Seven Mile Aroma (七里香)
Third Avenue and West Grand Blvd
Photo by Creative Hina By.Quileen on Unsplash
The first phase of entering a new culture is the honeymoon. Everything is foreign and exciting. There is a lack of attachment to the new culture that allows for an unrealistic level of enjoyment and acceptance. Like a first date with a hot girl, you haven’t yet discovered her neurotic tendencies or the way her emotionally fused relationship with her mother brings out the worst in you. Instead, it’s all fun and good times.
The honeymoon phase is important though, otherwise no one would ever enter into another culture. There must be a draw, a lure, that initial spark of excitement and curiosity.
Probably the most difficult phase of acculturation comes right after the honeymoon. It’s a time of overwhelm, tearing down parts of your identity to make room for a new identity in a new context. It can be difficult.
There is a lot of anger that comes out in this phase, a lot of wrestling with the new culture. The anger is often rooted in a hopelessness that you’ll never find your way in this new place. You have so much catching up to do, just to function at a baseline level.
This second phase of acculturation is the most dangerous and the easiest to get stuck at. There can be rejection of the new culture. People often give up learning and stretching themselves. They find a quiet corner in the culture from which to exist and observe - stable expat bubbles within the larger whole. To outsiders they appear immersed, but they are not. They have merely stuck their feet in the water to cool themselves, rather than diving in and struggling to swim on their own. For anyone entering a new culture, this is the struggle and temptation.
My first year in China I gave up on acculturation for a while. I clearly remember going to the DVD shop one afternoon and purchasing every Steven Seagal movie ever made. For two weeks I sat in my apartment, smoking pipe tobacco, eating carryout and watching movies with titles like Hard to Kill, Out for Justice, Marked for Death, and Fire Down Below. I can’t tell you how many broken wrists and goons being thrown through car windshields I witnessed during that ‘mother of all action movies’ bender I went on.
The experience was oddly narcotic. It was a cocoon of comfort, but comfort is anathema to acculturation.
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You’ll never make it alone, what’s needed is a friendly face in the new culture. My pastor calls them a “person of peace”, someone who will tolerate your smelly, helpless, infant-like state as you move from one culture to another. The person of peace must possess thick skin, because you are going to say a lot of really dumb shit. Like a toddler expressing words without really grasping their meaning, the journey towards cultural proficiency involves testing the boundaries and often crossing the line.
Peter Hessler talks about this third stage in his book River Town. He was the lone foreigner in a Sichuan town that hadn’t seen foreigners since the Qing Dynasty. Poor Peter couldn’t hole up in his apartment with watered down lager and the Under Siege series, he’d promised some publisher that he’d write a book about China. So, he went out.
Go to the same places frequently, Peter advises. Hang around in a certain spot and the people will become accustomed to your presence. This will increase your chances for conversation, for interaction, for friendship – all necessary for survival.
It can be just about anywhere – a diner, a park, a church or a coffee shop. Wherever people are gracious.
At my lowest point, I ventured out to a small restaurant just around the corner from my apartment. It was called Seven Mile Aroma (七里香) run by a lady named Cui Jin Xiang (崔金香). She insisted we call her ‘Lao Cui’ (Old Cui), even though she looked twenty-five. She was in her mid-forties, had an adult son and a husband who was a migrant worker on a long-term work assignment in Africa.
Lao Cui was the person of peace we desperately needed. She had a way of turning your bad cultural day around. Keep in mind these interactions were happening between an adult woman running a business full time and foreigners with the vocabulary of a toddler.
We called her our Chinese Mother. She fed us. She calmly tolerated our tantrums. Her patience and good humor got us through the day. Like dealings with very small children, she often had to guess what we were talking about – “Are you hungry?” “Are you upset?” “Are you poopy?”
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I left Jingzhou in 2008 and moved to Wuhan. Laurie and I married in early 2009, and moved to Shanghai that fall.
It was sometime around then that we went back to Jingzhou for a weekend. Now we had the vocabulary of eight-year olds and were off in the big city making our dreams come true. The trip to Lao Cui’s place very much had the feel of college kids coming home for the weekend. She was proud of the work I was doing and relieved to see I’d gotten married. Thank God a mentally stable woman had committed to tolerating my moodiness!
Years went by, we may have visited Jingzhou once or twice. Life in Shanghai got busy – work, friends, comedy, traveling. The manic lifestyle of a city gone wild.
No more hiding in our apartments, we were in the culture and operating at our full capacity. The third stage of acculturation is a years long process. It involves large stacks of vocab lists, thousands of hours of interactions and experiences, an incalculable number of mistakes made.
It’s hard to say when one arrives at the forth stage of acculturation, perhaps when you feel you’ve been irreversibly changed by the culture. Or maybe it’s when you realize others’ projections onto you don’t change, but you’re not bothered by them because you’re internally not the same. You find a quiet confidence in a new identity.
Laurie and I returned one last time to Jingzhou a few weeks before leaving China. It had been over ten years since we’d met Lao Cui. During that time, we’d been to many places – mental hospitals and factories, slums, performance stages, hot pot dinners, classrooms, and Chinese television shows. So much had changed during those intervening years.
The town was changing too. A bullet train had replaced the 5-hour bus ride to Wuhan where the driver would dodge traffic and car sick old people would vomit into grocery sacks. High rises were going up all over the place, the old was being torn down to make space for the new.
Seven Mile Aroma had closed, and Lao Cui was nowhere to be found. We spent an entire day going around the area, asking people if they knew her. To some, her face was vaguely familiar, but in China’s constantly shifting cycle of movement it is easy to lose touch with people. Especially in the pre-Wechat era.
If you read this and know where Lao Cui is, let her know we are still looking for her.
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Her name, Jin Xiang, means Golden Aroma. True to her namesake she filled the room with something fragrant. It freshened the atmosphere, covered our cultural smelliness.
You need that person of peace, you need to put in effort, and you need time.
Seven years seems a reasonable amount of time to acculturate if you’re working at it. Seven days in a week, seven years in a cycle. Seven is a well validated amount of time in the history of human growth and evolution. The path to adaptation stretches for miles and years. Acculturation is a wild up and down ride sometimes, so a little grace is in order.
Now, living south of 8 Mile, there are certain lessons I try to carry over. Detroit is unique in its own ways and similar to China in more ways than this town would like to admit. So, it’s helpful to think about Seven Mile Aroma and remember I’m in year two of a very long process. I need to keep working at it - find my spots, find my people, and don’t retreat into a haze of Steven Seagal and high fructose corn syrup.