我会想中国 (I Will Miss China)

I’m writing this in the Beijing Airport, reclining on a considerately provided chaise lounge and watching the planes take off.  I only have six hours left in China. Time to count my blessings (and, thanks to my long layover, link them to other posts!)

:

1.       The food (Good job, Medieval Sister, you guessed it right.  I was considering switching the order just to prove you wrong but then decided I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO).  There’s not much I can say other than that everything is delicious, fresh, healty-ish, and cheap.  Expensive meals cost two or three dollars.  My usual dinner, dessert included, cost around $1.50. 

I also enjoyed that I could walk into a restaurant and say “I want carrots, squash, and tofu!”, even if there was no such thing on the menu.    

2.       The scenery.  Guilin is gorgeous.  I’ve discussed the mountains and rivers at length already on this blog, so I’ll contain myself.

3.       My class.  The Chinese method of going to every class with the same group of people may feel sort of elementary school-ish, but it also fosters really close friendships with your classmates.  Friday was my last day at Guangxi Normal University.  To celebrate, the class monitor bought a cake with my name on it, another student brought two bottles of Coca Cola (my name), and we all took pictures with each other as one of the Vietnamese girls wrote farewell notes on her country’s currency.  I’ll miss ‘em!

4.       This blog.  Is this narcissistic?  I don’t know.   But I really enjoyed blogging about China. 

5.       The Chinese people.   Or, really, only some of the Chinese people; maybe just a few of them.  My interactions with the locals tended overwhelming towards the awkward/frustrating, but sometimes I met people who were really open, interesting, opinionated, and able to understand my American accent.  These conversations were extremely rewarding.

6.       The other students.  Last semester I studied with 30 Americans and that was interesting because I learned all about different kinds of college life in the United States.  This semester, though, I was the only one from the USA; my classmates came from Poland, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar, and my network of acquaintances included citizens of Mexico, Estonia, Costa Rica, Kyrgyzstan, and Chile.  Talking to them about their lives and motivations for studying Chinese was fascinating.  For example, I didn’t even know they had schools in Myanmar.          

7.       The excitement.  I have no idea what’s going to happen on any given day.  I might have a midterm exam, I might go on a day trip, it might rain and I might be fired.  A good symbol of this unpredictability, and the suspense that goes with it, is the elevator in my building.  Over four months, I have seen the following things in the elevator: a bunch of toddlers with no adults, a family with a bunch of balloons, trash, suspicious puddles of liquids, two people on bicycles, and a woman on a rumbling motorcycle.

This excitement is also stressful and tiring.  I’m ready for several weeks of predictability.

8.       The Porno Gym.  I could never forget you.

9.        The prices.  Most things are so cheap in China.  If you lock yourself out of the bathroom in the middle of the night, it’s nice that you can have a locksmith come and open it for you for $4.

10.   The invincibility.  I can do whatever weird things I want here and just offer as an explanation “I’m a foreigner/American.”  If I forget my umbrella and come to school soaking wet, it’s not because I’m absentminded; it’s because that’s what Americans do.  I may have left several Chinese people with skewed views on American culture, but I saved a lot of face.  Which is all that matters.

Whew, I made it to 10!  I really am going to miss China (as opposed to last semester, when I would have happily forgone a second semester abroad to return to ASU or work in a coal mine), and I look forward to coming back soon and often.

 If I had fully absorbed Chinese culture I would now reference a poem from the Tang Dynasty about flowers or bird or rain, but I haven’t, so I’ll sign off with a quote from A Far Off Place by Laurens Van Der Post (a book that avid readers of this blog with remember I already recommended): 

"The beauty invested in all, even the most trivial of things, when one believes oneself to be looking on them for the last time, overwhelmed him."