"The World Spins Madly On"

I recently finished reading an edition of The Best American Travel Writing, an annual collection of noteworthy travel pieces from American magazines. In one story republished from Gourmet magazine, William Least Heat-Moon recalls playing copilot for his father as a child, and something his father often said on trips. "From a mere vacation, one goes home older, but from true travel, one returns changed by challenge."

 

Beginning today, I can count down to my homecoming in days rather than months. It must be time to reflect on those challenges that have shaped me this year. Although some days it feels like it's just beginning, it also feels like it might be simpler to list the experiences and emotions I haven't had since August.

 

My passport was lost in the mail until the day before I left. I celebrated my 23^rd birthday on the Great Wall. I saw the Dalai Lama, and the sunrise at the Taj Mahal. I learned how to say, "I am cold!" in Chinese, and celebrated Christmas at a nightclub. I wrote a 50,101-word novel, and ate holy food off the floor while recovering from food poisoning. I rescued a puppy, and a monk who thinks we should love pigs as much as we love dogs taught me about anger. I taught, and learned, and taught some more. I really loved that part.

 

Some of my experiences were rather mundane. My toilet overflowed. I cried a lot. I went to the gym. I cooked.

 

Last night, my friend Cate and I climbed into the mountains above Chengde just before sunset. A network of trails crisscrosses away from the city's neon lights (lights that make it look much more glamorous than it actually is), and we've been saying for weeks that we wanted to spend the night out in the open, above the noise. We camped under a pagoda, watching the sun sink behind the western mountains on its way to rise over my friends and family, as the gleaming full moon ascended from the east.

 

We talked the night away, and got a few amateur photos of the brilliant moon, before the sun lightened the horizon again around 3:00 a.m. Watching the sky's rotation like that, it's impossible not to comprehend just how fast the world is spinning. As Cate said, "Look at this sky moving. How could anyone ever have thought the world was flat?" (I told her about Iowa.)

 

It's difficult to quantify what I'll miss when thirty more of those spins land me in the U.S. The food, my students, my friends, my own space. Will I miss the thrill of being on a bus careening toward a bicyclist and swerving at the last minute? Or seeing children relieve themselves by the sidewalk? The deep, guttural sound of a man cleaning mucus out of his lungs to launch it into the street? Perhaps.

 

Simon Winchester, author of "Welcome to Nowhere" in The Best American Travel Writing, quoted his tailor's comment to him upon his return from an incredible journey. "You know, you are a very, very lucky man indeed. Lucky to be in such a place. Lucky to see such things. And luckiest of all to meet such very kind people. I envy you. Everyone must envy you. Wherever would you be—have you ever wondered—without all their kindness and without all this luck?"

 

There may not be ubiquitous envy for my experiences or living conditions, but I do consider myself indescribably lucky to be in such a place, to have met such kind people, to see the sky turn pink and orange with the moon still high in the sky over Chengde. 

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"Life Would Be Perfect...": Want Less, Have More.

The past nine months have afforded me more free time than I've had in years (and far more than I hope to have again prior to, or even in, retirement). It was a time to develop hobbies. While I wish I could say I learned to juggle, or took up the offer for belly dancing lessons from the teacher at my gym, the truth is… I developed an obsession with National Public Radio. Which is how I stumbled upon a recent interview with author Meghan Daum, whose book, "Life Would be Perfect if I Lived in That House," chronicles her hobby—obsessively hunting for the perfect living space.

 

The interviewer, Rebecca Roberts, said in her lead, "It's a uniquely American phenomenon, this house lust, this fantasy of the perfect life in the perfect environment." I glanced at my surroundings and mused at what these uniquely house-lusty Americans would think. My kitchen has two food preparation surfaces: the top of a 4-foot-tall refrigerator, and the (broken) lid of a (functioning) washing machine. I cook on a hot plate that sits on top of my microwave, and I wash my dishes in a sink conveniently angled to elevate the drain. I don't lust for a house, but most days I do lust for an oven.

 

With Daum's interview in the background, I landed on this Foreign Policy story about China's housing bubble. Its author debunked Roberts' claim in the first paragraph. "Last fall 80 percent of respondents to a China Youth Daily online poll said that home ownership was a prerequisite for happiness." In the unlikely event that Americans ever were the only people in the world who associated happiness with square footage, it certainly isn't true anymore.

 

The article reports that China's successful young generation, beneficiaries of the spoil-inducing (and its less desirable cousin, unreasonably high expectation-inducing) one child policy are struggling to attain homeownership, the last rung of the success ladder they're told they deserve to ascend uninhibited. On the flip side, wealthy Chinese with a lack of places to invest excess cash are holding multiple, empty apartments now poised to crash in value.

 

About compulsively changing houses, Daum said, "I really felt that where I lived was a direct reflection of who I was. My house was really a mirror of my soul. And until I found sort of the right mirror, I just wasn't going to be settled." Young Chinese women seem to agree. They're unlikely to pursue a man whose virtuous soul isn't reflected in his walls and his wallet.

 

Scanning the rooms of my charmingly filthy, disintegrating hovel, with its perpetually broken furniture and a variegated wooden bathroom door shedding soggy splinters in my entryway, I'm inclined to disagree with the notion that where you live is in some way a direct reflection of who you are. Then again, I signed up for this dwelling. More unbelievably, perhaps because it's the first place I've lived on my own (or because I have impossibly low standards… or because I can listen to npr for hours without annoying anyone), I know my busted toilet seat and blown outlets will always hold a revered place in my storied housing history.

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Spring, Storms, & Sequins

Spring lasted about two hours in Chengde. I think I was asleep. Bundled up in my turtleneck and winter coat until the last bitter days of April, I glared at the stick-trees, beseeching them to grow some damn flowers already. When I returned from Qingdao last Tuesday, it was nearly 90 degrees, and blossoms were blowing off the trees in a fierce wind as though they had been there all along, and were now tired of announcing spring. Grandmas and grandpas play mahjong around tiny street-side tables well into the evening, barbeque joints stay open all night long, and Friday night beers can be enjoyed to excess by the banks of the river. It's like it wasn't 20 below a mere two months ago.

 

Dust storms are one of the more interesting experiences that accompany Chengde's spring/summer. Saturday afternoon while reading at a table by the river—shortly after some guys cracked open foaming beers which the wind splashed straight against my back and hair—the sky began to turn a hazy yellow. As I walked to the grocery store and then home, to change out of my beer-scented garb, the Saturday afternoon crowd continued to go about its business in the increasingly yellow/orange air. Severe drought and deforestation caused an increase in storms this year, so small clouds like this one don't merit much reaction—they happen all the time, and are sometimes almost indistinguishable from regular industrial haze. A more severe storm can look like this—Chengde had one of these back in March. Around 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, wind rattling my windows woke me to another storm. Street sweepers were out with their straw brooms, trying to make the dust disappear even as it swirled and settled on top of them.

 

Decidedly less of a global calamity, The springtime fashion sweeping Chengde's sidewalks also keeps me guessing, and wondering if I should just stay inside. It's a tragic fact that I cannot wear my flip-flops ("slippers," as they're known here) outside the apartment. They're considered house shoes, and honestly bare feet after an afternoon on the town are too filthy to describe. This rule I understand, but others are more difficult to decipher.

 

It seems your legs should always be covered, in some fallacious show of modesty. Evidence suggests it would be perceived as scandalous if I wore shorts around town with my bare white legs showing, yet women can wear shimmery dresses that barely cover their (small, flat) butts, with sheer black tights and high heels. I see them wearing dresses cut similarly to halters or strapless dresses that I own, but I know I couldn't wear the same dresses without repercussion.

As a woman who didn't develop beyond knees and elbows until I was nearly 17 years old, I finally feel some empathy for those "early bloomers" trying desperately to cover their extra, curvy flesh in front of their girlish peers. Except I'm trying to feign modesty in front of 30-year-old women who can wear sheer tights and sequins and look more like a 5-year-old in a dance recital than a soliciting trollop. Exasperated, I default to jeans and old Houghton softball shirts, pretending I, too, can still pull off the sweetly pre-pubescent look. 

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Window Clings

For the past five years, my mother has kept me in window clings. Every college dorm or old apartment window donned pumpkins at Halloween, Santa and snowmen at Christmas, and turkeys in between. Currently, chickens and bunnies on my kitchen window proclaim spring. It seems small, but my mom's window clings and the boxes they come in—full of local newspaper clips and American snacks—make me the grudging object of envy among fellow vagabonds. "Your mom is so cute," they always say. I know what they mean. My mom is the best.

 

She worries about me, but in a practical, hands-off way, shaking her head and saying prayers (and sending provisions) while I traipse around the world. She did contact a family friend who occasionally does business in China to ask him to check up on me when he's "in the neighborhood" of a country with 400 million people. Against all odds, she's convinced my father—whose words around this time last year were, "CHINA? Why on earth would anyone want to go to China?"—to spend ten days here with me before I go home next month.

 

I think my mom would be impressed with the women I've encountered this year: A Tibetan nun in India, who called me "teacher" but treated me like a daughter, pumping me full of rice, vegetables and cookies, insisting that I borrow her gloves for my eternally frigid hands, and grinding up my food poisoning medicine with concerned, motherly diligence; My student's mother, who keeps her cell-phone dictionary on hand solely to translate the names of the food she's sending me home with, who forecasts the weather for me and admonishes me to wear more clothes when it's chilly, who gave me a bottle of cough medicine and the classic Chinese prescription to "have a good rest" when I was sick.

 

In addition to my mother's care stretching across the Pacific, and all the willing proxies I've encountered abroad, so many women have filled a maternal role this year. My aunts sent me prayer-filled Christmas cards (and one pesky glitter-filled card, whose remnants are still being swept up) and the right words at just the right time. My sisters provided books, pictures and even a Christmas tree. My bosses are wide-eyed at the amount of mail I receive from someone as "distant" as my brother-in-law's grandmother.

 

No matter how independent we are, we always appreciate being taken care of. Window clings from America and flimsy black gloves from India remind me that good mothers are everywhere, and it's a good thing.

 

Happy Mother's Day!

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Qingdao

On the slowest trains in China, there are no trash receptacles, the squat toilet usually has a lifetime of stains, disguised only by the fresh ones on top of them, and, like pre-smoking-ban bars, there's no way to emerge from them without smelling like an ashtray. The next class of trains uses washable seat covers and offers a tin plate for accumulated trash. Finally, the luxurious new fast trains are more comfortable than airplanes, with adjustable seats, a free bottle of water, and music that, mercifully, isn't the annoying, easily downloadable tune that everyone uses as their cell phone ring-back.

 

Traveling to Qingdao and back last weekend, I experienced all three carriers, and was amused to note that the passengers don't really differ—they just behave differently depending on the setting. On slow trains, they spit sunflower seed shells on the table or the floor. Disgusting, maybe. But someone has decided riders on the slow train aren't civilized enough to use receptacles. The same seed devourers on the fast trains gingerly place their seeds in their own personal trash bag, supplied on the train.

 

Of course, in all three settings no one feels compelled to stand in a line when entering or departing. Crushed in the huddle for the train back to Beijing, I mused about my earliest lessons in "waiting your turn." I remembered my line buddy in kindergarten, a kid named Jeffery who picked his nose and was obsessed with singing "Take me out to the Ballgame." Fortunately, he moved away. But while he remained, I was trained to stand still next to him come hell or high water. I've seen the kids lined up in neat little rows at the primary school near my apartment, but as bodies swirled around me, pulling my backpack one way and my camera bag the other, leaving me stranded in the middle, I had to wonder if behind closed doors they don't give their kids lessons in throwing elbows as well as waiting patiently. There are some things I won't miss.

 

Chinese people have an uncanny ability to fall asleep instantly, almost anywhere. I admire and slightly resent them for this trait. I always notice babies and toddlers being lugged around in the most uncomfortable positions, bundled and resting on their mothers' arms, being jostled about through busses and train stations, or even hiking mountains. As I tried to contort myself a million different ways to sleep sitting up on the train home, I observed fellow passengers hunched over luggage in the aisle, or sitting on a stool with their head in a fellow traveler's lap, that traveler draped on top of the unconscious torso of their companion. I wondered sleepily about the benefits of sprawling out in car seats and strollers as a baby. Perhaps I was robbed of this basic instinct to become unconscious at will, regardless of spatial realities.

 

Our hostel in Qingdao was built in China's first observatory, an interesting, narrow building with a rooftop terrace and a huge telescope next to the bar (I shudder to think about the demoralizing things that telescope has suffered at the hands of intoxicated expats.) I traveled with Daisy, my student from last fall. Now, hostels are a scary concept for many people who haven't stayed in them—those of us who frequent them know they can be a blast, even if you do room with the occasional weirdo or the jerk who insists upon turning on the lights when they stumble in at two a.m., or stumble out at six. But for Chinese girls like Daisy, the fact that a foreign man slept in the bed next to her is almost too much to stomach. Even though he slept with his shirt off, she somehow hadn't noticed it was a guy until I told her later. A 28-year-old woman who took a day trip with us to Mount Laoshan was so shocked that she was sharing a room with some foreign men, she was thinking about staying at a different hotel.

 

The 2008 Olympic sailing competition was held in Qingdao, and it is rated one of the best places to live in China. While it doesn't escape the smoggy plague of most large cities (The Haier electronics factory is—proudly—stationed here) it is overall a pleasant city. Laoshan and the parks and streets within the city itself where covered with the pink and white blossoms of late spring. Dozens of couples taking wedding photos (formal photo shoots that happen with many matching costumes and cheesy poses, long before the wedding takes place) filled the parks and beaches. Germans occupied the city for a time, introducing beer and German architecture. The structures around the sea thus have a unique heritage, and one of the most popular beers in China is still brewed here.

 

The people were unbelievably friendly, which Daisy could not get over. She would ask someone for directions, and if they said our destination was five blocks down on the left, she would walk two blocks and check with someone else just to make sure we were still going the right direction. When we arrived at the turn, she would again ask, just to be sure, that we should turn left. Every time she spoke to someone, she would return to me wide-eyed and smiling. "These people are so nice!" She shook her head every time. I don't know if she ever needed directions—it was more of a social experiment, to see if 100% of the sampled population truly would answer her questions. After talking to an especially handsome man in a nice suit, she skipped over to me and remarked, "Ah! I am going to marry a man from this province!" 

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