Some families claim closeness via metaphorical bodily references. “You’re in my heart,” “It runs in our blood,” or, “It’s in our bones.” A beautiful gift from our mother, my sisters* and I have something better, something tangible. It’s this lump in the back of our throats. You might have one too, although it’s unlikely that you’re as in touch with yours as we are. It takes practice. It takes a lot of crying. About everything, from the mildly frustrating to the truly elating, wherever it hits you—work, the grocery store, or, in the luckiest of situations, your own living room. Almost always unsuccessfully resisted, the lump wells up and burns in our throats, constricting and threatening to explode. One thing makes it burst every time: acknowledgement.
After a particularly challenging week, I should have seen it coming in my sister’s email. “Forgive me for noticing, but I could tell you were a bit... down.” Once acknowledged, it bursts, flooding the eyes and nose—often the saline just streams out of the pores at the eyebrows, the ducts too overwhelmed by the flood to direct everything properly. Of course she noticed. For those of you not connected to the express line to my emotions, I suppose full discloser is only fair: Sometimes, this is hard. Sometimes, I am down. Often, even when I am happiest, there is a lump in the back of my throat, daring challenge to present itself.
But so many things are not hard, and maybe I don’t give them enough attention. Everyone we meet, and even some we don’t meet, couldn’t be more excited to help us out. This week, Jason forgot his bag on the bus. The person who found it opened it, found a phone number for Jason’s student, and brought the bag to her at our campus the next morning so she could give it back to him. I know some places where this might have happened in America, but I’m also aware of many places where the story would’ve ended with Jason buying a new bag, not even bothering to hope for a kind stranger.
Genuine friendships are born daily, as we share lunch with students or as we walk into the street to get lunch (The street food vendors really want to talk to us now, and honestly I’m more motivated to learn the language because of this.) A student approached me in the hallway weeks ago to ask if I would help her practice English, and now we share meals almost daily. Her favorite exclamation, “Of course!” punctuates our Chinglish (heavy on the –glish) conversations.
The other foreigners in town know what it’s like to be parachuted into The Land That Keeps You On Your Toes. “I just feel like every day presents some simple task that I can’t accomplish,” I whined to an American friend who’s been here for years. I called her because I couldn’t find curry or oatmeal at the grocery store. “I still feel like that,” she replied honestly. It’s ok to feel like that. The day before, I enlisted her help filling out my gym membership forms because I couldn’t read them.
Every evening we finish teaching at 5:40 pm, just as the sun is setting behind the mountains that surround our campus. Darkness settles as the bus nears the city, and Chengde’s buildings glow with sporadically affixed neon lights that chase, blink, and sparkle—a display that is arguably a bit flashy for a town this small, but is at least aesthetically interesting. The building project under the river has progressed, and most nights there’s enough water in the formerly parched riverbed to reflect a neon glow from the bedazzled bridges.
My toilet works, my electricity is usually on, and even on the hardest days I couldn’t be happier.
*I don’t mean to exclude my brother from this profession of sibling camaraderie. He just has the good fortune of having inherited less estrogen.
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