When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Peruvian
by Courtney Ng
Surviving Lima, speaking spanglish, shedding my "gringa" (foreigner) skin
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The Day I Realized I Love Lima
November 23, 2009 @ 10:53 PM | Permalink
Lima isn't the kind of city tourists spend weeks visiting. It isn't a particularly beautiful city, or a well-organized city, or even a very safe city, for that matter. The sun hardly ever shines and the pollution is enough to make you worry about lung cancer after a few weeks inhaling car exhaust all day. Lima, to be brutally honest, is an ugly city.
And that is why I love it.
I love Lima because it's not trying to be something for someone else. It doesn't have time for tourists. It's a city built around necessity – almost everyone who moves here does so for work, school, or because they have relatives here (which is practically all Peruvians, because Lima alone makes up more than 1/3 of Peru's population). Unlike charming Cusco or majestic Arequipa (both incredible places in their own rights), Lima has a sense of urgency. Every stoplight is full of honking cars and fearless pedestrians weaving through the traffic. Every store is bustling, clothes thrown in a pile on a table because there's no time to fold them. Every person has a purposeful walk, a product to sell, a problem to solve.
That is, everyone but Fermín. I met Fermín in Barrio Chino, the Chinatown in the center of Lima, last Friday. I was interviewing people for an assignment about the Chinese community Peru, and I found Fermín, an 89-year-old unmarried Chinese man, in a small bakery on a side street. He was just hanging out, chatting with the manager, when I asked him to come sit down for tea with my American friends and I. He didn't seem too excited, but he obliged.
We ended up staying there for two hours, listening to an elaborate life story of a man who grew up in Peru, was forced to go move back to China in the 40s thanks to China's war with Japan, and then came back to Peru. He never married, never had kids, and never left Lima. His spoke broken Spanish and/or could barely hear what we were saying, so the conversation went in circles a lot, but when we told him we needed to leave, he stood up, pointed out the door, and escorted us to the bus stop, waiting with us until our combi came by.
I can't say that Fermín was particularly friendly, outrageous, or outgoing, or that meeting him was life-changing or particularly eye-opening. It was just the fact that he was there, in a bakery in a Chinese neighborhood in bustling Lima, not having to go anywhere or impress anybody, that makes me think I'll never forget him.
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