It’s not often I meet someone who knows me only through the blog, but today I did, and only because I first met a Chinese woman on the Metro.
I was traveling home from work, zoned out in my usual routine of listening to a podcast as we emerged from the underground portion of the system to the next station. The woman got on and sat down across from me with a suitcase and a white piece of paper that I later learned was meant to spell out instructions for her trip.
She spoke only enough English to tell me, “Chinese, no English.” At each stop we made, she got up and tried to ask the train operator if that was her stop, but I couldn’t tell whether she wasn’t getting an answer or didn’t understand.
The paper said: Orange line to East Falls Church. Silver line to Wiehle. Bus to Reston.
Since she was already successfully on the silver line, things weren’t going too badly. And Wiehle is the final stop, and mine, so she was pretty safe there, too. But that final step was, in the words of Ned Flanders, a dilly of a pickle. Reston is a large place and at the Wiehle station you can catch many different bus routes that take you all over the place.
As we walked the platform toward the station exit, and down into the bus area, we managed to communicate that where she ultimately needed to end up was Reston Town Center. Two small, but quite vital words were missing from her paper.
With that tidbit we walked over to the pickup location for a bus that I know goes to the town center. She let me know that she was okay at that point, but after seeing what happened on the train I wanted to just let the driver know which stop was hers.
As we waited, another bus showed up to unload its passengers, and the first woman off the bus said something to me. I didn’t catch it at first, and thought I was in the way of her reading bus route info on the wall behind me. But the second time I understood.
“Are you cjhannas?” she asked.
She told me she’s a reader (hey, reader!) and actually lives right by me. And I wouldn’t have known any of that if another woman wasn’t a little lost on the Metro.