A Story by XXscribbler
Preliminary note to my readers: this is an old story, written very early in my career, and stowed away for years. I'm not really happy with it - the tale seems (now) a bit heavy in the last half. But it is FUN in its own way. Here it is for what it's worth. Cheers!
Airports themselves were okay, it was the cell phones that he hated.
Used to be, before the cell age, his waiting time in airports was usable and reasonably private: he got lots of reading done back then. Not now. Yammer, yammer, everywhere. A dozen or more conversations within earshot: you could close your eyes but not your ears. His refuge now was his fantasies and memories, where the voices in his head could drown out the verbal trivia around him. The plane was late, but he was patient. Memories were good.
Barry had been in Beijing some months ago. He was the only American, and the only academic, in a group of non-Chinese, mostly businessmen and women, on a multi-week PRC-government-sponsored tour. Not to mention he was the only foreign participant who wasn't significantly overweight, the only one who insisted on getting up and running daily, for both sanity and health. At least the group collectively didn't smoke, and their hosts had tried valiantly, with partial success, to accommodate that despite the amazing prevalence of Marlboro posters on public walls.
He was there because the Chinese Government had admitted, finally, a need for help in analyzing and planning some aspects of their changeover from command to market economy.
The usual PRC arrangements held: well-escorted and tightly choreographed visits, motorcades, lectures and consultations.
A good all-purpose "guide/maitre-de/translator/concierge", too, assigned to their group full-time, from breakfast to taps. Her name was a sibilant mix of sounds unpronounceable by westerners: she warned them first thing that their attempts at her real name would almost certainly result in something quite pornographic, so they should just call her "Missy".
Missy seemed young, and was physically tiny, at most perhaps five foot zero, and maybe forty-five kilos wet? She also seemed plain at first glance: not a trace of makeup, no jewelry. The more one studied her, however, the more one realized that she was quite refined and attractive. At any rate, she was stunningly graceful and quick in her movements, none of the usual unfortunate flat-footed local gait. Squarish face, classically fine-featured, atop a long, elegant neck, a neck emphasized by her shiny, jet-black hair pulled up into a French-roll, distinctly not a local style.
And always, everywhere, even at the nightly banquets (all of which she attended), she was dressed in formless khaki, as were most of their hosts. Too bad, Barry thought on several occasions. Eternally observant, not to mention near-terminally horny, Barry studied her covertly throughout the first few days. He always paid attention to women's exteriors, even as he consciously tried not to let those exteriors get in the way of appreciating a woman's other aspects. In his defense, he also appreciated her interior: she was smart, friendly, and capable.
Within a couple of days, he had had several reasonably long conversations with her during breaks. Missy had a very good, extensive technical background, was mentally quicker than most of the bureaucratic hosts, and also quite obviously better educated in general. She didn't stumble over many terms, handled people and questions nicely. She spoke good simple English, carefully restricting herself to mostly one- and two-syllable words, thus avoiding the trap of "show-off" polysyllabic nonsense that ensnares so many educated non-native speakers.
Missy also had an odd habit that took him some time to spot: she never used contractions, shades of Star-Trek's Commander Data, and that made her sound very formal.
On about day three, when Barry and Missy had already had their first few casual face-to-face talks, and had discovered that they could, in fact, enjoy one another's company, the group had a two-hour bus ride to an industrial plant. For the trip they picked up a factory interpreter who lectured them enroute, thus relieving Missy of her usual duties.
Entirely by accident, they wound up sitting together in the rear-most seats, and passed the time well. He was used to discussing technical subjects with non-technical people, and that ability seemed to help. Early in the ride he praised her English, and compared her very favorably against the current speaker, who was busily boring everyone with murky, over-fast, and generally unintelligible gibberish.
She accepted the compliments gracefully, then told him "My first English teacher once said I should read Mark Twain and Winston Churchill and learn to speak their way. That means using only small words, because they are strong and clear and easy to remember. So Mister Twain and Sir Winston have been my real teachers."
The conversation had later become more personal: she was 37 (Barry would have guessed perhaps 25, told her so, and was rewarded with a blush and "Thank you!"), had a seven-year-old daughter, lived with her twenty-eight year old sister and their mother in a 400 square foot apartment ("Four fifty if you count the balcony and our part of the hallway!") Barry was thinking, "That's half the size of my garage!"
Barry was single, unattached in any significant way at the moment. When in the general course of the conversation he volunteered that information, she returned the confidence, told him she was divorced. There was pain and embarrassment in her face as she spoke. It was so obvious that he apologized for "forcing" her to tell him (which he certainly had not done).
He considered the possibility he might be acting the "cultural imperialist", then explained the term and warned her that he would like to say something about her situation, but from his own cultural perspective. She found that interesting and told him to go ahead, that she wouldn't be offended no matter what, since they could surely agree that cultural differences were a matter of opinions and beliefs, thus matters of taste instead of fact.
Barry didn't know it, but she was mentally gritting her teeth, expecting him to tell her (as if enough people hadn't done so already!) how damaging, how devaluing, a divorce was to a woman, just as in her own society. But no, how wrong an assumption that had been!
He told her, "Missy, everyone makes mistakes. Absolutely everybody, and in all sorts of ways. Some errors are small, others large. A divorce merely means that you had the good sense to see a mistake, and the strength to try to fix it. It means nothing about your worth, you know. My own parents were divorced after twenty years and four kids. In America, over half of all marriages end in divorce within ten years. So for us Americans, at least for me and for most thoughtful ones, a divorce is not evil or degrading or bad for one's face. Many people have several divorces and marriages during their life. People do change, we live a very long time nowadays, and it is a mark of strength to accept and deal with the changes, even if it can be painful."
He paused for a deep breath, then continued: "So, Missy, I could not possibly think badly of you for such a strong and clear decision. In fact, if the Chinese view is that divorce is a disgrace or something evil, then I would admire you even more for making such a hard choice."
She was astounded: nobody had ever told her such a thing, quite the opposite. Her mother and friends all were appalled at the divorce, and kept bringing it up even now, years later. Tears started to come, but she successfully fought them back. She did observe, through her upset, that Doctor Barry carefully took no notice of the tears, and let her settle down without comment. More sensitive than she would have expected.
