Last night my partner and I were grilling out near our pool house. It was twilight and we noticed one of the new residents watching us from his unit. This particular condo recently changed hands, and the new owner moved in last weekend. We met him then, a young guy from Beijing who works down the road at Google. The gentleman watching us was older than the fellow we’d met; I guessed him to be a relative, probably the owner’s father. After about 10 minutes of pacing in the window, he came outside to visit. The three of us quickly established that he knew exactly 3 words of English and that between us, my partner and I knew 0 Chinese words.

The conversation went something like this:

Chinese Guy: Approaches while smiling and making sounds of greeting, though not in English. Pulls deeply on his cigarette.

Americans: Stand. Because it seems like the polite thing to do and because there are only two chairs in the immediate area. Smile. Say “Hello”.

Chinese Guy: Rattles off a string of words in Chinese.

Americans: Shaking our heads. Still smiling. “We don’t understand.” “Sorry.”

Chinese Guy: Gestures at the unit he came out of. Smoke from his cigarette mingles with the grilling chicken. Taps his chest. Ashes fall off the cigarette. “I am Chinese.”

Americans: Nodding heads again.

Chinese Guy and Americans: Smiling.

Chinese Guy: Thrusts pack of cigarettes at us. I think they are Pall Malls which I wasn’t aware were still manufactured.

Americans: Shaking heads. “No. Thank you.”

Chinese Guy: Grinds cigarette out on back of chair and tosses butt onto the ground. Lights up a new cigarette. Begins speaking in Chinese. Gestures effusively to the fence and the sky.

Americans: “Uhhh.” Look at fence. Look at sky. See nothing unusual. Shake heads. Smile.

Me: Cannot stop thinking about the cigarette butt lying on the ground. Wants to look pointedly at it and the trash can two feet away but carefully does not.

Chinese Guy: Smiles. Smokes. Begins speaking conversationally. Chuckles. Speaks more rapidly.

Americans: “Sorry, we don’t…” Shaking heads.

Me: Thinking it must suck to be an extrovert in a place where no one speaks your language. This guy is clearly desperate for conversation.

Americans: Trying to convey our names.

Chinese Guy: Laughs. Let’s out a string of words too long to be a name and gestures towards the swimming pool.

My partner: Checks our food on the grill.

Chinese Guy: Grinds second cigarette out on the wrought iron chair and flicks butt to the ground. Extracts another cigarette. Offers pack again.

Me: Watches him do this and tries not to flinch. Strongly wants to make a production of taking a paper towel, picking up the cigarette butts and putting them in the trash.

Chinese Guy: Talks some more. Gestures some more.

Americans: Still do not understand Chinese even when spoken very fast with lots of gestures but smile and nod heads rapidly.

Chinese Guy: Smiles, nods, smokes, begins walking back towards his (or his son’s) condo unit.

There are 30 units in our condo building. In addition to English, residents here speak Russian, Belorusian, Spanish and Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin)—a pretty good mix for a small complex. Unfortunately for the fellow last night, my partner and I are not among the Chinese speakers. The little seven year old who lives below us would probably do a better job as he’s attending a Chinese-English language immersion school. Seeing as how we weren’t verbally communicating, I was hyper-aware of other sorts of communication, history in general, and some cultural differences.

Smoking. Back when I was a kid, around the time Nixon made his historic visit to the PRC, Americans smoked in much larger numbers than they do today. What’s more, they smoked much like this fellow was smoking last night. Smoking was a social lubricant, a lit cigarette got waved every which way and whatever ground you stood on was a trash can for cigarette butts. Not so with most smokers in the U.S. today. Now smokers are more likely to be in mixed company and be conscious of keeping their cigarette averted from the crowd, disposing of the ashes and butts in trash receptacles.

Had the guy last night been American, I probably would have taken him to task for littering the pool deck with cigarette butts. I may even have informed him that smoking is not allowed in the common areas, even the outside common areas. Probably, though, I would have let that second rule slide. A habit is a habit and if you’re just hanging out, trying to be nice, I don’t want to be wagging a finger in your face. Human connection is more important to me than getting all peevish over the rules. The fellow last night was so obviously friendly, so obviously eager to make a connection, and so culturally oblivious that his smoking might offend. I didn’t want the one thing I managed to communicate to him be a scolding. This is California. We basically don’t want you to smoke until you leave the state. I figured the dude will be scolded enough while he’s here. Hopefully his son will clue him in to the cultural norms and the house rule on our common areas of the condo building. If he doesn’t, we can take it up with him but last night wasn't the right time.

That said, I was struck by how very conscious I was of those cigarette butts on the ground, the way he ground them out on the lawn furniture and completely ignored the trash receptacle. As soon as his back was turned I grabbed that paper towel and swept them up. I also couldn’t help thinking about what led to the two of us standing there last night. He looked to be 10-12 years older than I. Probably would have been in his teens when the U.S. and China established diplomatic relations. Our lives have been very different and yet both of us ended up in the same place last night, on the pool deck in a condo building in California. Me from South Carolina, via Denver and Boston. Him from Beijing and where else? What does or did he do for work in China? How did he come to have a son, presumably his only child, working at Google in the U.S? It’s a shame, really, that we couldn’t talk and learn a little bit more about one another’s history. We might as well still be separated by the Pacific Ocean for as much as we were able to share with one another.

Maybe next time his son will be able to come out and join him, do some translating. Maybe they’ll find the other Chinese speakers in the building who, as far as I know, are all from Hong Kong. The man is so obviously a social person; I hope for his sake he’ll be able to connect with people here for however long he stays. I wonder who I’ll find myself standing next to in another 40 years – assuming I’m still standing!