Tales of a preschooler

When foreigners live in China to work or study, they are assigned a foreign affairs' officer to take care of their housing, work environment, legal documents, entertainment, travel, etc. When I was a university teacher, Mr. P was my foreign affairs officer. 

Once the college took us on an out-of-town trip. Mr. P decided he wanted his 4-year-old son to go on the trip with us. His son CC always got car sick, so we'd have to stop by the side of the road and let him throw up. Once he was throwing up beside a large drainage ditch. He threw up and then started crying. I felt so sorry for him. But then I found out he wasn't crying because he was sick, he was crying because he saw the ditch and wanted to stop the trip and go fishing. And his dad told him it would not be possible. We all died laughing when we found out the cause of the tears.

The university gave us furnished housing on campus -- all the Chinese teachers lived on campus too -- but my apartment was pretty bad, as was their own housing. Everything broke all the time. I had repairmen at my home almost every single day. They didn't do their jobs well, which means the repairs would have to be done over and over again. Mr. P spent a lot of time with the repairmen at my place. 

One day Mr. P was with the repairmen at my house. They'd been there for hours. Mr. P looked at his watch and realized he was supposed to pick up his son from kindergarten about 45 minutes earlier. But he couldn't leave the repairmen, so I told him I would go pick up his son from the kindergarten instead. I wasn't sure this would go over well with CC, who seemed to be afraid of the yellow-haired foreign woman (I was the only foreign woman in the county of 10 million people, so of course I would seem scary to a 4-year-old.) 

I showed up at the kindergarten. There were no cell phones in use at the time, so Mr. P had not called ahead. The boy was expecting his mom or dad to pick him up, not me. But when he saw me walk up, a huge smile spread across his face. He knew I had come to rescue him. He'd not been forgotten after all. (A teacher had stayed after school with him, don't you know she was thrilled?) From that time on, the little boy was not afraid of me, his foreign rescuer.

Alas, he was a preschooler at the time. Now's he's in his 20s. He doesn't remember any of it now. He is 6'3" tall, studying in America. That's him pictured above. I saw him in Bedrock a few days ago (he's home for summer vacation) and he laughed as we caught him up on the stories of his childhood.

I have been here a long time it seems. But time just flies. Seems like it was just yesterday.