LanFeng

Written on July 24, 2006

To this day, I can’t explain exactly why I felt so drawn to both JunE and RongJun.  I suppose that, in the long run, the reasons are inconsequential.  I acted on my instincts.  I’m sure they did the same and in that sink or swim world which my family and I had been tossed, they helped buoy us until we learned how to tread water well enough on our own that being splashed in the face simply made us laugh.

However, where Wang LanFeng was concerned, I know exactly why she won me over.

If I had met her within the first five minutes of our setting foot in the Lobby, I probably would have pushed her as far away from me as I possibly could for the very reason, that, when I did finally get my first glimpse of her, caused me to enjoy being around her: she reminded me of the things I wanted to remember about my Mom.

Up until then, I hadn’t had time to breathe, let alone grieve for the loss of my Mother.  Meeting her Chinese counterpart within weeks of her death would have been a bit eerie, to say the least.  I wouldn’t have handled it well.  In fact, I would probably not have allowed LanFeng near me for ages, if at all, but, since she and JunE held the same position at the hotel yet swapped shifts every seven days, Rod, the kids and I had been living in China for nearly three weeks before the road I was traveling on intersected with her street.  

This delay had afforded me time to separate much of the good memories from the bad in regards to my Mother.  Enough so, that at the sight of this short, plump little woman pushing a broom and humming merrily to herself, I found myself struck by more of a sentimental chord than anything else.

There was something about the way she walked with her feet slightly turned to first position, carrying her weight on her heels, which gave her the same gate as that of the woman who had raised me. The similarity was present in the way her hair, though it had obviously been combed, still insisted on sticking out at odd angles and in the way that, when she noticed me watching her, she simply inclined her head slightly towards her right shoulder, smiled lovingly, then continued to amble along behind her broom, singing.

She had wider features than that of your average Han Chinese, high cheekbones and classically Asian eyes around which her approximately fifty-some-odd years had etched many lines of laughter and a few which told me her vision had begun to fail.  The hue of her skin, the cut of her hair, even the style of her shoes all seemed to fit into the standard I’d come to expect of women dwelling in the outlying villages, but there was a benevolence in LanFeng’s disposition I found lacking in many of the faces I passed on my journeys to and from the Academy. 

I knew she had to be younger than the warmth and the venerability she possessed would lead one to initially suspect, but in China, growing old is not considered the curse we Americans have convinced ourselves it is.  The elderly are respected for the wisdom of their years and, I believe as a direct result of their perspective on the ageing process, the Chinese visage becomes deceptively ageless once it joins the “Forty-Something” crowd. 

She was adorable; the type of woman one could begin calling “Auntie Wang” without the least bit of hesitation, and when all of these factors came together, I found it impossible not to like her.

Still, life with LanFeng could, occasionally, be frustrating.

My children’s attire always seemed to be wrong.  If I bundled them too tightly, they needed to breathe; if I was a layer short, they were sure to catch cold.  Josh’s shoes were too heavy.  Sam’s were too big.  And, though she never treated me in any manner other than that of one who actually cares what happens to the person in the spotlight, I sometimes grew weary of being under such a laser-like beam.  

In addition, LanFeng could give any speedy-lipped auctioneer a run for his money in a race to determine who could speak with the most agility.  How she could maintain pace at such a rapid fire of syllables, I don’t know, but to say she talked fast would have been the understatement of the century, and I was hopelessly lost when my hopelessly slow ears collided with her mile-a-minute mouth. 

Though these things presented us with our fair share of awkward moments, to LanFeng’s credit, she never allowed those moments to last long before she’d chuckle in a bemused sort of way, reach out to grab my hand and give it a squeeze, clap me on the back, or do whatever she deemed the situation warranted, then move on with life.  She could make it very easy to be around her…  That goes a long way in a country where a shy person by nature can readily become intimidated by the stares and the cries of, “Quick!  Look!  A foreigner!”