Growing

My first thought was that not much has changed. My friend’s dad responded to this observation with, “Well, we’re all ten months older,” which seemed to be about it. But I’m starting to notice a few things. Pop’s gone so country that Jaron of Evan & Jaron is praying for tragedy to strike his ex-girlfriend. Country’s gone so pop, Reba is covering Beyonce. I saw Toy Story 3 in 3D, which blew my mind. Also, I get to drive past Des Moines Golf and Country Club every day, and for the first summer in three years I’m not serving drinks there. Yeah, unemployment makes me feel so grown up.

I’m daily amazed by how flat and open my home state is, how the blue sky goes on for miles and the stars are all visible at night. A while ago, Jason and I used Google street view to show Des Moines to a Chinese student. Wide-eyed as we showed him our former houses and favorite parks around the city, he said, “Wow, America must be like one big garden!” Drawing the distinction between “America” and “Iowa” for the millionth time, I conceded that there is a lot of green space in Iowa. Seeing it now, in contrast to “gardens” built on top of cement in my Chengde neighborhood, I understand why what he saw was so fascinating. Des Moines just has so much grass growing everywhere, shrubs and flowers wherever they’ll fit.

Of course, how and where things grew was my dad’s primary concern—well, secondary concern, after navigating chopsticks. My parents spent ten days with me in China before we flew home last week. I packed the schedule with as much must-see China Stuff as possible, from Shanghai to Xi’an to Beijing to Chengde. Me taking charge was an interesting role reversal for all three of us. I planned, I booked hostels, I mapped bus routes… I stressed.

And in the same way that a parent is really proud of a nice gift, and the child is more interested in the huge cardboard box it came in, they derived the most pleasure from things I hadn’t counted on, like our bus driver’s road rage battle with an eighteen-wheeler (wahoo, China!) and, would you believe, the fact that the Chinese grow corn in the mountains. It’s true, folks. All these years Iowans thought we had a monopoly on putting corn everywhere. But in dry, mountainous Hebei province, corn is growing out of cliffs and valleys at every turn, water and constant sunshine be damned.

And, er, speaking of sunshine be damned (forgive me for compressing three blogs into one), I have formally accepted a position working for the Seattle Red Cross, beginning at the end of August. My official title is “Capacity Building Grant Coordinator.” I’ll be doing a combination of research, grant requesting, and conducting interviews with people the Red Cross has helped so I can write those heart-wrenching stories that make people want to donate money. The position is through Americorps, so I can continue my streak of being moderately impoverished but satisfied with my job. Thankfully, I have the awesome opportunity to live with my brother and sister-in-law and their two little boys, just a couple miles from work! Rumor has it I’m paying rent in dishwashing.

Going

Until a mishap stopped me in my muddy bike tracks yesterday, I hadn't stopped moving since I woke up last Thursday. My student's mom and her sister taught Jason and me how to make dumplings and a couple of other dishes. After lunch, I set to cleaning my apartment slowly and steadily, with Rosie's help/moral support. Including breaks for mixing cocktails, it was an all-day event.
 
Friday, Mr. Lei took us to Sledge Hammer Hill, a prominent feature of Chengde's surrounding landscape that looks more than a little phallic. Appropriately, touching it is supposed to add years to your life. Army crawling through the cave in nearby Frog Crag, which we did, is supposed to make your immune to disease. So, I will live forever and never get sick.
 
After a farewell feast with Mr. Lei, I gave my last batch of finals. Highlight: Two girls worked a dialogue about how much they love me and my beautiful smile into their final presentation (suck-ups, I know! But it was sweet.) Low Point: In my final act as a teacher, I had to tell a boy he's lucky I'm not failing him--only because I'm not allowed to--because he slacked off all year and then failed to prepare a final presentation.
 
I hunted down Chengde's foreign liquor supply, a shop curiously connected to an elementary school on a leafy side street, to buy Cuervo for my farewell fiesta. I went home to email information to the Seattle Red Cross (my future employer!), organized my apartment, packed a bag and headed to la fiesta. I even slept in a hurry, and left Chengde at 5:45 a.m. I spent the afternoon in Beijing with Daisy, and took off on the overnight train to Guilin at 4 p.m., plummeting forward as I read Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which suited my pace, and convinced me that moving is the only thing to do, really. I plowed forward even as I slept.
 
Within an hour of arriving in Guilin, I hopped a bus to Longsheng, where I missed a connection by five minutes, crashed in an ugly hotel reluctantly recommended by Lonely Planet at a last resort if you end up overnighting in this "decidedly ugly" town. The showerhead was positioned directly over the squat toilet, the whole place precariously perched above a coursing, muddy river. It's always raining down here, strange to see rivers with water after a year in the dust-stormy north.
 
Up early, I caught a bus away from decidedly ugly into arguably the most fascinating manipulation of landscape humans have ever pulled off, the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces in Longji. There I spent some of the best few hours of hiking, through soggy mountains of muddy, shimmering pools, little waterfalls pouring into the pools below all the way to the bottom, the water and me in constant motion.
 
Busses. Back to Longsheng, to Guilin, to Yangshuo. I walked 90 minutes in the twilight to my current dwelling at Yangshuo Outside Inn, past several tiny villages, amid perhaps the most interesting landscape on earth. Towering limestone peaks covered with greenery, grown up from shifts in land otherwise as flat as Nebraska. So I walked and walked and walked, slept, and leapt out of bed to rent a bike and traverse the countryside. Thursday to Tuesday, I barely stopped to eat and sleep.
 
It started sprinking as I left the hostel on my brand new Giant mountain bike, the Crayola color of burnt sienna, accented with deep maroon. A beautiful bike. Soon it was pouring. I hate to turn around, and I hadn't stopped yet, so I plowed on--almost Chinese as I futilely held my umbrella with one hand, navigating puddles and sharp rocks with the other.
 
I biked all day, stopping only for lunch under a tent restaurant during a hard downpour. The proprietor's child was curious about me. She also had a huge glob of thick green snot under one nostril, and while her mother smacked her hands and arms repeatedly for unseen offenses, she never wiped her nose. The little girl seemed as unphased by the beatings as her mother was by the snot globule. I sat until I could sit no more, and rode to visit a cave.
 
Foolishly, I assumed two things. 1: Caves are natural wonders. 2: It doesn't rain in caves. China sometimes has a way of taking naturally beautiful places and exploiting them in the tackiest possible way. So this cave's stalag-tites and -mites are lit up like a Saturday night disco, and photography teams take portraits and show them on computer screens--inside the cave--like it's Adventureland or something. Also, I had to pull out my umbrella a few times to dodge the dripping roof.
 
I tried to loop back to the hostel, but some conman  (or maybe he was legit, but it was a scam regardless) wanted to charge me to bike through his "historic village" situated conveniently on the main path. I hated the idea of just going back the way I came (why? why?) so I turned and took a side road from the village, going going going as the path tapered into more of a stream, until I was walking my bike on a narrow stretch that wasn't actually a path at all. I wouldn't turn around, because I was at the river and knew my hostel was just across the water, if only I could find a bridge. And I wasn't about to stop moving now.
 
But I looked back and realized my umbrella was gone. I'd rigged it over my basket to cover my camera bag. My heart sank--the umbrella was given to me by a sweet couple from California on Easter Sunday at the Vatican in 2008, when they noticed me next to them, umbrella-less and soaked to the bone. Since receiving that umbrella, I've never forgotten it on rainy days. So, finally, I turned around even knowing there was no chance it hadn't been claimed by the next passerby.
 
Here I am, frantically peddling up muddy, rocky slopes in the most beautiful place in China (did I mention this? It's beautiful. No, really.) going and going because I don't want to stop going. At once, it starts to sprinkle again, and I hear a dooming metal-on-rock sound. scrape-scrape.
 
The back tire on my brand new, burnt sienna Giant mountain bike is completely flat. And of course it starts to rain harder. This bike is really heavy, so I can carry it about seven steps before dropping it in a puddle. Going the long way around, the only way I know how to get back to the hostel, I figure it will take me approximately the rest of the week. I wanted to cry. Or maybe I did. In the rain, who can tell?
 
Two guys passed on their motorcycles before a skinny little man in an army surplus jacket took pity on me. He surveyed the situation, shook his head slowly and chuckled a little, and finally made a phone call to a bike repairman. I tried to communicate that I'd like to call the hostel, but eventually just plopped down on a rock to wait. If there's one thing I have learned this year, it's that things just happen in China, at a pace and through a method that I haven't yet managed to grasp. Usually, the thing to do is be still and wait anywhere from 60 minutes to 60 days longer than I imagine a thing should take. And so I did. Finally stopped after five days of going, I surrendered to the situation.
 
My rescuer was kind, but couldn't hide his amusement at my situation. I took off my shoes to ring out my muddy socks. He grinned and shook his head some more. Don't you have an umbrella? Mei you. He shook his head. Slowly, to rub it in. Then he pointed to the bike and shook his head grimly some more. The repairman was an hour arriving.
 
He found no fewer than five holes in the tube (how?) and I finally did call the hostel manager to negotiate the price of a new tube. (He found the holes or he made them?" she sighed in typical ex-pat fashion.) After a few more calls, the mechanic left, came back with the tire, and had it fixed up in three minutes. He also donated his old poncho to me for the ride back.
 
My savior squatted under a nearby roof, shaking his head still at the turn his afternoon had taken. And, again, I went.

---

The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. Get started.

"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. 

---

The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail. Get busy.

"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.

---

The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. Get started.

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. 

---

Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. See how.

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!

---

Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. See how.

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!" 

---

Hotmail has tools for the New Busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. Learn more.