The One Where the Bobbies Came a Knocking

In the middle of a relaxing Tuesday evening, two Chinese cops showed up pounding on our door. When they saw four white American girls, they both looked at each other and started cracking up. 

After an initial surge of fright, a lot of jabbering in Cantonese, and many confused looks, I was able to communicate that I spoke a little little little Chinese. They really loved that, and led us down our 4 flights of stairs to the outside of our apartment where we had put our trash. One of our coordinators had told us to put our bags of trash underneath an alcove outside of the apartment and people would come by and pick it up. That had seemed super strange, but we thought, “Hey, it’s China!”.

Turns out, creating a mountain of trash outside the apartment was NOT the proper garbage disposal etiquette. The cops picked up the bags and led us down the street to show us the correct receptacle. They were incredibly genial the whole time; WAY nicer than two American cops would be to an apartment of littering foreigners. 

I was able to employ my basic knowledge of the Chinese words for languages, countries, time, and teaching related jargon to relay why four young white girls were in a ghetto apartment in their town. I didn’t understand about 80% of what they were saying, and there were a lot of “Ting, bu dong”s on my part. 

Now we know where to dispose of our trash and that the Chinese boys in blue are unexpectedly nice to ignorant Americanos.