Saturday was a beautiful day in Dalian, China, where I live. The sky was clear, there was a chill in the air, and the intensely cold wind that will hammer us for the next five months had not yet arrived. (It arrived today.) Nonetheless my family only grudgingly started our day. Weekends often find us pondering the options for getting out, but indulging in an iTunes marathon of past Survivor seasons instead. This Saturday we were forced out of the house by someone else's misfortunes: my daughter's Chinese tutor has a broken ankle, so we had to go to her apartment, rather than sending our driver to fetch her to ours. Eleanor takes Chinese lessons every Saturday. Her teacher, Vicky, is a "close" friend, so on Saturday, we all went with Eleanor to see Vicky.

I use quotation marks around the word close because becoming close to Chinese people has proven a challenge for me. There was a time when I thought I had a pretty good chance of getting close to Vicky. Vicky's husband, Charles, works with my husband, Jimmy. Charles and Vicky are both from Tianjin, China; they also spent time in Shanghai. Charles hired on with my husband's company when it announced plans to build a factory in Northeast China. Charles, Vicky, Jimmy and I spent a year or so in Arizona together, where the company planned and prepped for the new factory and where employees trained by working in an existing factory. The friendships began to form there.

Charles and Vicky are educated and young. They are bright and handsome. They are part of China's burgeoning middle class, not the lucky ones who scored millions through right-place/right-time (or right-bribe) good fortune, just the working educated. Vicky resigned a very good job as a teacher at one of China's most famous schools in order to follow Charles to Arizona, then to Dalian. Charles, like me, and like Jimmy, is an engineer. Charles and Vicky enjoyed their year in Arizona, travelling the US and shopping for all the luxuries that are too expensive for them in China. Together, they returned to China with 30 new pairs of shoes, several new purses, and some electronics. (FYI: Electronics are very expensive in China, where they are made.) Jimmy and I endured Arizona, never completely settling in.

At the end of last year, we all relocated to Dalian and I felt a great deal of confidence that I could build permanent friendships with the Chinese people I already knew, like Vicky. Vicky is a natural born teacher and I am a natural born learner. You would've thought that our time together would be easy. Instead I found Vicky pedantic, intensely proud of her cultural and linguistic heritage. And me? I was not very responsive. Don't get me wrong, the Chinese language and culture are endlessly fascinating. But I failed to connect and Vicky's enthusiastic relating of the origins of the Dragon Boat Festival, for example, did little to inspire me. Cultural traditions in China seem so concentrated at the surface.

Not long after we arrived in China, I discovered that Vicky, like me, had lost her mother to lung cancer. In fact, that's how she met Charles. His mother was in a hospital ward with hers. Vicky's mother noticed that Charles was a devoted son, taking care of his mother, and pushed Vicky to acquaint herself with such a good man. Charles' mother survived, Vicky's did not. Charles was there for her. Being motherless children (okay, adult women), I thought, would cement the bond between us. But it didn't. Vicky doesn't express her grief openly, she has the stoicism of so many Chinese. My grief is newer than Vicky's and has only recently submerged below my skin.

I completely failed to account for the culture shock: mine and Vicky's. China, like America, is far from homogeneous. The city of Dalian is a boom town, built on the 30 years of "Reforms and Opening Up" that the Chinese goverment initiated in the late 1970s. In Dalian, the reforms began in 1984 when the development area where we live was established. Before that, it was all farms and small villages. Our neighborhood now is populated by people drawn to the boomtown: factory and construction workers for the most part. Make no mistake, it is not a sophisticated place. The people are coarse and hardened by nearly a century of turmoil in their midst. Their age-old traditions are designed to incite nothing more than endurance. Most of the Chinese who are breaking into the middle-class are not educated. They do not spend many brain cycles pondering the source of their good fortune; they save out of fear and occasionally spend, which is what their own government and everyone else across the globe asks them to do. Let's face it. Everyone is banking on the Chinese consumer to bust out. Everyone hopes that the money the Chinese workers earn will be given back in rampant consumerism, and that they will now be happy because they have a sweet TV. In the meantime, our neighborhood is packed with migrant workers shitting, pissing, spitting, honking, shouting, and littering as if they were still on the farm.

I had previously convinced myself that boom towns were my favorite milieu. I grew up in one (Huntsville, Alabama) and eventurally worked in another (the Silicon Valley). Along the way, my husband and I passed time in another (the "Triangle" area of North Carolina). How naive I was to think that a boomtown in China would be the same. Vicky knew, and tried to hint, that Dalian was not much like her own home town of Tianjin, and not at all like Shanghai, and that she had reservations about moving here. As it turns out, neither Vicky nor I find much in common with our neighbors.  But Vicky is ashamed of them. Because Vicky does possess many conventional Chinese qualities.  Most of all, I see in her a relentless desire to "save face" and to honor what came before by holding to traditions. Vicky cannot shake these customs that are so very old in China.  Perhaps she has no desire to shake them.  And this, more than anything, forms the divide that separates us.  While I am ready, willing, and able to criticize both my home country and hers, Vicky is more reticent. It is our way, not hers, to air grievances and to open internal wounds over and over again.

One morning not long ago, Jimmy and I pressed her hard. I had been watching famous director Zhang Yimou's movie "The Story of Qiu Ju," about a peasant woman demanding justice and, most important, an apology, after her husband is beaten up by the village chief. I was very excited by the movie. I'd seen it before but was really paying attention to the Chinese language this time. I'm sure Vicky would've loved to discuss the grammar; but the story itself, she didn't want to go there. While making the movie 18 years ago, Zhang Yimou actually filmed many scenes surreptitiously, capturing the hardscrabble lives of the Chinese in that era. Though Ifeel the change that has occurred since then, I resonated with the images in the movie, so unfamiliar to me a year ago. Familiar now. Marketplaces, vendors, cars, carts, even mules. Vicky was a quick to point out that "not all" Chinese live this way. And yet, don't many? The poverty rate in China was 16% in 2004; that's about 200 million people. The reality that Zhang Yimou showcased is stillthe reality for 200 million people! The idea of exposing such shortcomings made Vicky uncomfortable. Her comfort in these uncertain times is the old, the familiar, the traditional elements of her life: save face, honor the past.

Besides, Vicky, like me, was only now becoming so intimately acquainted with these shortcomings. She has lived a life dedicated to education, to refinement, and to civility. She is personable, polite, and ever respectful. She may have suspected that life here was going to be less refined than anything she had previously lived, but that didn't prepare her any more than I was for the reality of it. We both of us felt isolated, separated from that which was familiar to us. We have spent more than 2 years in the company of people who don't really know us. And, in our separate ways, we have been down. Way down. Who am I? Am I this person making small talk with other housewives? Am I the engineer/teacher I used to be? What do I believe is fundamental to a good life? What do I value?

These days, both of us seem to be better adjusted. Vicky has started teaching again, this time teaching Chinese as a second language to foreigners. Her English has improved immensely. She has many adult clients, but also, and significantly, lots of children to teach. She is a truly talented teacher of children, endlessly patient, constantly engaged in finding the right way to convey her meaning. On Saturday morning, teaching Eleanor, Vicky was vibrant, energetic, noticably renewed.  I, too, have found my way to contentedness. I think. I write. I stop trying to be somebody I am not (read: good housewife! I am a very mediocre housewife.). My Chinese is improving. I think Vicky and I finally have a good chance of getting closer now that we have overcome the hardships of uprooting and relocating. I look forward to it.