It started out like pretty much any other day.
Yesterday, I mean.
I drug myself out of bed, bemoaning the fact that I had, yet again, gotten too little sleep. I stumbled to the bathroom to get ready, got dressed, walked out to the gate and took a taxi to work, bought some breakfast on the street, taught three classes. You know, the usual for me on a Saturday morning.
And then…well…it got weird.
And I don’t mean just weird. I mean “I got the willies and feel like I need to have a shower” weird. “I am speechless at what just happened” weird. It was possible the most uncomfortable, bizarre thing that has ever happened to me in nearly four and a half years of living here.
Which brings me to my little disclaimer: Please don’t expect that this will happen to you if you should ever visit or decide to live in China. Honestly, most people are not like this. It has never happened to me before, and it likely will never happen again. But..wow.
OK, now you really want to know what happened, right? Well…
Two friends (a couple) of my husband and I had been staying with us since Thursday – they were in town for a hip hop competition on Friday night and were heading home by train on Saturday afternoon. We had all decided to meet for lunch during my break at noon to eat and say goodbye. So we did. That’s not the weird part.
The scene of the crime. And yes, they advertise being open 24 hours, but have business hours posted on the door. Again, not the weird part.
After we had eaten and were walking out of the restaurant, a young-ish boy of about 13 saw me and said, “Hi!” I responded with a polite “Hello” (as I usually do if the speaker is a kid. That’s my personal rule, you see – kids are OK and get a friendly response, but when it is an adult, it’s just obnoxious, so I ignore them) and we continued out the door. That’s not the weird part either.
My husband, our friends, and I stood outside saying goodbye to each other, since they were planning to walk to the train station to catch their train, and I had to walk in the opposite direction back to my school to return to work in the afternoon. We chatted for a minute or two, wished each other well, and then one of our friends (the girl) and I gave each other a hug. Nope, still not the weird part.
The weird part was what happened next.
As we were pulling away from each other, I saw the door of the restaurant open, and the boy who had said hello to me marched down the steps, shoved our friends out of his way, and moved towards me with open arms and a lecherous look on his face. His friends (at least two other boys around the same age) were close behind, the same looks on their faces.
They wanted hugs too.
Maybe this was some lesser-known tradition for Dragon Boat Festival (that holiday was yesterday, after all), or maybe it was “Hug a Ginger Day” and no one told me, but all I could think of were the prison scenes from Arrested Development– “NO TOUCHING!”
Do I need to hire my own security team to walk around with me and shout at people who try to touch me?
Unfortunately, I was in such shock that this was happening that I didn’t even really physically react, but thankfully my husband did. He put his arm out to stop the kid before he could touch me and asked him what he thought he was doing. Our other male friend asked whether the boys were looking for a fight or something. Although the boy stopped, he didn’t really show any other reaction to anything (this, combined with the half vacant look on his face and degree of dirtiness that I noticed as we were walking away, leads me to figure that they were not normal schoolkids – they were probably street kids with a couple of screws missing).
Rattled, I asked my husband and our friends to walk with me in my direction a bit, just to get away from these strange boys so that we could say our goodbyes properly. We headed off together, me at a loss for words as I tried to process what had just taken place.
As I’ve said before, I’m no stranger to the pseudo-celebrity status of foreigners here. I get stared at. I have people shout “Hello” at me. I have people take cell phone photographs of me, thinking I don’t notice. But I have never had random people try to touch me (save for a couple of drunk men when I’ve been out at a bar, but that’s not entirely unexpected), let alone so inappropriately.
Maybe I need to get one of these shirts so people will respect my personal space?
But wait, it gets weirder.
We stopped about a half a block away, tried the goodbye thing again, and then headed off on our separate ways.
But less than a minute later, I heard my friends and husband calling my name and coming up behind me again. The boys were actually following me! My husband and our friends agreed to accompany me back to my school to make sure nothing happened and to then take a taxi back to the train station. Even as a group, we were followed for nearly two blocks of the four that we had to walk.
My knight in shining armour. Oh, and honey, can you walk around with a light saber to protect me all the time?
And so, now that I have some pubescent stalkers who desire to hug me, it’s official: I need to learn kung fu.
Holy crappy creepiness. The most frightening part was that the boy didn’t have any sort of reaction afterward – just a half-gone look on his face. You’re right, maybe they were street kids, and/or had been experimenting with drugs that day or something… eeek. Glad you’re safe and sound, but it’d definitely be hard for me to not keep myself on my toes the rest of the week.
On a similar note, I’ve read about the “Cinderella” man who randomly goes up to foreign women (can’t remember which city in China he’s in though), calls them “my beautiful Cinderella” or something, and plants a smooch on their faces before they can even react, but he doesn’t seem vicious or lecherous according to posts about him.
I don’t know if it was drugs or just what I said, a few screws short and honestly didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. Or just creepy. Whatever the reason, it was weird. I’ll be much more on my alert from now on, that’s for sure too, which annoys me a bit, considering I’ve talked about how I’ve always felt very safe here.
I’ve never read about this “Cinderella man” before – I’m sure he’s not in our city though. But I will say that, lecherous or not, I kind of hope I never run into him.
After reading your post, I think it’s more that the boys are curious and want to “hug a foreigner” for the novelty of it. They’re teen/pre-teen boys, so they’re probably just beginning to be interested in girls and want to show off in front of friends. To them, there’s probably no harm in going for a hug, not realizing that their actions were inappropriate. Have you had any young male students that had crushes on you? At least your stalkers are teen boys that just want a hug and not creepy middle-aged men that write love poems to you and have an alter in thier studio apartment devoted to you. j/k
Nope, not buying it. The lecherous, yet vacant look on his face tells me that it wasn’t curiousity. The non-reaction to anything my husband said made it creepier. And the following me/us down the street for several blocks afterward, even after my husband and his friend told them to leave us alone seals the deal. Crushes are one thing, this was quite another.
Certainly creepy if not weird. Hope this does not happen again. Do these kids think they have a licence to hug a white foreigner just because she is one and just because they had seen you hugging your friend? Maybe you should just ignore the greetings of any stranger, including those of kids esp if you notice anything out of the way. So unnecessarily sad though.
I can’t even guess what was going through their heads, but as I said, something was off with them in the grand scheme of life anyway. Quite creepy, and you can bet I hope it doesn’t happen again as well!!
Man,that’s freaky as hell…you’ve got groupies/stalkers in a country where you could go missing and no one would know…eerr..scrub that thought.But still,do these “guys” still appear where you teach? Maybe you should seriously think about getting mace or learn kung-fu just in case?
Though i kinda wish caucasian girls did that to me here in Singapore..
I’m pretty sure my husband, employers, and parents would know and would send up the alert if I went missing. They didn’t follow us all the way to my workplace – we made sure of that, and checked very carefully to make sure they were nowhere in sight before I went inside. I had no intentions of letting them know where I worked.
And us too when we have an un-updated blog..lol..stay safe you hear? And yeah,stalkers like that can be scary..does your husband or friends accompany home every now and then just in case? I wouldn’t be surprised if you start looking over your shoulders alot more now.
I’ve always been pretty aware of what is going on around me anyway – being a girl, we’re kind of taught to be nowadays. I don’t think I would be under any real physical threat from these teens (they weren’t overly big) – it was just creeptastic.
Hmm freaky!
But count yourself lucky! At least you didn’t get murder on webcam!
While crimes are rampant in China, its not as bad as in Canada right now.
It seems being chinese means you are automatically being target of attack.
“Brian Dickson, 29, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with first-degree murder in the death of Qian Liu, 23.” The act was caught on webcam.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13152267
And… the current one : Murder of Jun Lin
“Suspect Luka Magnotta is in Canada awaiting trial on first-degree murder and other charges in the case. Police have said they believe Magnotta filmed Lin’s death and dismemberment and posted the video to the Internet. They say the 10-minute video also shows Magnotta engaged in sexual acts involving body parts and includes evidence of cannibalism.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/04/world/americas/canada-body-parts/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
I think you’re taking that a bit to the extreme. Sure, these are two serious crimes (one indeed very horrific) and the victims are both Chinese. But how many other crimes have taken place in Canada and elsewhere in the same time frame and the victims have been of other backgrounds? Plenty, I’d say. These just happen to be high-profile cases (especially the second). And based on the link you provided to the first article, and what I have read about the second case, it cannot be said with any certainty that those people were victimized simply because they were Chinese.
While I agree the first one might not be race motivated crime, but the second one is.
http://www.canada.com/news/hunt+Magnotta+mutilation+murder+inspired+race+hatred/6717319/story.html
This may be so (even the group quoted in the article states it as being a “possibility”). From everything I’ve read, this guy had so many incarnations of himself that he liked to present, it would be hard to state what is truth from what is a facade. I’ve also read rumours that the two were romantically involved – if that is true, why would he be in a relationship with someone of a minority race if he hates them so much?
Everything is rumours at this point and I think it’s hardly fair to declare that white Canadians are murdering Chinese people, which is the generalization you basically made in your original comment, based on these two cases, both of which are still in the fairly early stages of investigation.
Well, I agree I exaggerated, but two grisly murders in the past two years, don’t you think its highly unusual? Especially in Canada?
I think it is unfortunate, and horrible, especially for the victims’ families. I think these things should not happen to anyone, regardless of race. But I don’t think it is necessary to be alarmist and act like Canadians have some sort of vendetta against Chinese people simply because two men with some serious issues may or may not have murdered Chinese people because of their ethnicity. Exaggerating like that doesn’t help anything.
Shortly before I left Canada for China, a 12-year-old girl and her 23-year-old boyfriend murdered her parents and younger brother in the small city I was living in. Does that mean that all teenagers in Canada are raging murderers? Of course not. So until all the facts are learned in either of these cases (and it remains to be seen whether the truth will ever be discovered in the Magnotta case – he’s created so many identities/life stories for himself), I don’t think it is fair to make those sorts of judgements at all.