It was definitely a huge recharger, seeing friends especially and being around people who I relate to instinctively; at first it was unfamiliar and a little scary, I think because I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to relate or connect anymore for whatever reason. But when we did it felt good, as you’d expect, and made me question all over again whether I really wanted to go back to China.

Of course, not having anything else lined up, I had to come back. And now have been back for about three days. But the hard things about coming back are not the ones I expected. I’ve found that it’s basically just a horrible bitch to get over the time difference and the germs that you’re exposed to during long-distance travel, that moving from China to America and America to China is basically the same in that your first couple of days in either place is challenging physically and mentally, just because you have to confront a life that you haven’t confronted in a while, and do it on a severely mangled sleep schedule. Apart from that, and from a nasty cold that set in after my first day here, it’s been smooth — I was surprised at how natural and normal it felt to walk into my apartment building and put down my bags in the apartment I hadn’t seen for 5 weeks. Similar to how it used to feel to arrive back in Oregon after having been on the East Coast for a week or so, except in this case I was a hell of a lot farther from home.

Even that seems pretty remarkable to me. On the way to the airport I asked my father how long he thought it would have taken to get to China 100 years ago, and although I don’t know I assume it would be at least weeks and probably months. Now you can do it in a day and a half and feel like you never left.

Some observations from being home:

American food consists mainly of cheese and fried beef. That’s OK, but it becomes a problem because I love those foods. Particularly cheese. The fact that cheese is hard to come by in small-town China is extremely good for my waistline.

After a year in China, it takes about three weeks not to be stunned every time you see a person of non-Asian ethnicity.

After a year in China, even if you hate everything about Fox News, it is for some reason just intrinsically interesting to watch on TV. I have no idea why about this one. I can’t even begin to explain it. Maybe it has to do with how Fox News presents a simplified, uglier version of Americanism that is pretty close to the Chinese idea of what Americans are. I don’t know. That’s just a theory and I don’t think it’s true. It’s just fascinating, is all. The English voices, the big loud Americans, the bright colors, the extravagance, the extreme theories and unadorned Americanism. It’s weird. I couldn’t get enough of it, like picking at an itchy scab, so satisfying. I’d never even watched Fox News before this trip back to the U.S., but every time I saw it this time I was transfixed.

China quickly becomes a weird almost inaccessible washed-out memory. After a week home I found it difficult to recall lots of things, but now that I’m back that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t seem to have forgotten any of the language.

People in the U.S. are interested in China. I ended up having a lot more conversations about China than I expected with people who seemed genuinely interested. I kind of expected people to be pretty indifferent, because it’s such a far-away, weird, obscurely unknown kind of place. But people were pretty interested across the board, not too judgy, just asked questions and listened, which was really cool.

Now that I’ve woken up after a 15-hour night’s sleep and am feeling much better than I did the last two days, I think I’m getting used to things again and not feeling completely destroyed by the time change, I’m getting a bit more glad to be back. Not completely there yet, but getting there.

When it came time to go board I didn’t feel like I was consciously walking and moving and talking anymore; I was swimming in a mixture of emotions, just fighting to keep moving. And then, of course, saying goodbye to my mom felt like saying goodbye to the last person I knew in the world; the idea that I was going someplace where no one knew me or was likely to know anything about people like me was not just in my brain but enveloping my whole brain with fog. I guess I’m a creature who generally shies away from change, even though I have managed to find it pretty consistently in life for the past ten years.

Hugging my mom and saying bye was the first time that I felt like maybe bagging the whole thing, the whole idea, and just saying nope, take me home: Not goin’. Can’t do it.

Of course I didn’t do that. I recently returned home for the first time after about 15 months in China teaching English and studying Chinese. At a certain point I decided to go, and, knowing that it would be a disaster to let fear or anxiety get in the way of that plan, and wanting very much to stay there and have an immersive experience, I stayed.

I think a lot of people would not have such a hard time leaving home to go live in another country like China for so long — some people are better at it than others. But that saying-goodbye moment was very difficult for me — maybe the toughest thing that I’ve done.

The good news was, as I discovered, that was also the hardest thing I would have to do. Before I left, a friend who knew somebody who had also taught in China recalled a quote about the initial going-away experience: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water, and when you land realizing that the water is only a foot deep.” I wouldn’t say that arriving in China, adjusting to the culture, making friends and learning the language, was as easy as wading around in knee-deep water, but it was a lot easier than I imagined it to be when I was waiting in the U.S. to leave.

I spent 15 months there. I learned, more or less, how to be a decent ESL teacher (although I know I still have a lot to learn about being a teacher). I made Chinese friends who I’ll definitely remember forever and had experiences that have totally changed my worldview. I managed to become fairly conversant in Chinese, although I also have many more years’ work ahead of me on that front. But I made it through, and none of the bad stuff I imagined before I left happened, or if some of my fears turned out to be true (getting sick from the water or street food, for instance), they weren’t nearly as bad as I imagined they could be (getting sick from water or food was never a major inconvenience — it happens, but I certainly never had to go to the hospital for it, for example).

So in the end I would say that the maxim about going to China was half-true. Or maybe I would offer this modification: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water and remembering, oh yeah, I can swim.” Life in China isn’t necessarily harder than life in the U.S. : it’s just different, in a thousand fascinating ways.

So I’m going back in a month to continue teaching, with the hopes of reaching a level with my Chinese so that I can be certified as proficient, which hopefully will help me go in new directions that I maybe haven’t even thought of yet. And I’m looking forward to going back. When I was in NYC last week and walked by a Chinese man playing an erhu and all the memories came flooding back to me, I knew I wanted to go back. So I’m gonna. Hopefully I can find some people who want to go to Sanming to teach, too, because that school needs good teachers.

This article specifically quotes milk prices as an example of how inflation in China has begun to carry the prices of common goods way beyond the reach of the ordinary person:

“The money supply is too large,” said Andy Xie, an economist based in Shanghai who formerly worked at Morgan Stanley. “They increased the money supply to stimulate the economy. Now land prices have jumped 20 times in some places, 100 times in others. Inflation is broad-based. Go into a supermarket. Milk is more expensive in China than it is in the U.S.”

In Shanghai, where the average monthly wage is about $350, a gallon of milk now costs about $5.50.

I see this kind of thing everyday, and it wouldn’t be so crazy if there weren’t also products that were incredibly cheap, and also if there weren’t consumers so consistently making choices that to my eye seem absurd.

A little anecdote: I recently went “guang4jie1″ (sort of like window shopping) with a female Chinese friend of mine, who has maybe a bit of a problem with spending money. Although her monthly salary is lower than mine (my salary is about 4,000 yuan, or around $600), she compulsively buys things, mostly clothes but also other stuff like expensive meals and spa treatments, that I would never even dream of buying on a salary like hers.

A couple of weeks ago when I met up with her she casually bought a pair of 1,000 yuan boots and a 500 yuan dress in preparation for a holiday trip she was about to go on.

There’s a double-mystery here. The first part of the mystery is: whose money is she spending? Is it her parents’? Is it really hers and she spends no money most of the time and splurges on big things? Or is she just now, at the tender age of 24, beginning to burrow into a hole of debt that will one day haunt her like debt is haunting so many Americans now? I have no idea. I’ve never asked her where she gets her money from; although I have mentioned that it seems like she spends a lot of money.

The second part of the mystery becomes clear when you take a look at the 1,000 yuan boots she bought. We were in a department store in the middle of town and the boots were these kind of rhinestone-studded suede numbers that would sell for $40 in the U.S., I think. But she paid almost $150 for them.

As she was shoe-shopping I found a pair of classically ugly, cheap men’s  pleather shoes in the men’s footwear section. I don’t have a picture at the moment…I’ll try to go back and take one later, but these shoes were clearly pleather (fake leather), had cheap white soles with barely any traction, and were labeled with the brand name “FASHION” (this is a common brand name in China). The price tag was over 500 yuan, more than $80.

This makes no sense. You can buy a pair of Adidas just down the road for the same price, and the quality is far better, the shoes are made of much more durable and attractive material, and everyone knows that the shoes are expensive and nice. (Yeah, Adidas is considered “nice” here, and Puma is like super nice.)

On top of that, you can find these same shoes on the Internet for less than 100 yuan. Or in a seedier store in a crappier part of town. The reason for the high price seemed to be the location. You’re in department store, so some of the items will be double what they are elsewhere.

I have no idea how the retailers get away with this. It seems similar to the fruit phenomenon, which is that an apple costs 1 yuan when bought in the village next to the university, but 5 yuan when bought at a convenience store in the city.

Or the fact that a towel can cost 150 yuan in the city’s biggest mall, but 20 yuan at a smaller store outside the city center.

Crazier still is the fact that foreign-produced brand-name goods are often far more expensive than in the U.S. Levi’s jeans are the first thing that comes to mind. At home you can usually get a pair of Levi’s at Sears or some department store for around $30 or $40. But I’ve never seen a pair of Levi’s here for less than 400 yuan, about $60, and prices can go as high as 600 yuan, $90.

The higher you go, the more expensive stuff gets. There’s a Lacoste outlet store in this town (most of whose goods appear to be knockoffs) where the jeans cost a couple thousand yuan.

Cars are also often more expensive, and there’s a slightly hilarious and insane theory that a few Chinese people have told me that foreign car companies intentionally sell their cars for a higher price here because they think that Chinese people find prestige in more expensive things. Who knows where this theory comes from, but the only logical explanation I can see would be shipping costs and import taxes. The idea that a car company would raise its prices to attract customers, especially in a market like China where everybody just buys the nicest car they can afford, is ridiculous.

But with all that said, there is still one thing that seems to hold this world together like glue: you can still buy noodles and eggs for lunch for about 4 yuan, which is around 60 cents. If you live economically, which most people do, you can eat for only about 20 yuan per day ($3), which is almost exactly what my daily food budget is. That doesn’t include the yogurt I occasionally eat in the morning (5 yuan peanut noodles and hun dun dumpling soup is better anyway, just not as convenient), the Starbucks instant coffee I buy online, or my occasional pizza dinner, but it’s pretty consistent. In a good week I probably spend less than $50 on meals, and I always eat out.

Of course, if food prices caught up with the price of almost everything else here excluding rent (which they could do in the coming years — the CPI for food in China rose over 9 percent over the last 12 months as of October) even my life would be completely impossible here, even though my salary is higher than the average by about 2,000 yuan (around $300).

The reason: the rent for my tiny apartment is 1,300 yuan per month ($191), my student loans are still about 800 yuan per month ($112), and the various expenses of life invariably quickly eat up the remaining $300-odd of that $600-ish-a-month salary.

Luckily I have been able to find private students over the past six months or so to increase that income so that I don’t have to spend my savings to stay here, but it comes at the price of losing most of my days off in order to teach privately.

The whole money problem, however, is basically due to the fact that I can’t lower my living standards to that of most of the people here. In order to survive with prices like this and income like that, there’s certain food you have to eat every day, certain places you have to live, certain clothes you have to buy. Last year living at the college I more or less lived in those conditions and ate that food. But I don’t think I would want to do it again.

Anyway, I still have enough time to study and to write, and teaching English here is for the most part enjoyable and rewarding. But sometimes it’s a shock to think about the income gap between here and the U.S., and then see how much stuff still costs here.

But it can be a challenge. In a recent Chinesepod lesson, John Pasden, the foreigner host of the show (it’s a daily podcast for learning Chinese) mentioned that China is a post-industrial, pre-PC culture — meaning that, for example, in China it’s still OK to call someone fat if they’re fat, if they’re deaf-mute to call them dumb, or, to distinguish blind from seeing people by call seeing people “normal”.

This spills over into a million different things. I can’t profess to really get it. I think to some extent, to deal with non-PC-ness you just have to be a very easy-going person with an unshakable sense of humor. Which I have the capacity for, but sometimes am not really good at.

For example, yesterday, one of my Chinese teachers asked me if foreigners are all fat, if foreign women all look 60 when they’re 30; an acquaintance of mine recently used the derogatory word for black people at the dinner table (in Chinese and then, when I questioned him on it, in English); and pretty much every time I eat something that resembles junk food (which I do on occasion) some Chinese person in my vicinity turns to whomever is standing next to them and explains to them, in Chinese, that the only thing we foreigners eat is McDonald’s and KFC, so that’s why I’m eating that.

People also occasionally ask me why the United States is performing military drills in the Yellow Sea, up by Korea and Northern China, and then tell me, with barely masked emotion, that Chinese people are worried about it and think it is very dangerous. As if the white person before them can easily represent the views of basically the entire democratized world.

This stuff is stupid to get worked up over. Virtually all of these people have no contact with the outside world except through the government-run education system, the government-run media, and Hollywood movies.

(At the same time, however, they all learn English in school and learn about Western culture as part of their language study — which, I am coming to think, makes the majority of people rather confused about what exactly the outside world is, and makes it tougher for them to learn the language because half of learning a language is cultural.)

The result is a confusing mix of ideas that basically seem offensive to me whenever I run into them. But then I think about how foreigners and minorities deal with the myriad offensive conceptions that mainstream culture has of them in America (Indians, Chinese, Japanese, African Americans, Hispanics, hell, even people from Texas), and then I think about how different people from those groups deal with those misconceptions. Some of them choose to spend their lives being offended and pissed off, and some of them choose to find humor in how stupid it is. I’m trying to fall into the latter category in my life here.

And to be a little self-aware. After all, I’ve only met one or two people from Texas in my life, but I know that I have, on many occasions, uttered the words “I never met a Texan I liked.” (That was pre-Jamie’s girlfriend, if you read this, Jamie.)

Most of that is George Bush’s fault, and stereotypes, and of course I have long since let go of that idea (which I sort of just thought was funny). But I know that I had it at the time because it seemed entertaining, and I naively thought that as long as I never met any Texans, there was no way that my little bias against Texans could affect them.

Turns out I was probably wrong.

The first one and one of the most important is that there are things we get as Americans that a lot of other people don’t get automatically; it just comes with the territory of living in an “undeveloped” country.

Like what? What could be so great about life in America that you can’t get someplace else?

Well, at first, nothing. You don’t really notice the stuff until you’ve been outside for a while. Then it all starts to stick out at you.

Take traffic, for example. At first, I just found the traffic here insane and thought no more of it. But now I think a little further, and think that the people here have no other choice. It’s their reality to almost get killed every other day crossing the street.

OK, that one’s easy. How about building codes. Does anybody inspect the buildings here to make sure they’re safe and nothing is going to fall on you and kill you? Apparently not. Exhibit A is the building that fell down in Shanghai last year complete, just fell over in one big piece. Fire escapes are rare and precarious-looking structures are ubiquitous.

This building fell over in one big piece in Shanghai last year

Moving on. The next one is hospitals. One of the few foreigners I know in this town had to get his appendix removed in the local hospital, and somehow during the surgery they didn’t quite put everything back in the right place when they sewed him up. So some of his stomach muscles don’t work anymore.

Peter Hessler, in his book “River Town”, also points out that a few of his acquaintances died in his two years in a Sichuan river city, due mostly to a less safe healthcare system.

The next one is mental health. I was explaining to my Chinese teacher (who is a psychology professor) recently some of the services my sister receives as a disabled person. One of the things I mentioned was that there are social workers who come to hang out with her and take her shopping and stuff like that.

Her response was: We don’t have those kind of people in China.

I also have some personal experience with a kid with a disability who’s family is afraid of telling the public school system about the kid’s disability for fear that teachers will ignore the kid and people will ridicule him, because disabled people have no real enforceable legal rights in the education system here.

Compare that to the system in America where kids may be teased for having disabilities, but where they are also entitled to a whole host of rights and resources and modified forms of education (at least a great deal of the time), which entitlements are enforceable by suing the state.

Then, of course, there’s health care for the old, which I don’t know much about here but seems to be more or less nonexistent. I have had a couple of students whose elders have been dying or have passed away due to cancer of various varieties; the families didn’t have the money to pay for surgery so the old people just died, and this has happened occasionally with young people, too.

It’s hard to explain better than that, and probably none of this sounds particularly new or interesting. But it changes things to live here and know that if I were these people this would be my only reality — the world in which I would have to live and survive forever — and I think if that were the case for me my life would be a whole lot more oriented towards making money and finding security than it is now. Because the people here who manage to become wealthy-ish are able to have many of the securities and comforts that we’re afforded in wealthier western countries.

Many, but of course, not all.

Even more cause for a belated moment of gratitude.

This is a reference to the sun-blotting-out pollution that is the signature not just of large Chinese cities but of everywhere in China, with almost no exceptions that I have seen so far — big cities, pretty mountainscapes, small villages that may be located near enormous coal mines, etc. Pollution here is a constant of life, like sunshine and rain.

In Sanming, my city, it most prominently noticeable in the whitish haze that invariably reduces visibility not in any very obtrusive way, but just enough so that when you go hiking you can never really see much of the horizon, and when you go to the mountains with friends you never (or seldom) see a truly blue sky. It’s usually more that grayish overcast color that I associate with the depth of a New England winter, sometimes with a dome of bluish-gray at the ceiling of the sky.

Then also sometimes there is the stink, especially the further west you go in the city. The west side of town is officially the pollution side — that’s where the brownish striations of coal dust and carbon decorate the buildings most noticably, the place where many buildings’ residents seem to have given up on trying to keep the windows clean, and just let the dust and ash collect and collect until everything has this sort of choked, blackened mask.

It’s sort of a strange kind of beauty, if you have the right eye for it or are in a mood to overlook it. If you don’t or you’re not, it just looks dirty, or maybe more accurately just polluted, since dirt is everywhere but pollution is something that we can more easily quantify and identify.

And then it’s in the streets some days, in the coal smell that descends over the city, the sooty cloud that billows its way from the smokestacks at the steel mill (the biggest in the province!) or the burning trash heaps or any of the other numerous pollution sources here.

At first these details, the dirt, the pollution, were overwhelmingly depressing for me, but over time I have gotten used to them, grown accustomed to the sight of coal-streaked buildings (almost all of them look this way, which is why when I first arrived in Sanming I pointed to a cluster of buildings on the horizon and asked my liaison, Are those buildings burned?), and the loud, chaotic, playfully and rambunctiously and unpredictably polluted streets.

It’s part of life here and I can’t say I like it or hate it. It just is, as I wrote somewhere else in some failed fiction no one will ever read, like the high of one’s ears or the length of one’s nose or the color of one’s skin.

The clock just passed midnight which means as of today I’ve consumed a complete Sanming brick. Happy China birthday.

We don’t have a Starbucks in my city, and there are few in this province, so whenever I get a chance to go to one I take it. It’s like fucking Christmas every time I go. Suddenly I step from the loud chaotic uncomfortable unfamiliar world of China into an environment that totally sates every base craving I could have as an American: the corporate decor and smooth featureless music and padded overpriced comfort that is Starbucks.

The interesting thing about this trip was that my companion, a Japanese girl who teaches Japanese history in Fuzhou and whose name is Mami, does not speak English and so would have to order in Chinese. And of course I speak English and Chinese but not Japanese. And the tellers at Starbucks usually speak pretty good English and of course Chinese. And whenever I go to Starbucks I order in English because I don’t know the words for “grande black coffee, no room, with a ham and cheese panini” in Chinese (well, I don’t know grande or panini). So I took the lead and tried to order for Mami.

The problem is that when I’m with Mami it confuses everyone, because nobody knows until she starts speaking that she isn’t in fact Chinese. So Chinese people always look at me, scan over my face, and then start speaking in rapid-fire Chinese to Mami.

The only problem is, Mami’s Chinese isn’t as good as mine. So she often doesn’t understand and just nods her head, and then I have to step in and actually answer their question. But I’ve found that people usually still persist in trying to talk to Mami, not me…I’m not sure why; I think they realize pretty fast that she’s not Chinese. Maybe they figure that if this Asian-looking foreigner doesn’t understand them, there’s no way in hell the white guy standing next to her does.

Anyway, on this particular occasion I was in line with Mami and tried to order in English, but the Starbucks girl didn’t understand, so I ordered in Chinese, but there was still confusion. The place was packed. She couldn’t understand what Mami wanted. But she had my order, so I ducked out and ran to the pick-up line. Then Mami stayed there at the order line for like 10 minutes, but I had no idea what she was doing.

It turned out the Starbucks girl spoke Japanese and had lived in Japan for two years, so Mami was chatting with her in Japanese. Finally Mami came back and I started to say in Chinese to her that it seemed like everywhere we went together we confused the hell out of Chinese people, but I couldn’t remember the Chinese word for confused, but Mami happened to know the English word confused, so we stood there wondering out loud what the Chinese word for confused was.

Then a Chinese woman leaned over and told me it was wu4jie3, which actually means something like misunderstand. By this time I had checked my dictionary and found five different words for “confused”. Apparently confusion is an important concept in Chinese since it gets so many different words.

The Chinese woman spoke great English, and after a moment she started talking to Mami in English, asking her a few questions to which Mami responded by nodding and saying yes in English. Of course, Mami didn’t understand what the woman was saying, so when she asked Mami, “are you here in Fuzhou traveling?” and Mami again nodded yes, I said, in Chinese, no, we’re both teachers.

Naturally, the woman never imagined, and I’m not sure she even understood after that point, that Mami and I would be communicating exclusively in Chinese, which is actually true. Why would she? Why the hell would a white guy and a Japanese girl, both of whom have maybe only intermediate Chinese skills, be getting Starbucks together in China and using Chinese to communicate?

The whole thing makes no sense at all, but that’s China. And I surprised myself by actually being surprised when the Starbucks people told me they had run out of covers for their to-go cups. Almost as much as it surprised me the time the people at McDonald’s in Sanming told me they had run out of beef.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense in this country.

I think I have to start by saying that in this town in China I have become something of a celebrity. And I’ll just spare you the details about my ambiguous thoughts and opinions of that fact and say that it seems to be irrevocably true, and that I did nothing to earn it except be foreign, tall, of average attractiveness and the capacity for saying “yes” to even perhaps daunting propositions.

Tonight’s proposition was made to me about three months ago, when I went to one of the administrative leaders of this school to ask for reimbursement for my visa trip to Hong Kong, which after visa, transport and hotel costs totaled just under $1,000 USD. He quickly granted the reimbursement and then added, at the end of our meeting, that he would like me to perform the Chinese song “Childhood” (“童年”) on “Teacher’s Day” later this year. I had already once performed the song at a small performance my students had given the previous semester (although I suffered horrible stage fright, forgot half of the lyrics and treated the audience to an earful of microphone feedback), so I quickly agreed without asking for details. The man had just agreed to pay back 1 large that I had more or less kissed goodbye forever, so I was apt to agree to about anything.

By now, if you’ve followed my blog at all, you know that I was in for a lot of surprises when I finally did learn those minor details. It turns out that I was signing up to sing the song in front of an audience of teachers from all around our county who will be gathering in our capitol city performance hall in September. I would also be the only performance representing our college of approx 10,000 students, some of who are very gifted singers (at the first singing competition I attended here, I was moved to tears — there are seriously beautiful singers in the art department here).

So…that’s in September. Tonight was the warm-up, a performance at the college’s end-of-the-year bash when some of the best student singers and dancers perform in the college’s auditorium…again, seriously talented, devoted singers and dancers, troupes of 20 students doing really advanced dance and opera-style Chinese singing…and me.

Luckily, there were 15 dancers on stage to distract the audience from me. But I still had to learn a 4-minute Chinese song, not forget the words, and learn how to dance/do hand movements and stage walking and stuff along with the dancing students…all this while focusing on not choking and getting warbly-voiced and stone-faced in front of the school audience…which was at least 500…I don’t really know how many in all.

The good thing about this performance was that I had professional help. Since I was singing to a choreographed dance this time, the dance teacher instructed me on how to stand on stage (not hunched), how to walk on stage (big steps, not measly nervous ones), and how to accompany my singing with gestures that go along with the meaning of the words…and stuff.

At first these suggestions were exasperating, because it’s hard enough to remember the words to a real Chinese song, let alone doing choreographed steps and motions and stuff like that. It’s just not something I’m used to. And there is/was also my cynicism about the whole affair that Ihad to get over. I had to come to grips with the fact that Ihad agreed to do this, and that I could not go at it half-heartedly and make an embarrassment of myself again in front of hundreds of people. When the teacher/coach said stand up straight, I had to do it, when she reminded me that I wasn’t smiling and my eyes had no emotion, I had to fix it, when she asked me to wag my finger and shake my head, I had to do that, too.

These things, in any normal context of my life, I find/would have found impossible to do, but then I realized that all the other performers (all students, which makes me kind of weirdly the only non student on stage at the end of the show) are giving it their all and having a good time and actually putting on a damn good show, and I had to do it. So I worked with the dancers and the teacher, we practiced the song maybe 20 times, and then finally like an hour before the performance we had it, and I felt good with it.

I realized while standing backstage waiting to go on that the only way not to go insane with stage fright was to jump up and down and do jumping jacks and do the most ridiculous movements possible. This actually really helped me get the energy to have fun with the performance, and then a second later I heard the announcers shouting my Chinese name and I marched on stage and stared straight into the blinding stage lights and shouted “Hello everybody!” in Chinese into the microphone.

This time it went much better. I tripped over the lyrics a little once but quickly recovered and other than that it was smooth. I did not collide with the students as I had done in rehearsals, I’m pretty sure I remembered to smile most of the time, and I was helped greatly by getting a chance to really practice and getting good feedback and seeing myself performing in the mirrors in the practice room and stuff like that. And after the show, when people congratulated me on the performance, they really seemed to mean it (they congratulated me last time, but it was obvious that they were just being nice).

And then afterward my liaison told me that that was actually just a rehearsal for the big show in September, which I sort of knew already. So yet again in September, I will be doing something that would be completely unimaginable at home. And even though I am making a resolution to severely cut back on agreeing to appear in public performances here, I at least think I am going to enjoy my next slice of completely unearned stardom.

She took out a piece of paper that she had showed me about two weeks prior, the working license that allowed me to legally work at the university (and which she said was the last thing we needed before I could get a working visa to stay at the college). She pointed to just below the header, where the letter directed the holder of the working license to report to the nearest Chinese embassy in the United States to get a working visa. 

The last time she had showed me the license, I had not noticed that crucial detail. And after months of nail-biting, hair-pulling, ad politely trying to not be a nuisance but also still persistently question her about when I would finally be legal in the country…I was tired of thinking about it. I just wanted the school to take care of it. I did not understand one crucial thing about the situation I had found myself in, which was that they had told me what I had wanted to hear regarding the visa situation before I came to China, and I had let myself believe them. Everything that happened after that was white noise. For three months I had pestered the Foreign Affairs Office people about my visa, and for three months they had essentially avoided telling me what they knew all along — I would have to leave the country, on my own, to get the visa I would eventually need, and, as an added bonus, I would be expected to pay for that trip. 

This revelation, on the last day of classes, deflated me and almost squashed me. I was angry, I was frustrated, I felt used, I felt stupid. But I quickly realized (after yelling about it to myself and discussing it over the phone with a couple of key people) that there was nothing I could do about the trip out of the country. I would have to do that, either way. The only thing I could really do anything about was determining who would pay for the trip. 

So I spent a day negotiating with the college and eventually, with the help of a key person at the school, got an extra few hundred U.S. dollars out of them. They agreed that they would refund me for my actual travel ticket, that they would throw in a little extra money for accommodations, and I would go. That was the best I could get without outright threatening to leave the college, which, if I were a more stubborn or hard-nosed person, I would have done. 

I booked a train ticket to Shenzhen. There is a train that passes through Sanming, Fujian and goes all the way to Shenzhen, which is almost directly north of Hong Kong and adjacent to it. I would take the train to Shenzhen the day before my tourist visa would run out, then I would cross customs in LuoHu, which is part of Shenzhen and actually in the same train terminal where I would be arriving, and then, if all went well, I would simply get on the Hong Kong MTA system and head into HK. 

So, I waited. There were about two or three weeks between when I learned that I would be going to HK and when I actually left. Waiting was not the easiest thing I have ever done, because the entire time I was thinking about the fact that there was no guarantee at all that I would be able to return to the mainland. I was heading out of the country just as my tourist visa was expiring on the hope that I would be able to return on a working visa, finally, after being in the country for almost four months. I finished grades for all my students, begrudgingly since I felt that the school was seriously not doing its job in supporting me as a foreign teacher and therefore why should I do my job until they started doing theirs. But I did the grades anyway, submitted them to the college’s intranet and waited some more. Some teachers came by for a party at my place. We ate rat. It was actually a ton of fun. I felt less bad about the whole situation and the people involved. We all went out for karaoke. It was, again, a ton of fun. I felt a little less bad again. The dean in my department and others invited me to spend the Spring Festival with them in their hometowns when I returned from HK. I felt less bad again, and as the time for my leaving arrived I finally decided that whatever happened, whatever the reason was for why I was leaving with no guarantee that I would return, to wait in HK for some indeterminate amount of time for the Foreign Affairs Office to swap my paperwork so I could get the visa in HK — whatever happened, I was totally confident that there were people who really wanted me there, teaching, at the university. They did appreciate my presence, even if a behemoth bureaucratic system, and various slip-ups and textbook cases of miscommunication had seriously gotten in the way. I at least felt welcome, still, as I was leaving. Which helped. 

So with classes and grades and everything else done I packed up almost all of my stuff, or at least everything that I could carry, into two huge backpacks and a messenger bag and set out at 1:30 a.m. to catch the train that would take me to Shenzhen. One of the teachers picked me up and he very kindly waited with me at the train station and helped me find the train car when it arrived. Which was very lucky for me, because there was a lot of running and shouting involved. Apparently the trains tend to only stop for a couple of minutes at each station. So if you have over 100 pounds of gear on you it is not so easy to navigate, read the signs of trains, and try to process train stewardesses speaking Chinese. 

But it worked out. I got on the train, found my car, got into bed, and slept. I woke up at around 7 a.m. and looked out the window. The air outside was smoggy and the sun was up and the countryside looked almost as it had the day before, only a little flatter. We were moving away from the endless egg-crate-like mountains of Fujian, southwest, into Guangdong. There was still only one other passenger in the four-bed soft-sleeper room with me, a young woman, maybe about 23 or 24, with a pale, overwhelmed looking face and a soft voice. I had listened to her talk on the phone in a plaintive, almost whiney Chinese the night before. The only thing I had understood was “Wo hen kun, wo hen kun” — I’m very sleepy. I had been on the top bunk on the front end of the room, listening to Chinese lessons on my iPod as I fell asleep, while she was on the bottom bunk on the other side of the tiny room. I had also been able to smell the shampoo-scent of her hair, for some reason, whenever she moved. Probably because I already smelled like sweat and nerves. I don’t know why I was so worried about the whole thing, now, in retrospect. As I fell asleep, I was less worried than I had been at 11 p.m. earlier that night, waiting to get on the train.

After waking up at 7 a.m., I quickly fell back asleep and didn’t wake up again until 11 a.m. After an hour or so of reading I got up and moved around a bit, ate, read some more, and then finally decided to try to talk to the girl in the cab with me. Using Chinese, I managed to find out that we would be arriving at about 3:30 p.m., that she was also headed to Hong Kong via Shenzhen, that her parents lived in Hong Kong so she often went there, and that she was, amazingly, a secretary at the very college where I am a teacher. And that she had seen me around campus before. It occurred to me later, after she helped me find my way to customs and the subway to HK, that I never asked her for her name. But I’m hoping that next semester I will be able to find her and thank her. It was not easy for her, I’m sure, to communicate those very basic things to me in Chinese. And the last thing she told me, that once we got to the train station I would be able to tell where to go by the signs inside the station, I didn’t understand until after we actually got off the train and she pointed to a sign that said Hong Kong and she repeated the word — “biao1 zhi4″ that she had used so many times back in the train cabin, while I sat searching through my dictionary, befuddled — which word means “sign” (or as my dictionary defined it, to my confusion, “logo”), as in “YOU CAN JUST READ THE SIGNS”.

As a language teacher, I can totally and exhaustively sympathize with the frustration she must have felt trying to speak to me in Chinese, as I feel that frustration trying to speak to my students in English. But I also know from experience that speaking with someone of a different language takes practice, patience, and the ability to closely monitor your own words and simplify your sentences. Practice, that is, that you maybe only get if you’re a language learner or teacher. 

So, the train got to Shenzhen, I got off, I followed the girl through the train station, and finally we had to split at customs, where Hong Kongers and Chinese people split with foreigners. We waved and I said thank you, and I went to the foreigners customs area. 

The line for Hong Kongers and Chinese looked brutally long, but it took me about five minutes to pass through the foreigners line, and I walked straight down, again following the signs that said “Hong Kong”, to the LuoHu MTA station, used the ATM to get some HK Dollars, bought a subway ticket, and got on. This was when I finally started to get the surreal and exhilirating and confusing feeling that I was going back into something, essentially a kind of world that I had known before, for most of my life, but that I had been living very far away from, without realizing it, for quite some time. 

That description of what I felt sucks. It’s hard to describe. First there’s the fact that I hadn’t seen, looked in the eyes of, shaken the hand of, a native English speaker in four months…it feels strange to mention it, but honestly I also hadn’t seen a caucasian person in four months, which had been a quiet point of interest in my mind. It doesn’t matter at all, but it has relevance purely because of the undeniable role that my caucasian-ness had played in my life in Fujian. As in, people staring, people shouting hello, people continuously turning and saying to their friends, “Ni kan, laowai” — “Look, a foreigner” — wherever I went, all the time. And because of the fact that I had begun to wear my own skin differently, but had not had time or opportunity to reflect on the meaning of that, to step outside the situation, to see it all how I would have seen it if it were someone else experiencing it, not me. 

That’s what I started to think, standing on the subway, a few short miles from Hong Kong Island. I was suddenly very happy, for no one reason that I could pinpoint. I was smiling to myself, even as I realized that compared to all the clean, well-dressed, sophisticated Hong Kongers around me I looked decidedly shabby, my shoes were extremely dirty, and I did not exactly smell like something off a page of “Vanity Fair”. I was stinky, I had a huge load of bags with me on the subway, I was not sure exactly where my hostel was located and I was, despite the excessive sleep on the train, tired. But I was happy to be in Hong Kong. 

I was glad I had made it. 

: )