Personal Space
By Jian Ping
"Invaders"
I’ve been swimming in the pool on the rooftop deck of my condo building all summer early each morning—it’s not only my exercise time, but also a time of musing and reflection. I call it my active meditation. Most of the time, I have the entire pool to myself.
This past Saturday and Sunday, I found “my space” invaded by the presence of four Asians—three middle-aged women and a man. I found them in the pool on Saturday when I got there at 6:30 a.m., and on Sunday, I went at 6 a.m., and to my dismay, they came again, at 6:20 a.m. The women were short and chubby and all wore colorfully one piece swimsuits, and the man, skinny, floating in long, blue trunks. They hung at the edges of the pool or walked in the water most of the time, chatting in a language I couldn’t understand. They could be Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodians or Chinese. I did my lap swim so close to the south end of the pool so as to avoid them that I hit my left hand against the rail of the metal ladder a couple of times. But these four people scattered around, with two of them—the man and a woman—standing so close to where I made my turn at the end that the woman’s pink and purple flower-patterned suit was less than two feet away from my gurgles, and the man’s feet were so close that I could see their wrinkles and veins. I cringed and kicked the water as hard as I could to get away at these unappealing sights. “The rest of the pool is wide open,” I thought, “Why are you standing so close to where I swim?”
I was grateful that water provided good sound insulation that I didn’t have to hear the clatter of their chatting as long as I kept my head under. But I could no longer do my muse or fantasy. I counted my strokes and laps and tried hard to distract myself from their presence. I was struck by the realization that I had been very much “Westernized” when it came to personal space and found the lack of a “comfort zone,” an arm’s length, or rather, the disregard for a personal space disturbing.
I was very much relieved that these people didn’t show up at the pool this morning!
Jian Ping, author of Mulberry Child: A Memoir of China. Visit www.moraquest.com, www.mulberrychild.com
Tags: arm's length, personal space, pool, swimming
