Having Fun All The Time

A friend of mine sent me an email today wishing me a happy birthday, and telling me that she hoped I was keeping a daily record of my early experiences in China, because when she first moved to America, she quickly started forgetting things she’d experienced.

“Those things fade away much quicker than you expect,” she wrote. “You will even forget what you didn’t know. (Your case could be different, but this was true for me.)”

This seems totally true already. I’ve been here for a month already, but it still feels as though I’ve just landed. Even so, all of the things that struck me as profoundly different and strange when I landed in Fuzhou are already, I think, blending in with what I am coming to understand as reality.

Part of that is natural, I think: in a place as new and different as this part of China, there is a constant flow of unfamiliar information forcing its way through my brain. The vast majority of that (words, names, foods, smells, sounds, emotions, memories from home, etc, etc) are immediately lost. Some little bit remains, whatever I manage to hold onto, and that starts to become the basis for my understanding of things.

I think that’s even true of language…I’m not sure what being here is doing to my English skills, if it’s making them better or worse, but I’m certainly hearing less and less English nowadays than ever before. What English I do hear is, essentially, Chinese English…a language with different syntax, grammar and pronounciation than American English, but that is often pretty consistent in those differences.

So, I want to try to capture the first few days here, if I can.

I came in on a plane, flying through Shanghai and landing in Fuzhou. The plan was that I would get picked up at the Fuzhou airport. After leaving New York, nobody really spoke English. I realized I was on my own, pretty much. I used one Chinese word in my 30-ish odd hours of travel to China, and that was shuai, or water. I had to keep looking up how to say it. I realized I was fucked, speaking-Chinese-wise.

The food on the plane to Shanghai was really weird. I could hardly eat any of it, and I was hungry…so I started to worry about food. I realized I didn’t really know what kind of food they had in China, the real China. I wondered, with trepidation, if I would be able to eat enough to stay moderately healthy. I drank more water and ate as much of the food as I could (I don’t remember what it was, but I haven’t seen food like that since I got to China).

When I landed in Shanghai, I wandered around in the airport for a while. It was strange and exhilirating to be walking around on the ground in China. I was only in the airport, but I felt a little like I was in a dream. I stepped outside and looked out at the land, but it was very foggy…or maybe it was smoggy. I couldn’t see anything. There were some young Chinese people at the entrance to the airport and they seemed to be aware of me more than I was used to, but I wasn’t really sure.

That was after I went through customs. Before going through customs, getting through customs was mostly what I was worried about. Not for any particular reason — just because it was going through customs, and that made me nervous. I didn’t know anything about Chinese customs (no pun intended). So there was that.

It turned out that going through customs was easy. A man looked at my declarations form and papers and stamped the passport. I walked on through. I didn’t know where to get my bags, so I just followed the crowd through the airport to the baggage claim area. The airport seemed empty and unused, for some reason. Maybe because it was the middle of the night. We passed a lot of police as we walked through the airport.

I had been told in JFK that I would need to transfer my bags myself in Shanghai. I didn’t know what that entailed, or how I would find my bags, or where I would bring them, so that had been another thing to worry about on the flight to Shanghai. It turned out that following the crowd worked. I got my bags, as Chinese people bustled around me, speaking a language I did not understand, and then I noticed a woman yelling what sounded like “Fuzhou”. So I went up to her. She pointed in the direction of a sign that said “Transfer Flights”, or something like that, so I went that way. I waited around for a while (figured out that my cell phone didn’t work and so called my family to tell them I had arrived using a calling card on a payphone) and, eventually, someone took my bags and pointed me toward another door. I went through it. I was at the entrance to the airport. That was when I walked through the main entrance to check out the Shanghai fog.

The flight to Fuzhou was short, and I stayed awake for most of it. By the time the plane took off from Shanghai it was full daylight again, and I realized that I had cleared customs with no problems and I was reasonably sure that my bags were on the plane with me. Everything was fine, and everything would be. We landed in Fuzhou and I again followed the crowd to the baggage claim. I spotted a man holding a sign with my name on it, and he waved when he saw me. I had not sent any pictures of me, so he wouldn’t have known what I looked like, but I was obviously the one. The only other white people on the plane, as far as I could tell, were much older than me. I waved at him and I also smiled, very enthusiastically (as I had begun to worry, on top of everything else, that maybe I should have called him before I left New York to confirm that he would be there). Both of my bags drifted by on the baggage claim conveyer belt and I walked out of the airport to meet him.

He had come in a rented Audi with a driver. He had water for me and we chatted. He tried to teach me some Chinese words and I tried to listen. We talked about disparate things. (This is a nice car, right? Yes, it’s very nice. Naptime in China. Other foreigners and their first perceptions of China. Landowners and other people he knew.)

I reeked from traveling. I felt dirty and tired and overwhelmed. The fact that I had made it had not nearly sunk in yet. After talking for a couple of hours with him I tried to relax and put my head back. I had traveled for almost two days straight and I was completely bushed, and I was just realizing how different things were going to be (even the looking out the window at the buildings confused me for reasons I will get into another time). I think that was the beginning — the first day, then the next few days, then the first week, I kept feeling like the differences were piling up and getting more serious — and then things started to dissipate and become more real and more manageable, I think (or I became better at managing them).

So, that was the beginning of day one in China. There were actually a lot more things that happened. (We got lunch and ate fish stomach and a number of other things I could not really identify and I worried more about food. We got dinner later and I met people and struggled to remember their names, and failed, because Chinese names are so different from Anglo names, we came and looked at my apartment and I discovered that the water was out [see previous post] and on and on — I also tried to call family back home again and that was kinda tough to do, too, etc.) And by the time the day was over I think I would have slept anywhere, on anything, so I was not worried about how my mattress smelled, or how I smelled, or anything. I just went to sleep, and was extremely grateful to have made it to a home, to have a key to that home, and I decided that I would have to stop worrying pronto if I was going to sleep at all. So I did. And I slept.

The next day was just as long as the first, and the third just as long as the second, but I think each one was pretty much a little bit better than the last. That trend seems to hold true as things continue. And I think now I have realized that I have (more or less) made it.

Stay tuned for day 2 (or maybe week 1, or something) and thanks for the birthday wishes, y’all.

: )