To all those "Foreign Friends" out there

WICHITA, Kansas - This is a story from the book of China.

As I have already written, last month in Pingyao a young girl of perhaps 18 approached me as I was trying to make my way from the train station to the old section of town. She was annoying, pursued me and wanted to practice her English, but couldn't really think of anything interesting to say. You might recall that I eventually escaped by hailing a golf cart and telling them the name of a hostel I remembered from a tourist brochure. Everyone lived happily ever, or at least I did.

That's the plot of the story, but I want to revisit today because of something that young woman said. After about 10 minutes of conversation, I asked why she was sitting at the train station, waiting for American gentlemen such as myself to disembark, instead of say sleeping or playing with her childhood companions. "Because I like to meet the foreign friends," she said.

It's a phrase she kept returning to during our 45 minutes together. "Here's where foreign friends like to eat," she said. Then she took me in the direction of a hotel, to which I asked why we were headed that way. Even in China it seemed a little early for "massage." She told me this hotel was very famous, because "it was the first hotel in the city where foreign friends were allowed to visit."



My god, yes I definitely wanted to stay at a place where foreigners were once locked inside, paying $150 for poor service and surly looks from security guards. I was there to see a Ming Dynasty wall, not a garish hotel built in 1974. I declined the chance to hang out in a historical hangout of foreign friends.

That phrase bugs me, more so than the ubquitious 老外. Foreign friends -- a direct translation of 外国朋友 -- carries with me a sense of an exotic resource. These are people from the more advanced world, from which we need to extract services in order to accelerate our growth as a nation. This might be governmental reform, remaking the banking industry, or in the case of Pingyao, learning English. What makes it so troubling is that it reduces the encounters between visitors and residents to just a simple commodity market.

Ma Dawei addressed this in his learned talk back in April. "Always make sure you know what each person wants to get out of a relationship," he said. The Chinese won't want to be friends with you for nothing, you need to offer them something in return.

Maybe I'm naive, but I think the relationships and friendships I'm slowly making here in Kansas are different. I don't think they're based solely on acquiring skills from one person or another. I hope that's true, because I'm not in the mood to be anyone's "foreign friend" right now.