The midday sun beat down with surprising warmth on the metal bench at the corner bus stop. I tossed a polite half-smile to a middle-aged Hispanic woman as I sat down next to her. She shifted her shopping bags, half-smiling back, then we politely ignored each other in the courteous way of strangers. An older woman wandered over and hesitated over the seat between us. Finally, she spread her newspaper on the seat and sat down, bringing with her a slightly musty scent of unfamiliar spices. It reminded me of how people often sat on newspapers or plastic bags in China, not wanting to touch the dirty ground or public benches. As I thought about this, I wasn’t surprised to see that the woman’s newspaper was covered with Chinese characters. It struck me as funny how her actions seemed so normal to me…but then strange when I remembered we were in America.
Every half a minute the Chinese woman craned forward to see the street. Seeing her made me feel better about doing the same thing, even though I didn’t expect the bus for another 10 minutes. A young Hispanic mother pulled her stroller near the bench and a moment later overflowed into a flood of rapid Spanish, caught up immediately by the middle aged woman. I glanced incomprehensibly at their conversation. They must know each other, yet they hadn’t shown initial recognition.
After a minute, the Chinese woman beside me spoke to the middle aged woman, and it took me a minute to realize they were both speaking English, murmuring about the cost of the items they had purchased and the wondering about the bus.
I sat outside the exchange, distant and confused. Surely these two women did not know each other. They were just strangers waiting at a bus stop. They were separated by culture and language, yet they sat beside each other carrying on a comfortable, if broken, conversation. They knew something I didn’t; they had decided that courtesy to strangers meant conversation, not silence. We were in America, but people were following different rules, and I felt the sudden hesitancy of an outsider.
I pretended to be absorbed in my book, a book conspicuously full of English words. I hoped they did not think I was arrogant or cold. But maybe I was. I had that fleeting, desperate thought that this was my America. This is where I belong. I know how things work here, and they don’t have the right to change the rules.
But this wasn’t my America. I grew up in the part of America where people drive cars and don’t wait for buses. People load their groceries into their cars and drive off alone, wary of strangers. They don’t live life in public. They rush off to their individual homes and important activities and don’t have time for people who don’t speak their language or follow their rules.
When the women finished talking and craned their heads toward the street, I was glad to gather my things and escape to the approaching bus. I hoped they realized I wasn’t trying to be superior or aloof. I was just acting by rules that no longer made sense. The probably thought I belonged here, like I thought of every Chinese person in China. They probably thought of themselves as the foreigners, still adjusting to a country they’ve lived in for a year or ten years or half of a lifetime. I wanted to tell them that sometimes in your own country, you are still the one who doesn’t belong.
