Wai Guo Ren

"Wai guo ren! Wai guo ren!" The little boy pointed at me across the lobby of the Shanghai hotel.

Catching his eye, I smiled and waved. This prompted the boy to investigate the strange foreigner at closer range.

Coming closer, with his patient grandfather in tow, the boy continued to talk loudly about the foreigner, asking his grandfather what she was doing there.

Only a few feet from me now, he continued to state the obvious to his grandfather. "Wai guo ren!"

"Wai guo ren?" I acted surprised and turned to look over my shoulder. "Nali?" (Where?)

The boy's jaw dropped, as he pointed at me, "Ni shi wai guo ren!" (You are the foreigner!)

"I'm not a foreigner," I stated in Mandarin. "I'm Chinese! Don't I look Chinese?"

Now the boy was really confused. He looked at me for a moment, studying my blue eyes, brown curly hair, pale white skin with freckles, and "tall nose" (as they call Western noses in China). After a minute he nodded with satisfaction.

"Yes, you look Chinese," he finally admitted. Then turning accusingly to his grandfather, the boy said, "And YOU said she was a foreigner!"

Yao-San-San...

My Chinese cell phone number has eleven digits. It took me a long time to memorize it. It was actually convenient at times that I didn't know my phone number for those first few weeks, when random people on the bus in my small town in China would ask me to tutor them in English, or if some grandmother wanted to set me up with her grandson. I could honestly say I didn't know my number!

But eventually I did have to learn it. There were students and parents of students and potential students and friends and co-workers and neighbors who needed to know my number. And so after telling countless people my phone number over the following months and years, by the time I left China last May, I could have quoted it in my sleep!

When I returned to China last month for a 3-week visit, I took my old Chinese cell phone and charger with me. My brother Michael put some money in my account for me before I arrived so that I could use my phone when I got there.

But it had been nine months since I had thought about my Chinese phone number. So when an American in Hong Kong asked me for my number, I had to think about it for a minute. And nothing was coming to mind. Then suddenly it came to me, all at once, and in Chinese! "Yao - San - San, Ba - Si - Er - Wu..." I actually had to say it out loud in Chinese and write it down before I could tell my friend the number in English! :)