There is an international college in Hamilton's west end that seems to only enroll students from China, though its webpage claims enrollment from 51 countries. From what I understand, it's the sort of place that lower-upper-class Chinese families send their children to learn English. The girl's dormitory, Linden Hall, is located in downtown Hamilton. When I get off the GO Transit bus from Toronto, I get onto a city bus located midway between the campus and the girl's dormitory. Most nights, this bus is full of petite Chinese girls in their late teens, on their way home.
They dress in conservative blazers and skirts, but their hair and clothing is often artfully decorated and arranged in fantastic ways. Ragged, crimped pig tails, crumpled stockings, weird bits of jewelry, and so on. They are styles I don't recognize, and don't see on local girls. They exude wealth, somehow. They have strange little computers and MP3 players and phones, all shiny titanium and glowing blue LED. They are like visions from the near future, or living characters from some obscure anime. None of them speak English amongst themselves, though they have very animated conversations in what I assume to be Mandarin.
I feel like a sort of awkward dancing bear when they're on the bus, shuffling around to avoid bumping into people. I'm six foot and 270 lbs, folded up in a heavy wool overcoat, carrying around a briefcase and topped with an increasingly shabby hat.
The girls get off at John Street, which is a major transfer point.
They get replaced by paint-and-plaster-splattered construction workers, rumpled GO Train commuters, people in scooters, and teenage mothers. They're mostly white and mostly poor, with the exception of one of two middle-class office workers, or university students who, while currently poor, are decidedly middle class.
I've often wanted to record this transition, but I don't really think people would appreciate me shooting video of school girls getting off a city bus, you know? So, today I decided to pay attention, and write about it.
Today, I got on the bus, and there were dozen or so schoolgirls, much as described above. There were also five or six young Indian or Pakistani men at the back of the bus, presumably students from McMaster University. At least one of them was wearing a leather Engineering student jacket.At John Street, the girls left the bus, and were replaced by:
- A 20ish white girl with a "Streisand" nose, wearing a "Jayne" hat, army surplus jacket, big boots, and carrying a crochet handbag. Definitely some kind of geek - she kept trying to read the back of the SF novel I was reading.
- A acne-scarred male soldier, maybe 18 years old, with bright red hair, in field camo winter clothes and beret, presumably attached to the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
- A handicapped woman (Beth), aged about 70, riding a scooter (which caused some complaints from other riders) with a luxuriant growth of facial hair. I know her fairly well from my days driving a mobile soup kitchen, back around 2000.
- A very skinny Jamaican boy, around 15, in a very large black parka and a baseball hat.
- A pair of 40ish guys with short hair, jeans, and cheap coats, one of whom had tattoos on the backs of his hands. They talked a lot about beer and an ongoing divorce.
- A chubby blonde girl, about 18, dressed in clothes my middle-class white nerd eyes could only describe as "hip hop" and....
- . ...Her aunt, who was about 40, and dressed in track pants and a grey parka. The two of them talked about babies a lot, with the girl occasionally kidding(?) that she was going to get pregnant as soon as she got a boyfriend. I think she was trying to annoy her aunt.
- A 40ish professional woman, tall and plump, who works near my office. She always has very stylishly cut and dyed hair.
When the private school girls leave the bus, there's a sort of inversion. Instead of being the awkward large outsider, I become a self-assured, middle-class intellectual. Relatively well-off, relatively well educated, with liberal/socialist ideas and well-made (if generic) clothes.
Yet, given that everyone else in the bus tends to either be a manual laborer, on social assistance, or in university, I'm still entirely disconnected and in another world. Beth, the elderly disabled woman, actually avoids making eye contact me with, presumably because she does not want to admit our prior connection.
To some of them, I'm sort of "The Man," as it were. I'm a representative of a world nearly as alien as that of the Chinese school girls. I feel more comfortable when the bus population "shifts", because it transforms to the norm for Hamilton, which is a slightly shabby, blue-collar industrial city.
But while I am "in" that world, I am not quite "of" that world.
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