This is a fairly straightforward question that by all accounts ought to be answerable with one word – a simple yes or no will suffice – and yet whenever anyone asks me this question, I struggle to give them just one word. It doesn’t quite feel right to say “yes” but it doesn’t feel right to say “no” either, so the closest I can come is “kindasorta” (which is still one word, right?).
I wasn’t really expecting myself to be grappling with this question in a tiny coffee shop in the old square of the rural town of Shaxi, in Yunnan Province, China, but then again I wasn’t really expecting the Israeli circus to come to town either.
To be more precise, three acrobat/juggler/circus performers from Israel showed up in Shaxi one day, determined to put on a show for local school children on the opera stage of the old square, and two days later we had our show. That very evening, one of the trio found me in the Old Tree Café and opened the conversation with the aforementioned question.
His name was Guy, and by day he was a juggler. By night he was a chatterbox with strong Jew-dar (self-proclaimed). Upon discovering that the answer to his question was not “no,” he proceeded to share with me what seemed to be the complete history of his relations in the United States and his own experiences there. Though admittedly I found my mind wandering once or twice, Guy’s ramblings were really quite endearing in a single-serving-friend kind of way. Besides, we discovered that we both have ties to the Jewish community in Albuquerque, which was enough to be friends.
Time passed, we shared our stories, and then it was the hour for me to depart and follow some of my students out to the riverside just beyond the edge of the old town to see if we could catch some shooting stars. As Guy and I said our farewells, he gave me a big bear hug (he called it a Jew-hug), and I gratefully accepted what I realized was the first hug I’d had in over a month.
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