understand and unrecognizable: The medicine was foreign, the hospital system was foreign, the foods were foreign. Having planned to stop by my neighbor’s that day, I sent her a message to let her know I wouldn’t be coming, telling her I was sick. She replied:
“I’ll be home in about an hour, but if it’s too late tonight, I’ll be by tomorrow to check on you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be okay tonight.”
The next day, she messaged me, “I bought you some medicine last night, but it was too late at night to bring it to you. Are you at home?”
The meal my neighbor made for me when I was sick.
Then came the knock on my door. She was carrying a bag filled with boxes and boxes of medicine. Using a translation app, she typed, “I have some medicine that is good for your stomach. It will stop the nausea.” Then she walked into the kitchen, helped herself to my kettle, and made me a drink of the dried pellets and hot water to calm my stomach. She disappeared down the stairs, and then returned not long after with a tray of food for lunch: rice, fruit, and green 青菜. My stomach churned at the thought of eating much of anything; grateful, though, I accepted and ate what I could.
But her care for me didn’t end there. She treated me as family. I spent October Holiday together with her family on a trip to the Yangtze River, and when my family came to visit shortly after that, she and her husband personally picked them up from the airport two hours away, treated us to dinner, and took us to the best local tourism sites to show us the beauty of China. I still remember the day she drove me and my family to a nearby water town. My mom had heard that the area was well-known for its quilts. As we wandered the rows of shops, a quilt shop caught her eye and we stopped to look. The shopkeeper was persistent, but my neighbor tried to discretely tell me she could find a better buy for us. The shopkeeper caught on and was not happy to see her sale walking away, yelling after us as we tried to disappear into the ancient narrow walkways.
During National Holiday, my neighbor took me on their family trip to the Yangtze River.
For the short time that we were neighbors, she was always there, keeping an eye on me to make sure I was taken care of. Towards the end of my year-long work contract in Nantong, I met my now-husband, so I moved away to another city in China to be with him. It was as though she saw that he was there to take care of me now; I was leaving her nest, and gradually we spoke a bit less.
The water town we visited.
Several months after I moved away, I made plans to go home to visit my family in the U.S.A. for Christmas. My neighbor had found out about my travel plans just days before my departure and hurriedly overnighted me a package. Even while living in another city, my Nantong neighbor wouldn’t let me go without a gift of kindness; remembering our day at the water town, she shipped a brand new, beautiful quilt for me to carry back to my mom.
Beautiful Yangtze (长江) River in October 2015.
Hometown Introduction: My hometown is a small city in Wisconsin, U.S.A. which is famous for beer and cheese. With a population of 10,000, our quaint, historic downtown is nestled near a river with a set of railroad tracks that crisscross the city. If you drive just a couple miles out of town you’ll find rolling fields of corn and hay bales. Winding roads cut through forests where deer and wild turkey live which can often be seen crossing the road at inopportune times.
My neighbors took my family and I on a boat cruise in Nantong. We had just disembarked and were in front of the Nantong TV Tower, one of the most recognizable structures in the downtown area.
A photo together at the Nantong Airport before parting ways
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