Shanghai sistas

Another thing I did today on my day off: I went to the free Japanese lesson on the 4th floor of Satey from 13:30 to 15:30. Pam and Manjinder were also there.

The class was divided up into 3 groups: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. It was obvious from the self-introductions who belonged to where. I wasn't a complete beginner, and since I spoke Mandarin I joined the intermediate group with the 5 Shanghai women.

I would say that except for 2, the rest were older than me (granted that it's harder to determine the age of Asian women--so those 3 could be of similar age but abhorringly unattractive). Out of the 2 one was fair and the other was actually very cute!

The lesson was given entirely in Japanese by this guy whom I've met from the Yonago history tour. He was trying to differentiate the Ji-in verbs from Mu-in verbs. Although these 5 women spoke communicatable Japanese, they have no grasp of grammer. Though I had little clue what exactly he was talking about, I discerned his attempt at teaching the different conjugation of these verbs into present polite form, something I've learned from IVC. So I went up and did what I thought he was asking and explained it in Mandarin, resulting in his apparent gratitude and, inexplicably, the Shanghai women's collective ire. So they started shouting after one another, explaining to each other what I had already explained, as if my interruption had disrupted their internal hierarchical order. There's nothing I could do but chuckle.

So, after the shouting match subsided, the teacher (think his name was Kodo) asked us to sit in the middle and answer questions in the polite form. I was first and somehow survived the curiosity of 5 women(where did you come from? where were you born? how old are you? what did you do last weekend? who were you with last weekend? do you have a girlfriend? what kind of girl do you like?). And then one of them, the cute one, went up, and everything went to hell. Although she was in the middle, she was shouting questions and challenges at everybody, in obvious power-struggle mode. And another one, a bit older and also spoke passable Japanese, asked "How's your husband?" And then the second level of hell broke loose. The cute one started to get hysterical (that's what I thought, it could be normal for her), and actually started talking about how much she liked Japan and was going to divorce her husband (she couldn't say divorce in Japanese, but wrote it down in Kanji). I'm not making this up. And then Kodo asked her why is she seeking a divorce, she said "Because he is not handsome." What!? Surely she could be joking, but is this something to joke about? This went on for another hour, after all 5 of them had a turn at gunpoint. The smell of gunpowder never quite left our section of the classroom. I could only think of one word to describe the whole experience: bitchfight.

I've seen this passive-aggresive snapping back and forth in period films about China, during communal interrogations in the times of Cultural Revolution, but never thought that this might actually be how Chinese do things. Maybe it's just Shanghai women, whose dominating, willful and individualistic nature are written about in books to warn the Don-Juans of Taiwanese businessman (having a "small-wife" in China and a "big-wife" in Taiwan is a not-so-secret common practice for the travelling Taiwanese businessman). For some reason my mom has a copy...I don't even want to guess why. Shanghai is also the closest metropolitan city to Naxi, a region of matriarchal tradition. My mom did a lot of research on the Naxi people, and even visted there once, for her volunteer job at the Bowers museum.

I suspect that that whole thing could be sort of an communal attempt at either hitting on me, or deciding which one of them should hit on me. They went through a line-up, clarifying who's married and who's not, who has a boyfriend and who hasn't. The cute one whom I sat next to kept leaning over me, insisting on sharing her textbook with me, and of course, claiming that she'll be divorcing soon (what!?). The other fair one was VERY intrigued that I play volleyball and suggested that we should watch China vs. Japan next week. Another one was extremely inquisitive about whether I'm Taiwanese or American and how can I be both (hmm...). These and other things. Of course I could be self-delusional, but this is something that I've noticed with almost every single Asian (Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Malaysian) girl I've come across in Japan, who are invariably interested in everything about me. Maybe I'm fooling myself, maybe they really are interested (and why wouldn't they?), maybe it's just the way girls in Japan operate, or maybe it's the combination of an Asian face and an American passport.