Having Fun All The Time

Arriving in the beautiful town of Yangshuo

(This is part 2 of a 5-part series.)

Yangshuo: Luck with tourguides, quitting smoking and a culinary experience

My uncle and I were the first to wake up the next day and we set off to find breakfast. My parents were still exhausted from their 48-hour journey from the U.S. and we wanted to let them sleep, and my younger cousin (14 years old) also just wanted to sleep, so we let her be. We walked down the main street of Yangshuo, which is extremely wertern and touristy, and found a place with a decent western breakfast and ate for a couple of hours. The rain had temporarily stopped and the peaks started to appear from the mist around us, and it reminded me of being in a ski town in Colorado or Alaska — you can’t really believe that the mountains around you could be so dramatic or beautiful; there’s just no getting used to it.

Quickly, though, it started raining again, and when my parents woke up after noon it was too rainy to do much. We settled on a raft ride up the LiJiang river (Jiang means river I think so maybe it’s just the Li River) and found a 2 hour ride on a rickety bamboo raft for about 120 RMB. The driver couldn’t speak English, but my Chinese was good enough to find out that the river is 6 meters deep and has an old, creepy sugarcane plant along it, which we passed.

The raft ride along the Li River

Yangshuo is in southern China just a few hundred miles north of Hong Kong, and the landscape there is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen anywhere. The town itself is fairly small. It consists of a street that runs along the main river (the LiJiang) where our hotel was located, and then several streets that spur off of that into town that generally consist of restaurants and tourist shops. It’s a great place for touring, especially if you’re new to China or don’t have a lot of time to see a lot of the country, because there are a ton of places to buy gifts where bartering is not only allowed but totally necessary, there are a million things to do and its very easy to find places to get western food and to rent motorbikes or bicycles to get out and explore.

After the boat ride we cleaned up and got ready for the Yangshuo night show that was designed by the guy who also designed the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies. We bought the tickets in the morning; the tickets were about 150 RMB. There was an option to buy 250 and 350 RMB tickets too, but somebody told us that we didn’t need those, which turned out to be more or less true (would have been true if it hadn’t rained, but it did rain, and the only part of the stage that’s covered is the 350 RMB seats – but probably not worth the extra 200 to not get rained on anyway). The show consisted of about 300 performers singing, running around a huge stage that actually was the river’s surface – they used boats to move around on the water and crazy big moving platforms – and even though the story was impossible to follow I still thought the performance was beautiful and the music was good. The others in my group varied in their opinions – my uncle wished there was an English translation and my mom found the whiney singing a little annoying, and other people seemed to think it was just a little boring.

The night show in Yanshuo rocked my world, but others weren't quite as crazy about it -- although we all thought it was good. Those red things are people performing on a huge stage that is just water.

On the way to the show we were seated in a van with four of possibly the weirdest people I have ever encountered, and one very sweet and nice English girl. The English girl was of Chinese descent and teaching English in a nearby province, and she had run into the other four in Yangshuo. The four weird people were also all foreigners teaching ESL in China, two couples. One couple was American and one was English. The Americans guy was super mumbly and I couldn’t understand anything he said, and everytime I spoke to him directly he looked away; the American girl was super intense and seemed like she was burning a hole in my head when she looked at me; the English guy had huge bulbous eyes the color of pale green apples and spoke very slowly; and the English girl, after we had all got soaked at the performance, kept grabbing her breasts with both her hands, like full on titty-grabbing herself for no reason, and complaining about how her “knickers” were soaked.

I was, however, fascinated by the sweet English girl, and actually when I first spoke to her I thought she was Chinese so I spoke in a slow English. Then she started talking and right as I was about to compliment her on her excellent accent I realized that she was in fact British. She said she was staying in Yangshuo for three weeks studying Chinese before returning back to England to go to grad school, and I wanted to talk to her some more but there was no time; the show was over and it was time to head off to the next thing.

After the show we went out for dinner. We found a Chinese-style steakhouse and watched the World Cup game between Germany and England, and watched Germany kick England’s ass. Later that night I walk back with my parents as my mom did some last-minute shopping. We got a little lost in the winding streets of the little town after I stepped into a smoky open-air Chinese stall restaurant to buy some beers for us to take back to the hotel. The place stank of Chinese cigarettes and was loud and chaotic and dirty. It felt a little like being back in my home city and I felt more in my element there than I had felt in our expensive hotel in Hong Kong, in a way. I’ve never been able to afford nice hotels for myself and am still not sure if I ever will. I let a cigarette while the waitress wrapped up my beers, which I bought for 4 Chinese Yuan per can, or around 60 cents, which was 10 percent of the price we had paid for the same beer at dinner. Then I left the restaurant to meet my parents and together we headed back to our hotel.

On the way to the hotel we stopped at a McDonald’s to use the bathroom, and in the men’s bathroom, there was a completely drunk English guy who could barely stand, slowly and deliberately washing his hands, muttering, “fucking Germans”.

Thinking about not smoking

That night my parents asked me if I wanted to sit with them on the balcony looking out over the LiJiang river and have a beer or two, and I did. At first we just chatted and my dad and I smoked and we drank beers, and then my dad went to bed. Then my mom asked me about my smoking and I admitted that I was still smoking regularly, always at least several cigarettes a day. But that I wanted to quit, and that I had tried a few times but that I had always been foiled by basically nothing but a lack of resolve.

A view from the Yangshuo countryside

Then she mentioned in passing the story of how she quit, which she said I must have heard before, and when I said I hadn’t she told me about it. I guess that she decided to quit smoking after she got pregnant with me. She had tried several times before, especially after my sister was born, but had never been able to fully get there. She had been a smoker since she was 14, so anything – taking a drag at a party, getting into a car accident – could send her back into full-on two-packs-a-day smokerdom. So she finally managed to quit, while pregnant with me, by taking a full week off from work and deciding to do nothing but stay at home and focus on not smoking cigarettes. She asked my dad to smoke outside and put his cigarettes in his truck and she fully committed to not smoking. She cleaned the house constantly without taking breaks so that she would not get a chance to have a cigarette, and just basically wanted to smoke all the time until the week was over, and at the end of the week she wasn’t a smoker.

This story made me realize several things, but most of all it made me realize that being a smoker is more than just a habit or a feature of a person, not like liking chocolate or not liking broccoli. Being a smoker is totally something that shapes your persona and your routine and what your life is in so many ways. Once you have been a smoker for several years, your personality becomes the personality of a smoker, whatever that is. It may be only subtly different from the life and personality of a non-smoker, but it is different, and I realized that after smoking since the age of about 21, about five years, I could no longer remember what it was like to have the life and personality of a non-smoker. And I told my mom as much – that I couldn’t even imagine my life without cigarettes – and realizing that (after saying it, of course) was one of the bigger, kind of sadder things I’ve realized in a long, long time. I’m not sure why – I just realized that being a smoker and smoking is not just a matter of stinking and having ugly teeth and skin and etc, it’s also a huge conglomeration of things that pile up over the years and decades that you can never, ever measure or conceive of in one sentence or in one idea in your head. At least I can’t. It’s one of those cumulative things that you never fully realize that you don’t ever know you don’t ever know the full extent of. And after I really realized that, I realized that I have to quit smoking cigarettes, really. And the next day I didn’t want any. I did take a drag of my dad’s cigar halfway through the day, but I didn’t even know why, and after that I didn’t want any, and sometime after that I decided that I was going to focus on becoming a non-smoker, on overcoming my cravings and focusing on the long-term and giving it up. And that is what I did for the rest of the vacation – it was hard as hell at times, but that is what I did.

Also, at the end of the conversation I thanked my mom for deciding to quit smoking soon after she became pregnant with me.

A motorcycle trip through the mountains

The next day in Guilin we all woke up rather late, because we had all been up late the night before, and again we went off to a western breakfast. After that, my mother booked a cooking class to learn how to cook some Chinese dishes for the next morning, and I noticed that all the dishes the school was planning to teach were very weird, non-Chinese dishes that you don’t even find in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The school’s facilities looked cool but they were obviously teaching how to cook some weird forms of non-Chinese food that sort of approximated Chinese food – in other words, they were realizing that a lot of foreigners are not comfortable with true Chinese food and trying to accommodate accordingly, but they were doing it badly. So instead, I suggested that my mom just asked them to teach her how to cook fried rice, fried noodles, and gong bao ji ding, three super common and usually delicious authentic Chinese dishes, and that’s what she did, and the next day I think it turned out pretty well.

We stopped to take picture on the motorscooter ride. To left is Nancy, our amazing tour guide.

After we left the school we realized that the rain had actually stopped for the first time in days and we immediately decided to rent motor scooters to go on a tour of the Yangshuo karst peaks. There were hawkers promoting tours on almost every corner in Yangshuo, literally, so we just asked the first one we passed. The first question I asked the vendor was if she had helmets, and she said yes. This was a good sign, as the vendor we had questioned the day before had laughed when I asked this question and explained that helmets were not really necessary at all, as though it were obvious. But this vendor had them, and she actually offered a reasonable price off the bat – 100 RMB for a motorized scooter for the whole day. She said she could add a tour guide for 150. I asked if we could get a discount on the bikes since we were renting 4, and she said yes, and I suggested 80, and she said OK. We agreed to the tour and said we would go rally the troops and return in an hour.

It sounded great – around 550 RMB (less than $100) for 5 people to scooter around the beautiful landscape for a full day, and it was great. It was ridiculously, ridiculously great. We completely lucked out on the tour guide. Her name was Nancy, and she was clearly a sweet, decent woman and was one of the few people in Yangshuo, besides the people in the cooking school, who did not appear to want to rip us off in the slightest bit. She smiled a lot and let us take as long as we wanted all day and led us on an amazing six-hour tour of the Yangshuo countryside, through obscure villages, over muddy obscure mountain paths, through back woods and into huge rice fields in valleys, and answered all our questions and even told us about her family and that they all grew up in farming families but were now working in the tourism industry in Yangshuo. About herself, she said early on that she was just a farmer, with a smile that flickered with an understanding of the negative connotations that word carries in China but also the fact that she had risen above that status by way of her use of English in the tourism industry.

I probably annoyed my family by speaking Chinese with Nancy, even though her English was much better than my Chinese, but she was accommodating with me and seemed to appreciate that I could speak the language. She told me that she had learned her English by taking a months-long (I forget how many months, I think 6) training course in English. She also said that often in China the children of a family take the man’s name (females in marriages in China don’t typically take the man’s name after marriage), but that her son had taken her name. “Because I am the most important person in my family,” she added, again smiling slightly.

This is the little dirt path where Nancy showed us the rice -- it was in the middle of nowhere and totally quiet, a nice contrast from the touristy busy-ness of Yanshuo

The motorcycle ride was a bit difficult for my mother, because she had only ridden a motorcycle once before and some of the trails we went on were very thin and very muddy, but for me it was very fun and reminded me of my days riding a dirt bike in the woods in New Hampshire when I was a teenager. About halfway through the trip one of the bikes broke down, and Nancy made a phone call to a person who must have been her dealer, and the dealer agreed to bring another bike out and take care of the broken-down one. It was about that time that I realized that Nancy didn’t own or hold any stake in the motorcycles we were riding, and I realized I could ride the hell out of mine and really have fun, so I started playing in the mud on the bike more and opening it up all the way when we hit open stretches. I was able to get it up to about 40 MPH on a paved road, which was as fast as I wanted to go anyway on a small motorcycle in China. Also while driving through the mountains in Yangshuo there was little reason to go fast – the slower you went, the more chance you had to look at the incredible mountains and valleys and streams and hollows. The place was amazing.

At one point Nancy stopped and showed us the rice growing in the fields. The rice was green and lush and stood about knee high or higher, and she explained how at harvest time the farmers would cut the clumps of rice blades with a knife and use a small threshing machine (the word “threshing” is my guess and not her descriptor) to actually get the rice out of it’s green pod-like container. She also knelt over a stream and showed me some snails and I recognized them as the kind that is so often fried up with a bunch of numbing hot sauce in restaurants in Fujian – the kind you can suck out of the shell in one slurping kiss – and when I asked her if she wanted the snail she said no, but if there were more she might gather them.

The tour went on and on and on, and by the end I was exhausted and everyone seemed to be hungry and the sun was red and hanging low. Finally I asked Nancy to bring us back and we skipped the final couple of stops she had scheduled, but she was still ready to bring us on another hour or two of touring. The woman was working hard and making sure that we all had a good experience – I noticed that she went out of her way to talk with each member of the group every once in a while, not focusing on any one person but trying to switch between people and make sure everyone heard something interesting – and she earned every damn bit of that 150 RMB, which is a good day’s work in China (even for me). As we pulled into the garage and put the bikes away I thanked Nancy and said the day had been perfect and we were all happy. “I am happy too,” she said, “because today I got a group of five. It’s a good day for me.”

(I got her card at the end of the trip – her phone number is 138-7837-4059 and her email is nancyzhang09@126.com)

Tasty meals in Yanshuo

We all wrote enthusiastic comments in her recommendation book and went to a big Chinese dinner nearby, which I enjoyed thoroughly but which everyone else only enjoyed a bit – they were still not used to how to use Chinese sevingware, the rules of table (in China you eat out of a bowl and never off a plate, for instance, and of course you use chopsticks and not a fork), and the completely different palette of tastes that comprises Chinese cuisine.

One of the last things we did in Yangshuo was a cooking class, which was a little expensive at 150 RMB ($20 per person), but was four hours long and included a tour of the local food market, instruction on cooking and a final meal, all with a translator, so I think it was well worth it. I missed it because I slept in.

I realized over the trip that Chinese things – the food, the compulsion to drink hot water and not cold water, the flavors and smells and sights and habits – they are all part of a very big painter’s palette that is just different, just fundamentally different, from the palette of the culture from whence I came. It’s not that the people are weird or that it’s impossible to get accustomed to Chinese life; it’s just that you have to come to understand the colors that underlie everything here, become familiar with the palette, and then things begin to fall in place. But you can’t mix the colors. Just as you can’t take a palette of earthy greens and browns and yellows and splash hot pink on top of it, you can’t really take an American diet and mix it in harmoniously with a Chinese diet. The flavors, the ingredients, the philosophies, start from different places and go in different directions. You have to choose one and stick with it for a while. You can’t sit down expecting a burger and fries and end up with fried snails and curdled duck’s blood. It doesn’t work that way. So, I think my family had a bit of a turbulent time, food- and stomach-wise, throughout the trip, and it was a bit tough for them to eat and appreciate the Chinese food. But I think that’s OK. You can’t get used to it and start to appreciate it in just two weeks; it took me a lot longer than that; it’s just too weird and different at first. But I did realize, a bit, how much I had changed since coming here. There are so many things I like now that I thought were freaky at first – drinking boiled water, for one; eating everything out of a bowl; spitting at table; eating snails; sharing all dishes with the whole table; eating cold chicken legs at the beginning of meal; weird-looking, generally unidentifiable meats; jellyfish; etc. The list goes on and on. But it’s just because I’ve had enough positive experiences with all those foods to understand what good is when it comes to those foods. If you don’t even know what good or bad jellyfish is, how can you know that the slimy thing you’re putting into your mouth is not poison?

As part of their cooking course, my mom, uncle and cousin went to the Yangshuo food market, where they got a glipse of the very different, definitely dirtier and more gruesome Chinese food-shopping process. The only substantiative comment I got from them on the experience was: "It was definitely real."

After dinner we all went home and cleaned up and passed out. The next day was the cooking class and then we would leave Yangshuo to go to my base city in Fujian. The cooking class was located near the end of town, near the food market in a building with the most amazing view of Yangshuo that we saw on our entire trip. For 150 RMB per person, the school provided a translator, a chef and a guide; they met at 9 a.m. and went to the food market in Yangshuo (the only thing I heard from my uncle about the market was that it was “real; it was definitely, definitely real”) and then went back and cooked. Everybody had their own wok and utensils and salt and spices, and around noontime my father and I joined them to eat.

As part of their cooking experience they also tried some Chinese tea with the traditional tea set...this method of brewing tea is extremely common, but usually with slightly smaller cups, which means that every two or three sips the tea server has to refill your cup for you

We sat on a deck on the sixth floor of the hotel the school was located and looked out over Yangshuo and enjoyed the food and a few beers, and then it was time to go. We went back to the hotel and packed up in the van and headed back through the karst peaks, this time in the daylight, to return to the airport and turn our path toward the little city in Fujian where I had lived for nine months, Sanming.

The family arrives in Hong Kong

(This is part 1 of a 5-part series)

Hong Kong: A delay, a rainstorm and a night ride through the mountains

The journey all across eastern China has just ended, so before posting pictures I’m going to try to recall everything I can about the 14 day trip here.

Leaving Sanming

My family’s visit to China took place at the beginning of summer, just a day after I wrapped up the last bits of my teaching work for the semester. My mother and father would be flying to Hong Kong from Boston, and my uncle and cousin (mother’s side) both flew in from San Francisco. I was pretty much flat-out busy for two weeks before they came, booking tickets and hotels at the last minute and administering final exams and giving grades. So when the time finally came to take a train to Hong Kong to meet my parents, I was exhausted and had developed a bit of a cold, but I was ready to go. I had been living in a small city in southeastern China (Sanming, Fujian Province, right across from Taiwan) for several months without leaving for more than a couple of days, and I hadn’t left Fujian since February, so I was ready to get out of the area for a little while and see what the rest of China had to offer.

Hong Kong

The first destination was Hong Kong. I left Sanming on the 23rd of June to go meet my parents, submitting final grades that morning and then buying a sleeper bus ticket to take me the 14 hours to Shenzhen, which is a major industrial city in the Chinese mainland just a few miles away from Hong Kong Island. From Shenzhen I could literally cross the border from mainland to Hong Kong by subway. I had originally planned to go by sleeper train, which is much more comfortable and in this case faster, but all across southeastern China over the past month it had rained, and floods and landslides had shut down the train route. So I boarded the bus in the afternoon and we set out west.

The only notable thing from the bus trip was that the bus’s dinner stop was several hours away from Sanming, at a broken-down-looking roadside restaurant where they served bad chicken soup and fried vegetables and rice and charged an outrageous 15 yuan for the meal (about $2 USD; normally this kind of meal would cost 7 or 8 yuan). But the place was obviously in the middle of nowhere and supported at least a few families, who appeared to be living in total poverty. Connected to the dining hall I could see their living quarters, which consisted basically of half a dozen beds crowded together and shrouded in mosquito nets. The place is hard to describe; it was just the kind of place that you know at a glance is inhabited by people who make no money and have very little, so it was easier not to feel cheated as I forked over my money. It was a bit of a racket; I took my food and they told me to pay later, and after I started eating they asked for the money; that was how I got tricked. But there was nothing to do about it; I had already started eating so I couldn’t barter. I paid my money and reboarded the bus.

As the sun was coming up I arrived in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a huge manufacturing city that is full of modern, brand-new buildings, and it would look like a modern, well-developed city except that everything in it appears to be under construction, recently under construction or about to go under construction. There are piles of dirt, brick, metal, and other building materials everywhere — in parking lots, on sidewalks, in roads — and everything gives a feeling of being sort of haphazardly placed — as though the entire city were a sort of giant sandbox or playpen for designers and builders toying with the idea of a city. Buildings seem to not really line up in neat blocks; parking lots are incomplete; restaurants sit awkwardly next to factories and warehouses crop up next to shopping malls. The whole place seemed surreal as the bus drove through it, periodically stopping to drop off passengers, one at a time, until the bus was almost empty when we finally arrived at the station.

When I walked out of the Shenzhen station there were about 20 cabbies surrounding the exit, trying to usher me to their cabs. I didn’t think quickly and let one of the cabbies take me to his cab before I started to barter with him for a ride to the Shenzhen train station; I should have haggled cab fares when I was surrounded by 20 cabbies, but wasn’t sharp enough in the dazed blue dawn. So the 20 minute ride cost me more than it should have; about 70 yuan. The city started to redden as the sun came up and my cab approached the train station. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the main Shenzhen rail station and the cabbie told me that the subway would open in about 30 minutes, at 6:30 a.m.

As I was nearly arriving at the Hong Kong border crossing, where my cell phone would stop working (for some reason mainland China cell phones don’t work in Hong Kong), my mom called me up and told me that their plane had been delayed for reasons unknown, and that they would arrived at least 12 hours late; they were stuck in their connecting city, Detroit. This was fine because we had 36 hours in Hong Kong before we would fly to Guilin, to begin our travel in mainland, but it was a bit of a downer. She also told me that immediately before leaving San Francisco, my uncle had had to take his daughter (who was also coming to China) to the hospital because she had been complaining of strange stomach cramps, but that the hospital had cleared her to fly and they had successfully taken off. So I should still go to HK to connect with them. I wished my mom luck and said that I would try to find a calling card in HK so that I could get in touch with her and confirm her new arrival time later.

Arriving again

Arriving in Hong Kong was less dramatic than it was the first time I traveled from mainland China to HK, probably because this time I knew what to expect. I knew that I would suddenly find myself in a much wealthier, cleaner, more orderly, more familiar in a way and yet also unfamiliar environment. I knew that I would suddenly become more aware of my own body odor and clothing and that everyone would suddenly be better dressed and wealthier and just generally moving at a different pace (faster pace) than I had become accustomed to. So it wasn’t that much of a shock, and it felt really good to be back on the streets of Hong Kong (I spent 10 days there in the spring waiting for a new visa), cruising around on their super clean and efficient subway system and walking down the streets, digging the Western city vibe.

I only had the morning and part of the afternoon to get organized before I had to go to the airport to meet my uncle and cousin, so I immediately found an internet bar to search for the address of our hotel so I could check in and figure out how to get a calling card.

I settled on a calling card in one of the 711s that are all over Hong Kong (this is one of the major differences between HK and mainland; mainland really hasn’t figured out the magic of convenience stores, and it really does make life less convenient) and figured out how to check into our hotel, which was the plush and comfortable City Garden Hotel a few subway stops east of Central HK. I took a shower in the hotel’s bathroom and sat in the hotel room for 10 minutes and suddenly felt cleaner than I had felt in months. There is just something about being in HK that is that way — it’s the subtle noxious smell of mainland hotel bathrooms, or the dirty smell of the water, or the fact that laundry drying machines are not allowed in southern mainland — there is some indefinable way that life in mainland is dirtier than life elsewhere, inevitably dirtier, and once you are accustomed to it you don’t really feel it or sense it again until you leave mainland completely. And that is what I did in the hotel — just sat there and felt cleaner and fresher than I had felt in a long time, and then put on a fresh shirt and headed off to the airport.

Visiting the Night Market. It was so hot and sweaty and crowded, and we were exhausted, so we ducked out quickly after arriving

At the airport I met up with my cousin and uncle and then we headed back to the hotel pretty much immediately, and after about 20 minutes of walking around we ate at the best restaurant I have tried in Hong Kong yet: called Little Chili. It was a small Sichuan-style restaurant only a few blocks away from the City Garden Hotel specializing in (as the name implies) spicy Sichuan dishes including hot pot, shui3 zhu3 (I don’t know what that dish is called in English) and spicy fried meat dishes. We ordered Sichuan-style spicy fried chicken, fried Chinese greens, fried Chinese boiled dumplings and an eggplant dish and everything was ridiculously good, and way cheaper than you’d expect in Hong Kong. The 20-oz Qingdao beers were only 10 HKD! In the 10 days I spent in Hong Kong in the spring, I scoured the island for good food deals and I never found anything like this place. If you’re looking for good, cheap food in Hong Kong, Little Chili is definitely the place to go.

Unfortunately I screwed up ordering food and mistakenly ordered two orders of the spicy chicken dish, even just one of which would have been too big for the three of us. This was because I pretended to understand the waitress when I really didn’t understand the last question she asked me. After the confusion and the slight botching of what otherwise would have been an excellent introduction for my cousin and uncle to Chinese cuisine, I realized I would have to be stubborn and persistent in getting Chinese speakers to help me understand them through the duration of the trip, which would eventually result in me really getting much better at sticking to a conversation in Chinese, even when things got bungled or were difficult to understand. Which is of course essential for really making progress in the language.

The next morning, my parents came. It had been about nine months since I had seen them, which is one of the longest if not the longest period I’ve gone without seeing them. It was really joyful and almost tearful. In a way, I was almost nervous to see them again because it had been so long and I had missed them — I was nervous about the emotional ups and downs of seeing them for a good period of time and then having to say goodbye again. But seeing them again in person overwhelmed those worries and after a few minutes we got headed on our way to getting a taxi back to the hotel.

Connecting away from home

The next day, in Hong Kong, it rained, and it continued to rain throughout most of our time in the South. Our one day in Hong Kong we spent walking around — we went to the Man Mo Temple, and shopped for the necessities we would need for the rest of our trip, and did some antique-shop browsing. My cousin and uncle went to the old nunnery in Hong Kong and gave it great reviews, although I’ve never been myself. And for dinner we found an excellent and fairly cheap Chinese restaurant in SoHo, a little bit away from the escalator where all the overpriced food is. But it was quickly time to leave the expensive hotels and restaurants of Hong Kong — we only had about a day there, and then we took the bus across to the Shenzhen airport. I was a bit nervous to cross the border with my family — I knew everything would be fine, but I was anxious anyway — and then border crossing by bus was not as clean or easy as it is when you go from HK to Shenzhen by subway. But we all passed through mainland customs without a hitch, and after a delay of a few hours in the Shenzhen airport because of heavy rain, we took off for Guilin, our first destination in mainland China.

In the shuttle bus from HK to the Guilin airport, right after the border crossing, I encountered something of a major coincidence. There was another young guy on the bus, sitting next to my father and I, who I started talking to soon after we boarded after the crossing — a German guy a couple of years older than me who was also setting out with his mom to go traveling around China. The coincidences were this, in the order that I realized them:

1: He had also been teaching English in China, only he had been at it for two years and in Xi’an, and he had also been teaching German

2: He was also just starting out on a tour of mainland China with his mother

3: His mother had arrived in Hong Kong on the same day as my parents, and she would be leaving Beijing on the same day my parents would be leaving Beijing

4: They were also planning to travel to Guilin at the same time as us, and in fact had the same flight

5: They had been staying in the same hotel as us and the German guy, whose name was Jan (pronounced like “Yen” in English), had noticed us in the hotel

6: Jan was planning on traveling south through China after his mother left, just as I had planned to do, stopping in Xi’an and then continuing toward Taiwan

7: Jan and his mother’s seats on the airplane were actually directly behind my and my parents’ seats

There the coincidences (perhaps mercifully) stopped. Needless to say I ended up talking to Jan for about four hours straight and learned that he had spent about 3 years living in India studying Buddhism, that he studied sociology in university in Germany, that he was more or less sick of China and wanted to leave, and that he wanted to move to Taiwan to continue his study of Chinese, and that he was planning to go to Massachusetts in the fall to practice silent meditation for three solid months. He was a vegetarian and a non-smoker and I was able to identify with almost all of his views, except that he seemed to have been traveling and studying and meditating long enough to be far more calm and understanding of certain situations than me. And he was able to provide a lot of insight on life in China, particularly with respect to friendships, relationships and women — something I talked about with almost all the foreigners I met along our trip throuhgout the country (the foreigners who were living or had lived in China, anyway) since as I plan to sign for another year teaching English in mainland the reality of establishing and maintaining real relationships here becomes more of a necessity/reality.

Eventually, though, it got late, and I was exhausted, and I passed out in my airplane seat as Jan turned to his mom for conversation in German. My parents were already fast asleep on the plane; because of the delay, we wouldn’t make it to our hotel in Yangshuo, a small mountain town in the famous karst peaks in south-central China, until at least 2 in the morning.

Arriving in Yangshuo

I had booked a van to take us the hour and a half from the Guilin airport to our Yangshuo hotel, and when the lights of Guilin finally slipped behind us after the van reached the highway, we couldn’t see much out of the windows, except the occasional karst mountain floating by in the hazy dark like a phantom cloud. The karst mountains are plane mountains — they rise in great multitude from what appears to have once been a flat plane, not very tall or massive but sharp and jutting, like the image of a sound wave suddenly interrupted by a shout. They are so famous and beautiful that they are featured on the back of the Chinese 20-dollar bill. Everyone I spoke to who had seen them said they were one of the most beautiful places in China. But in the night they were just vague dark shapes moving slowly in the distance.

From our balconies in the hotel in Yangshuo we could see the nearby mountains and the river

We arrived in Yangshuo and checked into our hotel, and just as we were settling down to go to sleep someone set of fireworks in the park across the street from our hotel, and I saw the chrysanthemum-like explosions of fireworks outside at 3 in the morning. The next morning we woke up and stepped onto the balcony and looked directly out to the LiJiang river outside our balcony (we stayed at the Riverview Hotel, cheap, comfortable, with great service) and huge karst peaks to either side, towering over the little town and carpeted with green.

I traveled to Xiamen last weekend and stayed there for a few days. I left my base city by myself on Saturday evening and arrived in Xiamen in the morning, spent three days there and then came back.

Xiamen is a pretty city of about 2 million on the ocean.

I figured that for this trip, rather than inundating the blog with words, I would just post some pictures and some audio of walking through Xiamen.

So here goes.

Waiting in the train station, midnight.

The smoking room in the train station.

The sleeper cabin I had to myself, morning.

A Xiamen back alley, midday.

A Xiamen side-street.

A church on the same street.

Some wriggling prawns.

A shark moments after its head was cut off.

The packed ferry.

The ocean, afternoon.

Before I left to go on my visa run to Hong Kong, I really tried to find a site on the web that would explain everything to me. But I couldn’t find one. So I want to create a quick guide here to going to Hong Kong to change your visa status.

The whole thing is actually pretty easy, and once you get to Hong Kong there are so many English speakers that you really have nothing to worry about.

Here’s what you need to do: If you have a tourist visa and you want to switch it to a Z visa, there is no way to do that in mainland China. You have to leave mainland China to go to the embassy for your country (or, if you’re like me and hate waiting in lines, you can pay a travel agent in HK to go to the embassy for you). A great place to go is Hong Kong, because it’s close to the mainland and easily accessible and you don’t need a visa to enter Hong Kong if you’re U.S./British citizen.

What you need: You need a Foreign Expert’s License from the provincial capital of whatever province you intend to work in. This is a pink-colored piece of paper that says you are a foreign expert. You also need a letter from the Provincial Capital directing you to apply for a Z visa at the Hong Kong Embassy for your country.

NOTE: The letter MUST say Hong Kong. If it says “apply forthwith at the nearest embassy in your home country”, you will have to send it back to the provincial capital to be changed, which could be a delay of another week or so.

You also need a passport-sized photo for the application.

When you actually get to Hong Kong and apply for your Z-visa, the embassy or travel agency (whichever you use to get your Z visa — I used Shoestring Travel in Kowloon and they were quick and decently helpful and relatively cheap) will take the original documents away from you and just give you back a passport with the Z-visa in it. The Z visa will have a “duration of stay” of 000 (zero) days on it. But really this means that you and your employer have 30 days from your date of entry to mainland China to get a temporary residence permit so that you can stay in China. The residence permit can be valid for up to 12 months and allows you to travel in and out of China freely.

How to get to Hong Kong: If you’re relatively new to China as you’re thinking about going to China to apply for a residence permit, your Chinese skills might not be so good and you might be worried about expensive Hong Kong. I would say the first one, traveling with weak Chinese skills, shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and the second one, HK being expensive, you can’t do anything about.

But you should be able to get to HK pretty cheaply, especially if you’re in sourthern China.

Here’s how: Go to Shenzhen and take the subway from there to Hong Kong Go to this web site and look up the train schedule from your city to Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is in mainland China, right next to Hong Kong. If you take a train to Shenzhen, you can get off the train and inside the Shenzhen train station you can go through mainland China customs and cross over to official Hong Kong, and then take the Hong Kong subway to HK. (Once you get off the train in Shenzhen this will all be easy, because there are signs throughout the train station that say, in English, “HONG KONG”. You just need to follow these signs through the train station [most people will go that way] and you will find customs and the subway). The web site linked to above will give you pricing and time schedules for the trains going to Shenzhen. In my experience the site has always been accurate.

You have to actually go to the train station to buy train tickets in China. So go to your local train station and figure out how to buy the tickets you need. Basic Chinese should be able to accomplish this. You can say “dao4 Shen1 zhen4″, they will ask you what day, you say the day, whether you want a soft sleeper or hard sleeper (ruan3wo4 soft sleeper/ying4wo4 hard sleeper) and presto, you’ve got your ticket. (From what I understand, you can’t buy a train ticket more than 10 days in advance in mainland.)

If you’re traveling a really long ways and have money to spare, soft sleepers aren’t bad. There’s less cigarette smoke and it’s theoretically more secure because you get a small cabin with only 3 other people, so there’s less risk of someone poking around in your stuff. The beds are about the same in terms of comfort. The difference between the two is just that hard sleeper you share a whole train car with maybe 80 other people in 3-stack bunks, whereas soft sleeper you get a more secluded (and quieter) cabin with 4 bunks, 2-stacked.

Overall I think both are pretty safe. If you are traveling with a lot of stuff and are seriously worried about someone stealing your stuff, go with the soft sleeper, but if you’ve just got a bag of clothes and a camera, keep your money and passport on your body and sleep with your camera by your feet or head, and put your bag of clothes wherever. Nobody wants to steal a bag of clothes anyway.

When you get on the train and find your bunk, just relax. Someone will come and take your ticket from you. They will give you a plastic card. Keep this card. When you are close to arriving at your destination, they will come back and get your card from you, which will of course wake you up if you’re sleeping. If they’re taking your card, it means you’re almost there so you can get your stuff together. If you want to ask someone when you’re going to arrive, you can say “wo3men shen2me shi2hou4 dao4 Shen1zhen4″ (I’m not good at Chinese so the grammar here is probably wrong, but it gets the message across).

In Shenzhen, it’s easy to find the border. Cross the border and take the subway to Hong Kong. The HK subway is labeled in English and now that you’re in HK it will be super easy to get around because at least half of the people around you are fluent in English.

Once you’re in Hong Kong: If you have your papers with you when you arrive in Hong Kong, it will only take two to three business days (maximum) to get your visa. You might be able to do it in less than 24 hours.

If you’re like me and had to go to Hong Kong to wait for your papers to come in the mail, you might have to hang out for a while. If this is the case and you’re trying to reduce expenses, I would recommend staying on Lamma Island. It’s way cheaper than anywhere in HK and it’s easy to get to by a 20-minute ferry ride and much more relaxing. If you’re staying in HK for a while and want to keep costs low or just not stay in the busy city, just go to Lamma. But, if you want to stay in the city and money isn’t really a problem, SoHo is nice. If you want to stay in the city and you want to save money, the ChungKing Mansions in Kowloon (hostels) are definitely the cheapest place to stay in the city. I stayed in the New Peking Guest House (actually called the Peking Guest House once you arrive there) and it was satisfactory, about 180 HKD per night for a tiny private room.

I think that should cover most everything for someone who has to go to HK to change visas. Once you get your Z visa, of course, you have to return to mainland and still get your residence permit, which requires that you have a foreign expert’s card, which is like a second passport, kind of. So that’s potentially another hassle if your employer is as unhelpful as mine was. But this little guide should get you through the trip to HK and back without costing you too much money.

If any travelers in this situation actually stumble across this and have any questions, I’m happy to answer.

And remember to have fun while you’re in Hong Kong. : )

This week a friend of a friend, whom I had never met (the friend of the friend), came to visit me from a huge city (Guangzhou) several hundred miles west of here where she also teaches English.

The trip was a little slapdash. She had a few days off and took the sleeper bus here from Guangzhou, arriving on Monday morning, and had about two and a half days to stay here and see Fujian.

The idea, before she arrived, was to travel down to Xiamen, about five hours away by bus, to spend some time there and see the sights. But when I realized she wouldn’t get here until 6 a.m. Monday morning I backed off that plan a little, thinking it would be too rushed to cram in a trip to another city in Fujian if she wanted to see any of my base city.

It turned out that we managed to get to Xiamen and see my city at the same time, a feat which involved hiking around here for one day and taking a cruise around on the backs of some motorcycle taxis, and then the next day rising fairly early and deciding to go to Xiamen anyway, even though we couldn’t stay in a hotel there because neither of us had our passports with us.

It was fun, if tiring. Monday was tomb-sweeping day in China, a holiday for honoring the dead by visiting their tombs  in the mountains and lighting small fires by them and burning incense with family. So we swung out of town and started up a country road that my professor, when he was still here last month, had shown me, and walked a few miles into the country. We saw lots of tombs untouched, and then a few with families milling around, burning incense and I think eating. We climbed up a hill and saw a tomb up close and, next to it, another under construction.

The tombs are sort of scattered around the evergreen-and-bamboo forested mountains of Fujian, oval shaped, made of gray and red stone and brick, resembling a female oraface or a bisected papaya. The mountains in Fujian are pretty and misty and lush-looking, resembling in shape and size the Green Mountains in Vermont where I lived for five years in college. They look prime for skiing to my native Northerner’s eye, but as far as I know snow falls here only once a decade or less. Once you put the city behind you walking on those roads, it would be easy to forget about the large, clogged city you left behind if not for the smog that still lingers in the air even miles away.

We came back to town after an afternoon in the hills, walking on the way back past the enormous steel mill in this city that has essentially swallowed whatever town was there before. There are small residential streets where people still make a life as the ten-foot-wide blue dump trucks from the steel mill rumble by all day, leaving behind trails of exhaust and dust, and whatever industry churns inside the blue steel walls of the factory that stands above the small houses.

Then we ate and considered watching a movie and then went home instead. We were both tired from the walk and planned to go to Golden Lake the next day. But when I woke up rain was dumping down and I realized that anything we did would have to be indoors. There being nothing to do indoors in my city, I proposed that we catch a bus to Xiamen and see what we could in an afternoon. If we had to be sitting around inside all day, at least we would be moving.

This made me feel better after waking up and seeing the rain. We went downtown and bought tickets for a bus leaving ten minutes later and hopped on board. That was at 11 a.m., and I figured that at least we would be there by four and would be able to see some of the city, no matter how early we had to come back. I was exicted. I’ve lived close to Xiamen for more than five months now and haven’t really seen any of it except the bus station, and I knew I would be satisfied to get just a taste of it.

I felt that way for the first three hours of the trip, buzzed because of hopping on a bus with no set plan for return, and then I started looking out the window. Long stretches of tumbling, slanting mountains drifted by at first, interrupted only by 30-second stretches of darkness as we passed under mountains. Then the mountains began to flatten and the air thickened. It looked almost like twilight, even though it was only two o’clock. The air was thick with smog and occasional rain, and we began to see factories, but not just factories — huge industrial compounds of factories, whole towns made into factories or factories made into towns. Many seemed to be oriented towards stone mining or refining and furniture manufacture. It was one of those moments when you don’t willingly step back, but feel shoved back to marvel at the vastness of production that our world requires, and the system that allows it to exist thusly — the size of those factories that produce towels, desks, chairs, stone steps, whatever, that no doubt find themselves post-production scattered all across the world, used by every kind of person, all manufactured in this little vein of mountainous land between here and there.

Once, around three in the afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a town going by — smoke rising from the factories, the factories seeming to be all there was of the town, the air thick and twilightish, a long row of maybe 1,000 middle-school students walking along the side of the main road in front of a factory in their nylon school uniforms, returning home, probably, from school, in the middle of all this.

Then it started to rain harder and the traffic on the highway stopped for maybe an hour. Just stopped, no explanation, no idea of what was ahead of us. People got off the bus to socialize and smoke cigarettes on the road. Somebody lit one on the bus. It seemed to be getting later more quickly. I wondered if going all this way had been a good idea, and thought about my classes the next morning.

Eventually the traffic cleared up and we passed by the scene of the accident. Most of the debris and all of the victims appeared to have been cleared away. What was left were five or six cars piled together inside a tunnel and pushed to the side of the road to let traffic through. The bus picked up speed and a half hour later we were inside Xiamen and it was raining hard and 5:30 p.m. We hailed a cab to the bus station and got train tickets back for 10:30. This gave us about four hours to explore, and we went to Gulangyu (a small island just across from the city that was British-settled a century-or-so ago) and walked around for a while, ate, bought a souvenir, and went back to the train station.

We had hard sleepers, which turned out to be comfortable enough, but for some reason I couldn’t sleep. My visitor-traveling companion spent an hour on the phone with her boyfriend and I put on my headphones and turned the music all the way up. I started thinking about things I didn’t want to think about, feeling lonely and worried about being awake to get off the train when it arrived back home. An old man, who I had been a little rude to when we got on the train (he had told us we had the wrong bunks and I had insisted he was wrong, until, of course, I realized he was right — I still can’t really read Chinese) had told me that we would arrive around 6 a.m. but I didn’t know how we would know.

It turned out to be not a problem. The train steward woke us up at six and swapped out our tickets and fifteen minutes later, as I stood on the smoker train looking out the window, I saw the first signs of my home town out the window; I knew we’d be there in about five minutes.

I felt fine after we got off the train. That had been my first real trip in China where my Chinese skills had been sufficient enough to handle all the stuff involved with booking tickets, finding sightseeing stuff, buying food and other necessities, talking to cab drivers. But it wasn’t just that. The morning had one of those feelings that you get when you have been moving for a while, when you’re dead tired but not ready to sleep. There were a few people riding by on bicycles this early, dressed in ponchos and boots for the rain, but still not many people on the street. We hailed a cab and went home and I showered and spent a couple hours preparing for class and then slept for ten minutes.

For my afternoon class my friend came and actually taught the class a tongue twister, and they were amazed to meet another foreigner and, as always, incredibly warm and excited and eager to learn. It was really fun, and it was really nice to see someone else’s teaching stlye, to get some new ideas and to get some tips and constructive critiques of my teaching. I got off class and my friend packed her bags and got ready to go. We caught the bus to the bus station, grabbed some Lanzhou noodles to go and I saw her off on the train platform.

Before she left, we sat in the waiting room and watched Chinese Informercials for skin whitening creams and laughed and made fun of the T.V. It was fun, and I learned a lot just in three days about what it is like to be a foreigner in a major city (Guangzhou, where she teaches, is huge, and there are a ton of foreigners there — it was interesting to hear about her experience and how different it has been from mine; she makes more than twice the money, for instance, is not nearly such a spectacle to the locals and has a lot of foreigner friends and, as previously mentioned, a foreigner beau), but as we waited for the train I didn’t really feel like eating and I couldn’t stop feeling surprised at how much I felt I was going to miss this person who I hadn’t even known three days before.

This was a repeat of the experience I had a month previously, when a professor  and friend from my undergrad college stayed here for a month and I spent some time with him almost every day. Seeing this place through both of their eyes definitely changed it for me, and also made me realize that in the day-to-day, when I am here, even if I am not actively missing home or the people I know and love back there, there is a lot I am missing.

So, I walked out of the train station after she left and headed back outside. It was getting darker again and the rain was settling down now; the streets were wet but it was barely drizzling on my neck. I sat on a bench for a while and thought about it, about what it means to go somewhere and then come back, to do things that you do just because you want to, not because you know how they will end up or what they will mean.

Then I got on the bus and came back home, one foot after the other, happy and surprised like always, but also sad again to see someone go.

Before coming to Hong Kong, I naturally booked the cheapest hostel I could find. It’s called the New Peking Guest House, located on Kowloon (the peninsula north of Hong Kong Island, considered part of HK but not the island), which has turned out to be the epicenter of tourist traps in HK. 

That’s a bit of an exagerration. The area is not too bad…it’s very city-ish, lots of foot traffic and plenty of large financial buildings around. Certainly not everyone here is a tourist. But it turns out that just about every young person who comes to HK on a budget stays in the Chungking mansions, which is the large building of hostels where my guest house is located, and so a small unregulated market of guys that appear to generally be Indian and African have cropped up in the area, most of whom are relentlessly hawking watches, rooms in cheaper hostels, and a variety of other “goods”, both lascivious and pharmacological. Once you walk a little ways down the street this stuff quickly dissipates, and the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon is just a relatively expensive downtown-y area full of clothing stores, malls and restaurants. So that’s the first thing I saw when I came to HK.

I got to the hostel in the evening, though, and pretty quickly went to bed. Before I went to bed, however, I tried to contact someone on CouchSurfing.com, which turned out to be an incredibly wise move. 

Before I had even fallen asleep the person, a girl whose CouchSurfing page said she was into books and would be happy to show anyone around HK, had written me back, and the next day I wrote her back, and finally we set a time to meet that evening. This was great. I had only been in HK one day and already I was gonna get to make a friend. 

That day, which was Thursday, I took the subway across the harbor to HK Island with the idea of taking the tram to the peak of Victoria Peak. But when I got there I decided it was too foggy to even bother. So I sat and had a cup of coffee. An older couple, maybe in their fifties, came and sat down in the cafe across from me. So I asked them where they were from. The man, in good English with a German accent, told me that they were from Germany. He had a cousin living in Idaho. A son living in South America. They were on a two week vacation and had started four days ago in Frankfort (sp?). Next they were going to Macau, and then Australia. They had also come to take the tram and then decided not to. I told them that I had read that you could go to the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, which was right next to us, and check out the observation deck they had there for free. So, we all decided to go. 

The deck was kind of lame, but not entirely pointless. Only one corner of the building is open to the public, so you basically just get a view of the harbor. But it was a pretty nice view, with a view of the enormous 2 International Finance Center building.

2 International Finance Center, 2IFC, is the tallest building in HK and apparently the 7th tallest office building in the world. See it? It's that pointy one. I didn't take this picture, obviously.

I asked the German dude his name, it was Axel, which is perhaps the coolest name ever. He was originally from Homberg (sp?) and was interested in my experience in China so I happily filled him in. Then I said goodbye to them and went back to the hostel to drop some stuff before meeting my new CouchSurfing friend. 

The CouchSurfing friend experience was awesome. Her name was Tif and she was friendly from the get-go. She had clearly shown people from CS around HK before, because she immediately was in tour-guide mode and didn’t totally drop the tour-guide thing the whole time. Which I didn’t mind at all, because she was telling me interesting stuff about HK. She pointed me to the light show on the harbor that happens every night, that I will post pictures of when I return to Sanming and can upload pictures from my camera. She told me about SoHo and how to get there, which I explored two days later and turned out to be the coolest part of HK I have seen so far, she took me on the ferry, which crosses the harbor from Kowloon to Central and is about a million times more fun than taking the subway, and after we wandered around the night market, which I will also post pictures of later, she took me to HK Island to go to a hookah bar, which, who wouldn’t love to go to a hookah bar in Hong Kong. Seriously. 

I also recited poetry with another person for the first time ever. She was talking about how she really likes Saul Williams, and apparently I had had enough beer to recite some Hart Crane and Robert Frost at her. So then I was glad that she responded in kind with some Saul Williams, because otherwise I wouldn’t have realized that it is actually pretty awesome to listen to someone recite poetry, and would have felt foolish for actually reciting poetry at a hookah bar. It’s a really entertaining form of conversation. It just takes a willingness to shelve one’s self-consciousness momentarily. 

So, then, after haggling with some taxi drivers, I went home and slept pretty well until the next morning. Since then I have walked about 20 miles throughout Hong Kong, exploring a ton of it on foot, but of course none of it is as fun when you do it by yourself. It’s interesting, sure, and you get to see some cool things, but always as someone who is totally foreign to everything around him. Always with no sense of belonging to any of the stuff you’re witnessing (which is a feeling you get to have when you walk around with a local, who knows it and lives it every day). 

Today it started raining cats and dogs, so I have even given up on walking around. I went to the movies and watched the film about Confucius, and had dinner. Apparently I’m staying here for another five days-ish, at which point I’ll be able to head back to the mainland, which is a very good thing because eating in HK is way, way too expensive for me. And the 3000 RMB the school promised to reimburse me for this trip has already come and gone like it was nothing (which really, HK costs as much as the U.S., and 3000 RMB is about $400; imagine traveling as a tourist to any U.S. city; how long would $400 last you?).

Peace out till next time. 

: )

Tonight I found something that I wrote last October while I was still in Vermont, before I came to Fujian. Not sure why I never posted it but now seems as good a time as any. I had forgotten what my professor, Mark, had told me before I left. His words have turned out to be totally accurate and true; it’s a pity that I managed to more or less forget them. I suppose that’s the reason for writing in the first place…

How I ended up going to China by saying “OK”

On a summer afternoon this year I was sitting at a desk, in a cubicle, on the eleventh floor of an office building in downtown Portland, Oregeon. A lot of things were gray in that office. The linoleum covering the desk was a kind of granite color, with little chips of darker colored gray to give it a little less sterile look; the cubicle walls were covered in that gray nylon fabric that all cubicle walls are covered with. I had all kinds of charts and phone directories and printouts of information that I had affixed to the wall with gray staples. I had stapled the sheets of paper to the wall long before that day, and had since memorized most of what was on the sheets by sheer repetition of use, which meant that the sheets of paper on my cubicle walls had become invisible to me and therefore meaningless. I had gray pens, and gray file organizers, and a gray computer tower. I even had gray pants. The dust that accumulated on the cuffs of my shirt was gray, and the highway that was visible out the nearest window was gray, and the carpeting that stretched out all around me and throughout the small hive of cubes was gray. Everything was gray, gray, gray. Gray was everywhere. I checked into work at about 8 a.m. and checked out at 5:30 p.m., with a 20-minute lunch break somewhere in the middle. Which meant that for a good portion of my day, nearly every day, I spent a considerable amount of time contemplating, absorbing, ignoring and reviling gray.

As you might expect, the gray in my work life, after a time, began to make things outside of work begin to seem pretty gray, too. Not gray in the literal sense, exactly. More gray in an all-encompassing, world-view-orienting type of way. I think I began to see gray in everything. I began to be gray. I began to think in tones of gray. Not in any kind of well-balanced, yin-yang, seek-the-middle-ground way, but in a dull, impassive, grim, unhappy way. Things were gray and I was not enthused about them, the color or the overall outlook.

But that’s just to set the tone for you. On that day, that summer day, I was feeling very gray, but I was working. I was busily doing whatever it is that office workers do on their computers all day long. I was probably working in Excel. I was probably concentrating hard, on whatever I was working on. Then, for a momentary reprieve from the drudgery of coding, or looking at data, or tweaking some presentation or graph in Excel, I pulled up gmail. There was an email from a friend of mine. It was a brief, informal email, a quick bite that looked like it had been copy and pasted from a newsletter or something that had come through his inbox. The email said that a former professor of mine, from the college where I got my B.A. (the college is a tiny liberal arts school in Vermont), was looking for someone, preferably an alum, to fill a position teaching English in China. The subject line was probably in all caps, and probably said something like “AMAZING OPPORTUNTIY TO TEACH ENGLISH IN CHINA”. I am certain that it contained the word opportunity, because that is where all the trouble started. Or, maybe I should say, that is where all the fun started. However you look at it, I think it was the word “opportunity” that drew me in.

I tend to think that our society, meaning the United States society, and presumably other nations, although I’m not sure which, are generally obsessed with the idea of opportunity. The idea of the American Dream is very much built on the concept of opportunity. Capitalism, at least in my lay mind, is generally synonymous with opportunism, so maybe that is why it seems to me that America is generally preoccupied with the idea of opportunity. The maxim of American opportunism is generally thus: You only get a limited number of opportunities in life, and you have to jump on them when they come along. Stand around long enough, and you’ll get a chance to sit down. You only live once. So on and so on.

The general idea of these idioms seems to be that life is like a waterslide at a summer water park. You wait in line, and wait in line, and wait in line, and eventually you get your chance to jump into some dark, downward-slanting chute through which a ceaseless current of chlorinated water courses. You go whooping and hollering your way down the pipes, toward some unknown wave pool full of screaming, sweaty children. You hope that if someone becomes your landing pad, it will be a chubby kid. You don’t really know where the pipe goes or how long the slide is, because they all wind in and out of each others’ paths confusingly, but you generally expect that the ride will be fun, and that you will get wet, and that you will not get hurt. So you leap willingly into a dark chasm which, to an untrained eye, could easily be an entryway to drowning or suffocation. Occasionally, a kid chickens out and walks the 10-year-old version of the walk of shame, back down the long poolwater-soaked stairways, elbows his or her way through the lines of kids snaking up said stairways and through the cloisters of excited children on each transom, to the sympathetic (we hope) arms of his or her mom. Most kids gawk at these chicken shit children as they walk back down the stairs. Everybody knows they chickened out. Everybody knows that they did not leap into the waterslide whooping and hollering. They got scared.

Maybe people really don’t think of life that way, but sometimes I get the suspicion that nobody ever really leaves the waterpark. There is a little bit of the excitable water-slide goer in all of us, hawkishly looking out for the next scaredy-cat kid to come walking down those urine and chlorine slicked steps.

There are certain key things that certain individuals said to me that helped me make the decision to go. Tonight, sitting in a friend’s living room with the college professor who helped me get the job in China, a friend of mine asked him what the most important piece of advice he could give me was. “I would say just be patient,” he said. “There are all kinds of ways that your patience will be tested, and it’s generally not OK in China to express a lot of impatience, which can be maddening.” He explained that people tend to be less inclined to question orders handed down from on high. That people are generally not good at questioning the whys of what they do, but just accept it as necessary.

One friend who had taught in China told me to bring lots of gifts.

Milton Leathers, a soft-spoken southern gentleman from Athens, Georgia, told me that there was no way I could ever regret going to China if I did it. His words were “Even if something bad happens – and I really don’t think there’s any chance that anything bad will happen – you still will never regret it. I meant think of all the things that you will learn just by being there.”

He also said, “You’re 25, which is about the age that you are starting to realize that the years are going by a bit faster than they did when you were 14 or 15; soon you’ll be working some type of regular job, with a focus on your career, and there won’t be any time to get away to do something like this; and if you do, there will be someone right behind you to replace you in your work.”

The general consensus of everyone I know is that I had to go, which, in a way, means that I did have to go. There was no way that I could have made any other choice, given that. When everyone in your world gives you one version of reality, or potential reality, you have no choice but to accept it. To do otherwise would be nihilistic. Of course, in a way, they never understand the full context, which is why one must question it and make sure they understand the full picture. But there is a difference between showing the whole picture and insisting on one’s unwillingness to do something. I think people saw enough of the picture.

I talked to quite a few people about China, some of whom had been there to teach. One of those people is the uncle of my significant other. He is a writer with graying hair that tends to stand up on his head (his hair), giving him a bit of a shocked look. I talked with him in his living room for an afternoon, about a week ago. Almost the entire time I sat on the couch silently, nodding and smiling as he held forth about everything he could remember about his experience in China.

He talked about the language, his past studies of Chinese, where he was located and the lifestyle he had had there. He told me about some of the friends he had made, and the fact that many of his students had visited him in New York since he had come back home. He talked about some of the other teachers he befriended, one of whom was the dean of his department, whom he taught English during his time there. He showed me books, gave me reading suggestions, burned some CDs of Chinese dictionaries.

One of the things he said was striking, for some reason. He was looking across the coffee table at me, with his wide-eyed, slightly awed look. He crossed one knee over the other. Behind him was a stack of books that reached to the ceiling. Daylight slanted in through the old wood-paned windows of their tiny apartment in the Upper West Side of New York. He mentioned that it had been easy to meet people, that the majority of people were kind, and gentle, and generous. “I loved them,” he added.

A thought: The key to my door is really weird. It’s not like a normal key, where you have a flat object with two edges that are all curvy and bumpy. The bumpy, key-blade part of it has another plane that intersects the main key-blade at a perpendicular angle (so that if you point the key at your face you see a plus sign). It’s extra difficult to fit into the door and for the longest time it took me several minutes to get the door opened in the dark. I wondered if I would ever learn to open the door smoothly without a struggle and a full minute of cursing under my breath. I noticed today that I open it smoothly now, with a minimum of jabbing at the door.

This weekend I went to town on the bus to run some errands, and on the way back it was getting dark out and it was raining and the people on the bus, even though we were packed together closely, were more or less quiet. I was listening to music on my headphones and looked around at all their faces and realized that I was unimaginably far from home and still alive, and I got a little rush of joy but also dull, quiet sadness because, also, I could see how unimaginably separate and different I was from the people on the bus.

Another thought: What would happen if there were technology that could translate one spoken language into another orally, on the spot, so that you could have a conversation with someone without a translator present, without knowing any of their language or they of yours?

Another thought: What is the point of travel? Why does it feel so intrinsically interesting to some of us, and not to others? Why do I feel, now, so ambivalent about travel for travel’s sake, as I have for as long as I can remember, and yet then also why am I now so far away from home?

The bus stops. A woman I watched get on carrying a thick bamboo stick over which were slung two large plastic bags filled with blankets and vegetables straightens up and lifts her stick of bamboo and struggles to get the bags back onto the two ends of it, and as she does this the bus begins to lurch forward. But all the passengers around me shout at the bus driver to stop, and he does, and the lady slowly gathers her things and lurches, herself, towards the exit. We all shuffle aside and press against each other to give her way. Everybody pays the same, 1 yuan, about 15 cents, to ride the bus, even these people who bring on large loads of clothes, food, machinery, I assume in most cases to sell somewhere, with them.

The bus rolls forward again and the driver turns out the cab lights. The drivers do this whenever we are on the road and won’t be stopping for a while, and when they do, everyone on the bus seems to get sleepier and quieter. There is a young girl sitting on a cardboard box on the floor of the bus, next to an older woman who is standing next to a few similar boxes. I’m not sure what’s in the boxes, but I look at the girl. She is staring straight ahead, with no expression that I can discern on her face.  I feel like I recognize this girl, but I don’t know why. She doesn’t appear to be sleeping, just absorbed in some kind of thought. Or maybe no thought at all. I keep glancing down at her face, to see if it will reveal something to me about what she is doing or thinking. I keep expecting her to turn to the woman next to her, since I think they are together, and say something. She just sits there, staring off at nothing. She sits there for ten minutes like that.

Finally we come to my stop, and I get off with a bunch of other students who are all going back to the school too. I open my umbrella and walk in front of the bus and look both ways to see what cars are coming. It is clear, except in the distance, in the lane opposite the bus, a silver car is gliding fast through the rain and shows no sign of slowing down for me or the people around me. We walk across the rainy street and about 100 meters away the car starts laying on its horn. By the time it reaches our stop we are all on the other side of the street, and I hear the ragged sound of its horn bend as it passes behind us.

I walk slowly in the rain. I have very little to do with the rest of my day, and I feel tired. I walk up the hill on the rain-soaked dirt road that leads back to campus. There are little pockets of students all walking the same way, and I walk by some of them and some of them walk by me. There are palm trees on both sides of the road and run-down houses and an old brick factory where plastic is burned and recycled. The walls and the window frames of the building are black with soot and a thick smell of urine and trash seeps up from the stream that flows along the road.

I feel old all of a sudden, but very new, in a way, too, because somehow I know that I was never really supposed to be here or to see any of this. It is all a choice you make, to go somewhere far away like this, and I think about how I made that decision some five-odd months ago. It feels like I didn’t really decide so much as let reality decide for me, while I sat by and weighed the reasons for going or not going as if they had perfectly equal weight. They still do, as far as I can tell, even now that I have put the decision behind me. It made itself, or anyway I don’t feel like I had anything real to do with it.

Robert Frost’s old famous poem says, “And sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth”. These lines are so haunting because they hit at precisely what it is to look at a life–your life–and have decisions before you that are so obviously serious and important that it’s impossible not to feel just a little bit outmatched by them. Like it’s unfair that anyone could have that much power over his/her own life in her hands.

It is also about the recursive nature of time; how you can regret things that you did or didn’t do in the past, but you can also regret things you are not doing now; hell, you can regret things you know you’re not going to do in the future.

But that has nothing to do with whether they actually happen. That has more to do with chance, with how you feel on a particular day, with how important you decide it is to think about the road you’re taking. And with how far ahead and how long you stare down that road.