Help! Where’s the coffee?

Before I departed for China, I had lower back pain. Jumping back into my trip, I am now in Xiamen touring a weekly antiques market with my good friend and professor, Flora Lee.

It was only my second day, and I hadn’t yet discovered the Popeye cappuccino at my hotel. I was an American zombie in China. The movie releases in August.

Flora, understanding that I was in a dense fog, led us to a convenience store where she bought me a bottled Starbucks Frappuccino.

Never touch the stuff back home, but in the land of tea, it was a restorative nectar.

I complained about my back pain, and Flora suggested a treatment akin to that used by Olympians such as Michael Phelps.

I was seated on a comfortable stool on a crowded street in the center of the antiques market.

I rolled up my shirt. Two women began to press 6 or 8 clay cups onto my lower back and inserted burning incense into the holes in the center of the ceramic, doorbell-shaped cups to heat them.

The burning sticks reminded me of the punks we used to light fireworks on the 4th in Brooklyn in days gone by. Illegal fireworks from China, of course. Life comes full circle.

And it worked. The pain was lessened for a day or two. Unfortunately, I walked around in clothes smelling like a forest fire.

I hoped no one would notice or hoped people I met had also taken the treatment and so would understand. A bonus was that the treatment was free. The sidewalk practitioners would not take one yuan from me.

Little did I know, due to my ignorance of Chinese, that Flora was getting the hard sell from them.

They wanted her to purchase a deluxe set of the “hot cups.” In my jet-lag delirium, I had no idea what was transpiring.

I am not adept at languages, so I didn’t seek to learn any Chinese. I had an app on my phone that asked in Mandarin, “Where is the toilet?” Good enough. When I was at St. Augustine’s High School, Brother Paul remarked in front of the entire class that I spoke French like a Spanish cow. Moo, señor! So much for reinforced learning. The Chinese sounds are very different for me. Probably for you, too.

My Chinese “sister,” Wendy, taught English grammar at Xiamen University and occasionally corrects our American usage.

It is golden fish, and not gold fish, she told me. When she was teaching Chinese language and culture at SDSU-IV, we would teach her all the slang we could think of.

She is a good sport. We sought to get beyond the grammar textbooks. I learned that Chinese students begin studying English in first grade, and I met first-rate English speakers who had never been out of China.

I found China humbling in positive ways. As a retired smarty pants professor, there were numerous opportunities to realize how little I know and how much I need to relearn.

This is all good in my book. I feel younger and energized, and I thank my Chinese friends for their care and patience.

I couldn’t have learned much of what I did in China from another book and definitely not from watching CNN.

You have got to walk the streets and drink tea to meet the people and make friends.