The first or second Sunday night that we were here, our doorbell rang (because obviously apartments need their own doorbells; knocking isn't good enough). I looked through the peephole, assuming it was one of our across-the-hall neighbors, Kate or Amanda. They are both young blonde women of average height, 25-ish years old, and thus far they were the only people who'd ever rung our doorbell. The person behind the door was a tall, wrinkly old Chinese (as I later found out) man who I later found out to be 55 years old. The first night he came by peddling his wares (bootleg DVDs) in his faux-leather duffle bag, but we had no idea who he was or if he was legit so we declined multiple times (politely) and closed the door. For some reason, ever since then, I look through the peephole before I open the door and I expect to see an old Chinese man. In a minor way it was rather traumatizing to see an old Asian man when we were expecting a young Caucasian woman.
The next day, we told some people at work about our experience and they said "Oh, that's the cheap movie guy!" Apparently he's known in our building, we just didn't yet know him.
This past Sunday night, the doorbell rang again and Sarah opened the door to the same old Asian man, his name is Tom as it turns out. This time, she invited him into the living room where he plopped down on the floor and started to take out pile after pile of bootleg DVDs. We pulled out a good 20 DVDs at 10 durhams each, and we tested a few of them in our DVD player. A few didn't look great (clearly recorded in the movie theatre) but most of them looked decent so we ended up with 18 of them.
The whole transaction only took about 15 minutes, but the man kept talking and asking us questions. Mind you, he didn't speak more than 30 words of English, but we found ways to communicate. It was complicated. He just stayed put on the floor asking us questions about our families, our jobs, how much we make, awkward stuff like that, but clearly we weren't giving him much information. Sarah tried to explain autism...clearly not so much. We figured he was harmless, and he kept saying "Wow, teachers, 24 years old!" while giving us the thumbs-up sign. I told him my parents are both teachers in America (he understood the word "teacher" but I think "elementary school principal" and "occupational therapist" would have been going a bit too far), and he kept saying "you father is good man, I not good man." Sarah joked that if he was a bad man he should leave, but clearly he didn't mean it that way. It was awkward when he told us that teachers make too much money, but maybe in Communist China they do make relatively too much money.
Finally, there wasn't much left to say and he just kept on with the "Wow, you teachers?!" so we told him we had to get on with our homework. This opened up a new round of trying to explain that we are graduate students part-time...not so successful. Sarah even went over to her computer to illustrate "time to do work" and he came over next to her and looked at her computer screen! After another five minutes we got out our textbooks and he took Sarah's and started looking through it! Somehow he started talking about China (sort of) and how big it is and all the places we should visit (because he left China but apparently we should visit there).
I don't remember how we finally succeeded, but once we were persistent enough he got up to leave and nicely shook our hands. We sat down to look at our 18 new DVDs (180 durhams total, or about $50), and then we started reading the movie descriptions on the back. I can't even begin to describe them, so here's one of my favorite examples from the back of Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay (this is just an excerpt):
Though having experienced thick-and-thin, Kama is to be just as before but the field finds pleasure in it , he will challenge Harold's friendly sentiment , endurance and the mentality limit once more, ... Be needless to worry about, disregarding what has come about however , being able to not blot out the friendly sentiment between them , may let two personal relation become especially rapid and intense only.
Now I'm not saying I speak any other language well. Spanish is the only language I consider myself a speaker of, and I probably sound like this when I speak Spanish. My only issue is that whoever used Photoshop or some other such program to create the bootleg DVD case could have just searched for a movie blurb in proper English...I don't get it.
The three or four movies we've watched so far have been perfect quality, though as I write this we're watching Step Brothers and it was clearly filmed in a movie theatre. At least the person with the camera had it on some sort of tripod though!
That's all for now, more experiences to come soon.
