WRITING

Maybe it was turning thirty that pushed me over the edge. Maybe being overworked and underpaid felt less forgivable than when I was in my twenties, brazen and broke. Perhaps I felt like the world had humored the trail of cities and jobs and love interests left in my wake before but was now requiring something more age appropriate. But thirty found me single, on a month-to-month lease, and with ovaries that were in no way aching to perform. My job had been the only thing tethering me to one spot and leaving it meant starting over, yet again. I could remember what that had looked like in my early twenties- the drunken celebrations and packing parties and Ikea furniture left out on the curb- but what’s enchanting at twenty-three often appears tragic at thirty-plus. I had to physically distance myself from all the choking expectation if I were to have any chance of deciphering what I actually wanted next. That was as far as the plan had progressed by the time I found myself driving away from Baltimore, alone and with no destination. At best, I was leaving behind options I didn’t like; at worst, this was the most pointless and self-indulgent thing I had done to date. An invisible pull kept my foot on the gas as the silence settled around me. A trunk filled with peanut butter, a few weeks’ worth of canned tuna and only several outfits was tangible proof that something was indeed underway. I scanned the radio then quickly turned it off to focus on my breathing, my eyes set on the road stretching out ahead.

The first night out on the road pummeled my bohemian wanderlust like a sledgehammer. Monsoon-like rain drowned out the flashing hazards of surrounding cars as the wind battered and shoved me at will over the rumble strip. I persisted for an hour before surrendering my pride, and one hundred dollars, to the only “budget” motel within miles in a town called Bethlehem (an irony I would only appreciate in hindsight). I attempted to stay positive, hoarding all of the toiletries and resolving that I would fill my backpack with the contents of next morning’s continental breakfast. Too tired and defeated to even enjoy the hundreds of brain-rotting channels, I drifted to sleep with only one thought in my head: What in the fuck was I doing?

With any semblance of an agenda gone I devoted my time to covering ground, and lots of it. Clueless to the fact that this directionless drive would eventually take me across the country, I first headed north. Through a festival of toll booths I made my way from weathered waterfront towns of Connecticut, across saturated green hills into the bluest skies of Vermont. I didn’t know what I was searching for, but I knew that I had time on my hands, and would maybe figure it out along the way. I dissected my first lobster in Maine and biked through the streets of Salem at night, the wind carrying souls of the wrongfully accused underneath the glow of street lamps. I inhaled familiar scents and sights in places foreign to me: bedraggled mannequins in stale thrift store windows, dusty book shops crammed with wisdom aching to be uncovered, dimly lit bars packed with fishermen slugging beers and talking in loud, salty voices. I was enchanted by what I saw and who I could so suddenly become some few hundred miles from home: a stranger; a visitor; a student of new realities. I wandered into unfamiliar towns knowing no one, crumpled maps and visitor center pamphlets my reliable tour guides. As I talked to people there was little foundation of shared experience, and no supposed goal of building a friendship; it was likely that we would never meet again, and the moments felt authentic if fleeting. When asked what I was doing on this trip, my answer varied slightly each time. The only answer that seemed to resonate with what I was actually feeling was, “I don’t really know.”

The initial loss of purpose was palpable and seeped into my decision making whether I wanted it to or not. I had never enjoyed following a schedule but it was somehow ingrained in me. “What did you DO today?” and even more troubling, “What will you do when this is all over?” The nagging questions waded around in my subconscious. I made unspoken to-do lists: See the Grand Canyon. Have coffee at Café Allegro. Hike the Tetons. My baffling sense of direction ensured that I got hopelessly lost with some regularity, only it didn’t matter. After all, when you have nowhere to be, you’re never late. A few weeks in, one of my couchsurfing hosts in a tiny Massachusetts town gifted me an old GPS. It was slow, and often wrong, but as my direction up until then had consisted of google maps routes scrawled on the backs of old receipts, this marked a crucial moment in my trip.

As I meandered south down the east coast before beginning the drive cross-country, I started to get my rhythm. Until then I had relied on the kindness of strangers to settle down for the night, but the freedom of spontaneity quickly took precedence. I grew accustomed to sleeping in the car, driver’s seat reclined, under the glow of streetlamps and 24-hour neon signs.  Broken sleeping bag as a blanket and legs propped up above the steering wheel, my setup left something to be desired, but much repetition convinced my body that this was just the way a person sleeps. I woke with the sun, put on some ten-times-worn shirt, and went out into the world. The simplicity was exhilarating. I brushed my teeth in parking lots; applied eyeliner in the rear view mirror after fourteen hours of driving before stopping for a beer; flew through sprawling deserts with the gas light on hoping like fucking hell to encounter a rest stop. I slipped in through hotel lobbies to swim in their pools, then washed my hair in their bathroom sinks. Free shit and the freedom to make rash decisions were my hard drugs, and I was living a Kerouacian dream.

An older man in Nashville quizzed me on my knowledge of the band performing in the bar one particular night. The lead singer was one of the Allman brothers, and no, I definitely hadn’t known that. When he asked how I wound up there and I told him of my trip, he commended me for taking the excursion alone, something that “too few people do anymore.” On his way out of the bar he shook my hand and slipped me a “small contribution to the road trip fund” which I tried politely to refuse, and looked at only after he had gone: two crisp, hundred dollar bills. I designated the small fortune as beer money, having gone too far down the rabbit hole of “roughing it” to turn my sights towards hostels now. Later that week in Little Rock, Arkansas I pitched a two-person tent on my own for the first time ever. Sweat pouring down my neck in the 90-degree heat, I set up my accommodation for the night: a sleeping bag sprawled atop a yoga mat, and a recently acquired bottle of Nashville bourbon within arm’s reach. The comfort of my air conditioned car sat just yards away, but I hunkered down in the still air of my tent in an act of defiance; against whom, I am not certain. But at the time crews of imaginary men, laughing arrogantly in the back of my mind and doubting my survival skills, kept me perspiring in the woods until morning.

I shot my first bow and arrow outside Santa Fe, with some guys attending what turned out to be a group camping trip for Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a bull’s-eye. “Holy shit, do it again!” they screamed, at which I misfired straight up in the air and lost their arrow in the Rio Grande. I decided the next night to make the seven hour drive to the Grand Canyon, so that I could witness it for the very first time at sunrise. I barreled through a lightning storm in the flat sprawl of Arizona, my car the tallest object for miles. Scared shitless and hunched over the wheel, I made peace with the idea of a bolt through the windshield rendering me brain dead.

The southwest had me crawling through eerie ghost towns to find the single operational gas station, prices jacked up two dollars a gallon higher than the rest of the country. None of the restroom doors closed properly, and the mirrors above the sinks had been pried off their mountings as if to discourage patrons from lingering. Not an issue, folks. The watercolor sunset over the Mojave Desert darkened to an inky night sky, the blackness so menacing it threatened to suck me in from the dimly lit two-lane highway. Nobody even knew I was there, and the thought at once terrified and liberated me.

All of the time spent alone with nature was changing something chemically inside me, and my brazenness swelled with each test of my physical and mental stamina. I skidded down paths into the Grand Canyon in shoes whose traction was but a distant memory. I took wrong turns on trails in Zion National Park and turned a hike of five miles into eleven. Dangerously low on water I staggered back in the blistering sun, singing to myself “You’re thirsty, but you’re fine!” to quell the panic. I took in views from the peaks of Yosemite that I felt pretty sure I was unworthy of witnessing. The Oregon coast felt like a magical kingdom that I am fairly certain, if I were to return, would have vanished into thin air leaving only a glimmering breeze behind. Majestic mountain ranges in Wyoming still drift through the back of my mind like long lost friends.

I felt like the absolute monarch of my own existence. My chariot: a Nissan Sentra with cigarette holes in the upholstery and a partial rear hubcap. My domain: the potholed back roads and sprawling black interstates where fast food signs kept time to the slowly stretching hours. My sense of self-empowerment was inversely related to my appearance, a confidence bubbling up from within with each outfit repeated and shower skipped. My lack of smart phone had me snapping photos with a disposable camera which, upon discovering its 2006 expiration date halfway through my trip, left me feeling like some gross exaggeration of a hipster. There were no photos to exhibit most of what I had taken in, and my eyes twinkled with the delicious secrets of memories that saturated my brain.

On one particular drive through Utah I was hit with a feeling of completeness so overwhelming that I started to cry. Not a pretty, single tear rolling down a rosy cheek sort of crying, but a heavy sobbing grasping me from the gut. I cried out of a sense of sheer joy and fulfillment, and feeling so humbled and grateful for all that is out there to embrace. Sitting in the midst of scenes so grandiose and powerful, just a speck of matter rendered speechless by what I was taking in, I suddenly found the search for answers so irrelevant. I suppose I had set out hoping for some glimmer of inspiration on what to do next with my life, but I was instead discovering all that I didn’t need in order to live. What to “do next” became an invigorating riddle; the vastness of what I was seeing made me feel ashamed for ever having doubted what lies out there for anyone willing to go find it. As I have never been able to meditate for long without falling asleep, I was as of yet unfamiliar with the sensation of Nirvana…but this felt like transcendence.

If my months of solitude on the open road were like floating through a daydream, then returning to the clamor of a city was like being awakened with a taser. The old comforts hardly felt comfortable- the upheaval begged to continue. Back in my original setting, the inclination to begin filling time with all the “should’s” flashed like a warning signal in my mind. Something had expanded inside of me, and it was refusing to be ignored- nagged at me as I bought my coffee or texted about weekend plans.  In place of answers I had been left with an even bigger question than I had ever allowed myself to ask; a wondrous, insatiable curiosity for the world that defied obedience to any one path. I still had no idea what was next; all I did know was that my world view had permanently shifted, and falling back on the familiar felt like a betrayal of what I had just glimpsed. There was only room for more exploration. My mental checklist of elements to compose a fulfilling life had been upended, or maybe dissolved altogether. My desire for answers gave way to a thirst for more questions; a gnawing hunger for what I had yet to learn, to realize, to perceive. What exactly that meant for my future, I had yet to decipher. But then again, at least in my experience, that’s how something truly remarkable begins.

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In spite of all the anticipation for my big move abroad, it was the culture I returned home to that left me shell shocked. A rift grew between myself and all that was familiar as I made myself at home to a new way of eating, speaking, and being, and for that change, I was completely unprepared. The initial excitement and despair of family and friends over my departure was just the honeymoon phase in a slow devolution of fading general interest. Years ago everyone gathered to bid me farewell under a “Bon Voyage” sign written in Chinese. They showered me with journals, photo albums and guide books to various cities in China. I prepared a meal of “authentic” Chinese food, including homemade fortune cookies. It was something new and exciting that no one else had experienced—China was a novelty. When it became evident that I was staying longer than expected and building an actual life the Far East, the novelty wore off.

What I experienced in China at first made for entertaining mass emails and amusing stories (Babies in split pants! People napping, everywhere!), but over time these became barriers for relating to people back home. The longer I stayed, the less bizarre the way of living in China became to me—my point of view switched from that of a detached onlooker to that of a resident. The irony was that my lifestyle abroad and that of my friends back home had the same general outline: search for an apartment, find a job, build relationships, earn enough money to maintain all of the above and still have a fulfilling social life. But for those living abroad, the unspoken knowledge that the overseas world would at some point come to an end gave those living there the air of college student rather than citizen of the big, scary “real world.”  We lived with a sense of urgency and purpose reserved for those diagnosed with a terminal illness, driven by equal parts ambition and fear of the inevitable.

People back home continued on what I assume was the natural track for most: graduate from college, find a job, get an apartment, create a life in the place of your choice. Put down roots. They established friend groups, discovered their favorite bars, and dated in hopes of finding “The One.” Meanwhile the overseas crowd apartment hopped, switched cities, changed jobs frequently and changed partners even more frequently. We drank, spent, traveled and experienced life in excess. We had our cake and ate it too, hoarding all of the necessary elements for a happy life while completely avoiding the grounding ball-and-chain of any particular person or place. We joyously surrendered to and supported the group-think that this was the way to live.

The reactions of those living abroad in regards to the types of lives their friends were living back home varied, but most came in the flavor of relief (“Everyone back home is getting married/ hating their job. I’m so glad I’m not a part of that world”) tainted with a little bit of fear (“All my friends have been on a career path for years while I’ve been here. Where the hell will I ever get hired?”) This paired with a general feeling of longing and guilt for having left so many people behind is what inevitably brought most overseas worlds to an end.

On trips home when I found myself integrating with those in my former world, both parties had a hard time even knowing where to start. The questions asked about my stint abroad ranged from vague to nonexistent. “So…how’s China?” This question, presumably well-intentioned, only served to increase the palpable distance between the speaker and myself. “What was your favorite food?” Their feigned interest proved difficult to maintain, as they were then left bored and speechless by the unrelatable details of my favorite fried noodle vendor who looked like he was twelve. As years went on and I answered this question more and more frequently, I tried to craft the perfect cocktail of interesting and relevant points to respond with something they would actually listen to. I grew to realize that this was a difficult task. In earlier days I would naively pour out information about my job and travel and my quaint little neighborhood (where my landlord was batshit but the rent was so cheap!) before realizing that I was going about this all wrong. The reality of my life abroad was that I was extremely happy and experiencing new things every day. That’s not something that an audience of people in the midst of an economic collapse wanted to hear. These people were on hard times and they wanted to hear about some weird shit. Part of me wanted to play the role of jester and respond with something that fed into their preconceived notions of China: “I ride a rickshaw to work and sustain myself on a steady diet of cholera water and dog meat.” It was tough to find a balance between what was accurate and what was interesting without being a smartass. But what I came to know for certain was that the plain and simple truth just wasn’t gonna cut it.

Whenever a citizen of the overseas community would make the announcement of deciding to move back home, I couldn’t help but feel like they were admitting to a downgrade in their life. The announcement took on the tone of an adulterous husband breaking ties with his mistress: “It’s just time. It’s the right thing to do.” The sparkle in someone’s eyes when first talking about moving abroad was in stark contrast to the look of faded enthusiasm, the shrug of the shoulders, the dutiful decision gently stated… “I think I need to go home.” Where home was exactly, we were no longer sure. Most making this statement were referring to the place where their family was, their birthplace, or wherever the largest number of friends had decided to congregate. This move was treated as the final and necessary step in the saga of their life abroad. But why? Did people living back home anticipate the same sort of inevitable transition ahead of them in which they would be forced to pick up and start over somewhere else? And why did this existence in which we had secured friendships, gone to work every day, paid bills, and (for some) picked up a new language somehow not feel as “real” as what people in our native countries were living? Undoubtedly living in China was cheaper. And it’s true that despite years of hard work and saving, the Chinese currency continued to feel more like play money, and the thought of spending it seemed far less daunting than ever having to part with US dollars.  One could also say that finding employment abroad was much less complicated at that time, especially considering the economic crisis we had all cleverly ducked out of back home. But certainly life in China couldn’t be described as easier in general. A typical day was rife with language barriers, bizarre rules and regulations that were seemingly enforced or bypassed on a whim, navigating constant censorship online, and routine errands that were inexplicably made to be ten times more complicated than necessary (purchasing a vacuum in my first year in China required amounts of time and paperwork akin to adopting a child. There are probably countless suicide notes alluding to attempts at transferring money at the bank.) There were also the frequent reminders that, no matter how long your stay or how much this felt like home, you would never be one of them (a crotchety neighbor complaining loudly in Shanghainese about foreigners being rude and messy, when I interjected that I could understand her, replied— “That’s why I said it.”)

Despite all of the cultural roadblocks I ran into, the “culture shock” that I had mentally prepared for was not evident upon my arrival in China but it was abundant upon my first return home. The switch from riding a bike to driving a car was daunting and gave me nightmares of slaughtering innocent pedestrians. Paying four times the amount I normally would on a mediocre meal- in which I had to choose ONE dish rather than sharing eight with the group- left me baffled that anyone could afford living in this country. Being able to understand, without even trying, every single conversation going on around me made me realize how much I had normally been able to tune out when the language being spoken around me took effort to understand. Walking down the street felt like a scene from a bad Mel Gibson movie in which I could hear everyone’s thoughts, and the sound was overwhelming. Gazing into the kitchen pantry to try to figure out what to eat was like staring at a Rubik’s cube. I had seen all this before, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of how to build a meal without noodles or rice.

My entire concept of personal space and common courtesy had been turned on its head. The glares from people in line ahead of me at store counters at first seemed bizarre and unwarranted; until I would realize that I was standing mere inches from them. The shoving through crowds was something I found myself constantly apologizing for and the penchant for shouting “fuck!” in public areas would have to be exorcised from me. I was so accustomed to the majority of bystanders not understanding anything I said as long as it was in English. It was a convention and a comfort to which I had grown far too attached.

Another self-discovery, apparent only once I was taken outside of the context of urban China, was how incredibly blunt I had become. My manner of speaking and acting had been gradually dulled by years of witnessing public displays of outrage, aggression, and bathroom activities completed curbside with the same level of ease as if inside one’s private home. I no longer sugar-coated what I thought, and furthermore, the thought of doing so seemed ridiculous to me. Before moving to China I had understood the culture to uphold, above all else, the concept of “saving face”: don’t do anything to bring public shame upon another. I quickly grew to realize that, while the concept was prevalent in all aspects of life, the only face people were truly concerned with saving was their own. Shaped by a short lifetime of beholding people on the streets, raw and unabashed, just telling it (or yelling it) like it is had made me more brazen than I was even aware. I found myself looking into the faces of the people I was talking with to see quiet expressions of disbelief, discomfort, or hurt. I was apologizing far more than I ever had, but knew that the excuse of “I guess I’ve lived in China too long…” was somehow falling short. These types of encounters experienced in short snippets on visits back home filled me with dread of how I would ever find my way back into the world I used to know.

Suddenly in the end of my fifth year in China, I began to feel the stirrings in my brain of a person who longed for new excitement. China had become familiar, and I felt secure enough in our love affair to know that if I needed to spread my wings, China would always be there for me to return to. As the realization set in that this longing could only be satisfied by re-acclimating myself to the world I had left behind, no one was more shocked than I was. For all the following months of planning my gradual divorce from China, the actual transition came at me hard and fast. Six years of successes, hardships, adventures, love and heartache all vanished like a vivid dream as the plane I boarded left China in its dust. We descended smoothly into American skies as I continued my internal crash landing, having cried into my scratchy, sterile smelling airplane blanket the entire way home. I had returned. Just like that, it was all over.

Once home, the sensation of displaced refugee was difficult to justify to myself. Had I expected everyone close to me to cling to the details of my personal evolution like some white-knuckle thriller? It perhaps should have gone without saying that anyone who has not personally witnessed a child taking a crap on the street could not possibly appreciate the nuances of an expat’s love-hate relationship with China. People back home largely didn’t appreciate and, understandably, didn’t care that I missed being woken up by the shrieking of my neighborhood jian bing vendor, missed the 5am karaoke, missed the bad English t-shirts, missed my geriatric neighbor who was always in her underwear and kept me abreast of the building’s latest gossip. I continued to use that special blend of Chinglish  (this is so mafan/ that dude is making me very bu shufu), sometimes mistakenly to the wrong groups who didn’t know what I was saying, because some words in Chinese just conveyed the desired meaning so much better. I clung to memories of my alternate universe through others who shared my China experience and, for those of us fortunate enough to have had them, the friends who came to visit us and saw a glimpse of what kept us over there. To us, it was not a vacation, not a panicked attempt at delaying participation in the real world—it was our life. It was an entire era of relationships and possessions and personal discovery, and it all ended just as effortlessly and unceremoniously as the wheels hitting the tarmac on our final flight back home. The longing for a place in time that no longer existed would eventually subside as life propelled us forward, but China was our phantom limb, and the memory would always linger. We would carry on as though the change was not as daunting as we knew it to be, because having been to China and back, we could surely handle whatever new adventure was in store.

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It’s amazing how many near-death experiences can be squeezed into a two-hour stint within the confines of an elementary school in China. The most mundane, some might say instinctive, actions can have drastic consequences if not carried out correctly. Going down stairs, washing hands, walking across the room– all scenarios in which elders must enforce safety, whether it be for the child in their own care, or in the care of another ayi (the Chinese caretaker.)  Every movement of the child must be watched, and commented on, in order to ensure their survival. The extent to which these ayis hover over the children entrusted to them makes me wonder, are they more concerned with the child’s safety, or are they more concerned with appearing concerned?

Four days a week I had a front row seat to this spectacle at the kindergarten where I would attend classes with my employer’s daughter. At school the ayis put on a show for each other, engaging in an unspoken contest of who is more attentive with their employer’s child. Amateurs simply force their child to sit in their lap during any seated activity. More seasoned caretakers go to much greater lengths to prove their worth. The children under the watch of these women may as well have stayed home, as they won’t be getting any sort of learning experience on their own. Not on this ayi’s watch. When it’s time to clap, ayi grabs their hands to make them clap. When it’s time to eat, ayi all but chews their food for them. She places the child in his chair, pushes him up to the table, and proceeds to carefully deposit all the food or drink into the child’s mouth for him (all the while incessantly wiping his chin and constantly instructing him to chew slowly and drink carefully).

Any ascent or descent invites a whirlwind of comments on the proper way to use a staircase. Daredevil foreign kids who hop from one step to the next will quickly be intercepted by an ayi (not necessarily the one taking care of that particular child, mind you) who points out that by behaving so recklessly, they are endangering not only their own wellbeing, but also the wellbeing of every person around them. In most cases, the mother of the child is standing right beside them, and has clearly not found their child’s actions dangerous enough to be interrupted.

There is also a wrong way to wash your hands. Most children stand in a trance as their ayis do the washing for them: turning on the water, squirting the soap, rubbing their hands together, drying them off. This is the correct way. The wrong way goes something like this: a two-year-old attempts to go through these steps on her own, and gets water on her sleeves (where was the ayi to help roll up her sleeves?) This results in a gaggle of concerned ayis flocking to the poor, damp child and shoving paper towels up her sleeves to keep her arms dry. There is, of course, also a lecture in store for the neglectful mother.

The charges of the most attentive ayis have become so crippled in their ability to do anything that they fear even traveling across the classroom without an ayi’s hand to clutch.  The most traumatic event for one of these children is when the ayi excuses herself for a moment to run to the bathroom while the child is seemingly distracted by some activity. The scream-crying that erupts from the classroom upon the child noticing his ayi’s absence usually only lasts a few seconds before the frantic ayi flurries back in.

Foreign mothers and ayis generally make no attempt to talk to one another. During the slightly calmer snack portion of class, ayis congregate around the table of children eating to keep a constant watch as the mothers retreat to the back walls for a hard-earned chat with their girlfriends. The resentment was clear both from the ayis and the Chinese teachers, who delighted in any chance to scoop up the plate of a fumbling child or help push in a child’s chair, all while glancing at the negligent mothers talking amongst themselves. It was abundantly clear what was on the minds of the teachers and ayis: they were doing it right, and we Westerners had a lot to learn. And maybe, in a way, they were right.

In a crowded, competitive society in which children are taught from kindergarten to study hard in preparation for one big test at the end of high school which profoundly influences their higher education and career, perhaps the children allowed to learn from their own mistakes and think independently are precisely the ones left behind. But what does this mean for foreign children in the care of an ayi, the children who will go on to expensive international schools and never be placed in the Chinese education system? I couldn’t help but have flashbacks to myself as a kindergartner– scraped up knees, my hair in some bizarre up-do as I had styled it myself, making messy art projects that I thought were so exquisite at the time– and feel that these children were missing out.

Previously published in NewsChina

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