New China Experience

Now that I'm back from seven months in China, and have been ever since school started mid-August, any new China experiences are emotional ones through the rear-view mirror of memory. On Monday, I was walking down the street and saw an Asian couple zooming by me on one of those popular motorized scooters. The guy was in front, the girl was clutching onto him from behind. Something about the way she was latched onto him reminded me of how in China it's popular for the girl to hold a guy's arm above the elbow, so you can feel his bicep. And then I missed China for the first time.

Sure, I've thought of China often since I've been back, but I've been so guarded that every time I think of China I first steel myself for the challenges I faced there. Wow. As I typed that last sentence I noticed that it's really similar to something I wrote in my journal when my family first moved to Florida. My journal is back in Orlando, but it went like this. "Transition is when you accept that there's good and bad where you are and where you were." A few days or weeks after you move, your mind pitches your old home against your new home in a war, and there's a whole period of transition in which your mind ensures that your old home wins. I'm in a weird place because I don't know whether to call America my "new" or "old" home. It's my most recent one, but also my most distant one. My reaction so far to coming back, strangely enough, has been as if I've just moved to China! I'm fiercely protective of how hard China is to live in for a foreigner and how easy and rewarding American life is in comparison. But you're not really moved until you have the ability to miss both.

So I think it's a really important step for me to start missing China. It's not a logical decision: my little experience shows that! I mean, who sees a Korean couple on a motorbike and thinks, oh, that reminds me of the way they hold hands in China. And then who misses that? I mean, one of my friends from Beijing recently reminisced about the restaurant we used to go to almost every day after class. That would be something I would think I would miss: good food, a routine, daily feelings of success in ordering, good friends. But when she mentioned it, I only remembered the time in a shallow way. I remembered that it had been fun, but I didn't experience it again in mind, I didn't re-live it. That's what missing is: the disconnect between living and re-living the good times.

I wonder if the arm-grabbing gesture was something located in my mind really far from all the difficulties of being in China. I can feel someone holding my arm that way, but I can't think of who it was or when. I think once or twice when I went out to eat with my Chinese family, my Chinese mom would hold onto me like that, the same way women would if a guy was holding an umbrella, only I didn't have an umbrella.

I feel wary of letting myself miss China, because from there it seems a hop, skip, and a jump away from wanting to do it again, and I don't want to do it again. I've relied on the tension between my fluency in America and my insufficiency in China to maintain my need to say, "It is finished", but the tension isn't just an abstract one. I'm tense from it. I've been tense all semester; that's why I'm down to twelve credits. I can't handle any more stress because I'm already stressed figuring out where my life is going as it relates to the last seven months of my life.

But now maybe the pressure is starting to drain as I learn to miss China.