The Colonizer and the Student
Sometimes God Sends Us the Most Annoying Angels. I Learned to Listen the Hard Way.
When the scowling white-bearded man started flying around the clunky old TV set, I knew I was in trouble. I braced myself for a painful two hours as the timpani beats blaring from the TV painfully banged on my eardrums. Only my deeply ingrained need to be polite kept me from jumping out of my seat and running out the door.
I had just moved to China as a Mandarin language student at one of China’s largest universities, and wanted to make friends. As a Christian, I also wanted to find community in a local church. The local congregation, the only English-speaking Protestant church in a city of six million people, offered a Wednesday night Bible study in the same dorm where I was currently living. And this Bible study’s leader, an international student from Zimbabwe named Ariko, was beginning what I considered one of the worst Bible study sessions I had ever attended. I gritted my teeth in anger.
After we watched an excruciating twenty minute video whose introduction included angry white man God, Ariko turned off his barely functioning TV set, turned on the lights in his room, and called us to get our Bibles. “It’s time to recite this week’s memory verse!,” he happily chirped. “Let’s recite the memory verse together.”
“What?!” I shrieked inside my head. “Are you serious?! This is something I ask children to do. I’m an adult with a graduate degree!” At Ariko’s command, I nevertheless muttered John 15:5 under my breath over and over again: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”
“Again!” Ariko exclaimed. So I repeated this verse almost a dozen times, individually and as a group, with clenched fists and quickened pulse. I barked John 15:5 alongside fellow students from China, Mexico, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Botswana. I tried to ignore the halitosis of those squeezed beside me on the bed in that cramped dorm room, yet the lingering smells of our comingled breath were impossible to avoid. Whiffs of recently consumed dinners containing peanut butter, fried rice, and foul smelling durian rose with our Bible verse chants. A pungent offering indeed. As soon as Ariko finished his long-winded and disorganized closing prayer that night, I bolted out the door back to my own dorm room and screamed into my pillow.
The next day, I walked to the university’s library so I could set up an internet connection on my laptop. When I finally found the IT guy who was supposed to help me out, he just snapped some incomprehensible sounds at me. I only knew a few Chinese phrases at that point, and my “please,” “thank you,” and “where is the bathroom?” were not doing anything for me. As I stared at the tech specialist in utter bewilderment, he turned around and closed the door in my face.
I started walking back to my dorm, frustrated and despondent that I wasn’t able to accomplish what I thought would be a very simple task. Not only that, but how was I supposed to contact friends and family back home if I couldn’t establish my own internet connection? I was feeling pretty rotten.
And whom should I run into in that moment of utter grumpiness? Yup, you guessed it. Ariko. “Hello, Melanie!” He happily exclaimed. “How are you?”
“To be honest, Ariko, today isn’t going so well,” I responded. “I tried to set up internet on my laptop, but I had no idea what the IT guy was saying. I really want to communicate with folks back in the US, and I don’t know how to do it.”
I was shocked by Ariko’s response. “Let me help you!,” he replied. “Let’s go back and see what we can do.” I knew Ariko was a PhD student with many responsibilities, yet he dropped everything to walk with me back across the large campus to the IT office.
When we arrived at the office, Ariko explained my situation in flawless Mandarin. He muttered in agreement with the IT guy’s response, nodded his head, and turned toward me. “Please fill out this form now, and take this ticket. You can return in 48 hours to pick up your laptop. Be sure to bring the ticket with you.”
“That’s it?” I replied, astonished at how easily Ariko had handled the situation. “Yup!” he chortled. “You’re good to go! All set!”
When I returned to my dorm that afternoon, angrily rubbing grime off the desk and ignoring visible gaps between the ill-fitted windows, I sat for a while as I tried to gather my thoughts. I don’t know what I had expected when I moved to China, but this wasn’t it. In a few short days, my emotions had already run the spectrum from elation to rage. I had no idea what to think.
A few moments later, a question spontaneously popped into my head: “why did that Bible study make you so angry, Melanie?” My eyes bulged at the shock of the question. I was truthfully scared to answer it. WHY had the Bible study made me so angry?……..
……because it wasn’t my preferred style.
……because I greatly care about good pedagogy.
……because I don’t suffer bad teaching.
…….because…..
…….because……
…….because I don’t like my pride to be offended.
…….because I demand a good product, even in church.
…….because I want things to go my way.
Wow. When I was honest with myself, the question “WHY does this make me angry?” revealed more about who I was than anything else. The problem at the end of the day wasn’t Ariko, or his haphazard prayers, or any of THOSE people. It wasn’t even that horrid video of muscular, swashbuckling God. The problem was my unwillingness to commit to relationship with people who sometimes offended me. It was my pride at accepting help from someone I had considered beneath me because of his abysmal teaching skills. It was my fear that God may challenge me and change me in ways that I did not want or anticipate.
I started to feel pretty rotten again, but this time the reason was self-loathing. Turns out, I really was just a snobby white Westerner. I had subconsciously expected China to welcome me with open arms. I thought I was above colonialism, but at the end of the day, I wasn’t. I was just part of the problem.
In that new low moment, another thought popped into my head: the memory verse from the night before. “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” I was shocked not only that I had remembered it, but also by how much comfort it brought me. Perhaps Ariko had more to teach me than I first thought.
