The wall of fear

Jerusha McCormack reports from China on beer, weather and Beijing Zoo, where the crowd isn't watching the animals.

The young African-American student was sipping his first Chinese beer at the next table, easily identified by a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. "Good beer", he smiled at me, the only other foreigner at the outdoor campus café.

Hard not to feel solidarity when one is surrounded by a world as alien as China. I smiled back. "Been here long?"

"'Bout four days." Pause. "I think." Then he looked unsure, frowning into his beer-glass. "Hard to tell."

"Know what you mean." It all came back. "The jet-lag makes everything a blur." Never mind the culture lag, a voice-over seemed to say. There were few American students around in any case, never mind black ones. Even to make it here, he must have come a long way.

"It's just that everything seems so, you know, normal," he added, with a shrug. "Or whatever."

"Normal?" This sounded intriguing. Nothing seemed normal as far as I could see.

He studied me carefully, as if to gauge a reaction. "Well, you see, my father told me not to come. He told me that the Communists would shoot me as soon as I got off the plane."

I laughed, recognising the Cold War paranoia from my own childhood in the States.

"Where you from?" I wanted to check whether my guess was right: father working-class and from a non-city background.

"Go to school in Akron, Ohio," was all he would volunteer, as if anticipating judgment. A response seemed important.

"Well, if your father said that, it's a wonder you came at all."

"I almost didn't come." He adjusted the brim of his baseball cap. "It was like climbing a wall of fear." The wall rose before me as I watched him take another sip of beer. I had felt it too, and I didn't need a father to tell me that I would be shot by the Commies. It had risen before me when I was first asked to go to China. Why China? Nothing about China resonated. The language resembled nothing so much as a tangle of barbed wire. I could not read it or speak it or understand it. The people were not people: they were hoards, they were swarms, they were an unimaginable 1.34 billion of what my grandmother used to refer to as "The Yellow Peril". The SARS epidemic had given that figure of speech all the terror of an invasive, life-threatening assault. That was last year. This year it's the bird flu.

And that was only what I could articulate. In the end, all I knew was that China was going to be the furthest reach of my world and that alone was threatening.

"And so how are you finding it?" I asked to fill the silence that was a tribute to our fear.

"Well, you know: yesterday they took a group of us foreign students to the Beijing Zoo." He put his glass down. "I didn't like it. The cages were small. They were dirty. The animals didn't look good. They were all asleep. Nothing was moving." He looked at me again. "I guess it's this heat."

Well over 30 degrees, day after day. "Beer weather," I smiled.

He looked a little grim. "You know, there were a lot of people there. But no one seemed at all interested in the animals." He paused for effect: "It took me a while to realise they were all staring at me. Then they started to crowd 'round. It was weird. The children were pointing at me. I think they wanted me to take my shirt off. Make sure I was black all over, you know."

He took another sip of his beer. "Guess I was their first black man." With that, the grin reappeared.

"No one told me that we were the wild animals." There was a considered pause. "No one told me they were afraid of us."

Jerusha McCormack is a visiting professor in Beijing Foreign Studies University