Moments: Returning After a Holiday

February 16, 2011

The first step back inside the apartment felt somehow unsettling. The room seemed a little darker than I remembered, the walls a little more bare. The air was stuffy. I walked through the door at three p.m. yesterday, dropped my bags, and began to clean. The floor and the sheets were first priority. The window ledge in the bedroom was caked with dust. I worked away at the cleaning for a few hours -- washed the curtains and the sheets, wiped down the shower and mopped the floor.

The construction next door has progressed -- this morning I woke up to the sound of hammers, saws, and voices. Workers talked just beneath my window. I hate to say it, but now is when the pangs of homesickness creep in. At the time I said goodbye to my family I felt nothing. I was thinking about the security line: about taking out my laptop and taking off my shoes and triple-checking my passport and my tickets. After that, I was checking screens for my gate number in L.A., or standing at a Beijing carousel looking for a green army duffel and a torn black suitcase. Then I was looking for a socket to charge my cell phone... an ATM... a taxi. Now, suddenly, I'm in an empty apartment wiping dust off a window ledge; the skies outside are gray, and the landscape is dead with winter.

A teacher at breakfast asked if I was happy to be back. "It's not that I dislike it here," I said, "but it's hard to leave home." I'll feel fine in a week or two.

The apartment:

Moments: Illness

November 5, 2010

I took two students to lunch on Sunday. We stopped in at a popular campus restaurant, but the place was full of people. The students immediately turned and said we would find a different restaurant. I followed them to a place known to the foreigners as “The Corner Restaurant.” We ate green beans, rice, and a dish the menu called "Crispy Sweet and Spicy Chicken." At three o’clock that afternoon my stomach started the same dull ache I’d felt several times the semester before. I ignored it at first. By five, I was wrapped in a blanket on the couch, holding a hot water bottle to my stomach. Foreign friend Amanda brought toast to me at dinner. Ten minutes after she left, I walked to the bathroom, kneeled before the toilet, and passed out. When I came to, a lurch in my throat left vomit on my sweat pants, the bath mat, the hot water bottle, and the tile. I felt lighter – almost too light. I cleaned with paper towels and went to the couch again.

Almost every hour that night, I woke with more stomach pains and diarrhea. Substitute teachers were called for my classes. Amanda brought toast and rice. In the middle of the night Tuesday, I walked into the bathroom and twice lost consciousness. When daylight came, two teachers helped me to a small campus clinic. There, I could see just a few rooms – a pharmacy, a cashier’s office, a waiting room, and one room with two little stools that faced computer desks. Into the computer room I went, and sat down to face a Chinese woman who wore a white coat and had a firm jaw line. Glasses sat on the tip of her nose. She pressed her fingers into my stomach, asked a few questions, and led my helpers into the pharmacy room. I could see them through the doorway, talking for a while. When they came back, I was handed a box of tablets. The foreign teacher had looked up the word “antibiotic” in an English-Chinese dictionary.

Over the next two days, I watched an entire season of Gilmore Girls while I lay on my bed. Wednesday evening, I assured a supervisor I could teach an eight o’clock class Thursday morning. In the night, I woke with more stomach pain and more diarrhea.

Another visit to the campus clinic, and a better translator. This time I got directions: while taking the antibiotics, eat only liquid foods such as congee or soup. No meat, no solids, no cold food. A new box of antibiotics and a package of anti-diarrheal drinking powder were given to me. I have eaten only congee since. My stomach has so far had no pain. I will continue this for the next two or three days. But all this laying in bed has made me miss home a lot – Mom's chicken broth and English-speaking doctors and English medicine labels.

November 28, 2010

A few nights ago, I felt the same stomach pain that plagued me a month ago. I waited by the toilet, but no vomit came. I couldn’t sleep. The pain started gradually at around seven thirty p.m. At two a.m., on the phone with my parents, my mom and I searched the internet for any disease that remotely matched the symptoms – dysentery, ulcers, appendicitis. I called an American Registered Nurse hotline. At three the pain began to subside, and at four I fell asleep.

A student took me to the Xinzheng hospital at ten thirty the same morning. I sat on another wooden stool in a room much like the San He clinic on campus. The student translated the doctor’s questions, and led me upstairs for blood work and an ultrasound. In the lab, I sat at a little window and put my arm on a counter. My student talked to me while my blood was drawn.

Two nurses sat in the ultrasound room. A patient was standing by a bed, unrolling the waist of her long johns and zipping her pants. I laid on the same pillow and paper sheet that she’d lain on. The nurse spread the jelly, passed the camera, looked into her screen and said she could see everything clearly, just like pictures she’d studied in textbooks. I was too thin.

Downstairs again, the doctor prescribed four stomach medicines. It was now twelve o’clock. There was a crowd of people at the pharmacy and cashier windows – patients trying to get medicine before the hospital employees went to lunch. At one window, a woman put on her coat and pointed us to another window.

“Push through the people,” my student told me, “or we’ll never get your medicine.”

December 7, 2010

I finished taking the medicine yesterday. My stomach felt strange a few days last week, and I didn’t have a strong appetite – ate mostly toast, rice, crackers, and bananas. But by Friday, I felt quite normal again.

Moments: Construction

October 20, 2010

It sounds like a jackhammer is about to take out my apartment. The walls and windows shake. I feel the vibrations as I sit in my chair. A grating, never-ending hammering – I woke up to it at midnight last night.

Now that I’ve looked out my window I see it’s not a jackhammer, but an excavator machine. I only know the name because I just looked for it on Google. I wonder if Peter Hall will be shaken into a collapse.

The excessive hammering is the construction of housing for the foreign teachers who have children. The site’s lights stay on late at night and brighten my room even if my curtains are closed. Almost every time I open the curtains, there is a new scene to observe. One day I saw a giant ditch in which four or five women in visor hats shoveled debris onto the bed of a front loader. Above ground, men were shoveling some kind of white powder – ash, maybe? Cement? The stuff filled the air. It swirled above the workers like columns of steam. The next day I saw the ditch was being filled. It slowly grew shallow. With each new layer of dirt, a road roller drove up and down the ditch, setting my radiator to shaking again. A few teachers sat in my living room on Sunday and couldn’t hear a sermon podcast over the din. As I look out now, I can’t quite tell if the workers are constructing, or still removing remnants of the demolished dining hall.

October 27, 2010

The construction site outside my window is mostly level now. The ditch is filled, and the dirt is smoothed into one flat rectangle. I’ve heard teachers say the building will have no foundation. I wait to see if this is true.

Moments: Re-entry

June 14, 2010

Last week, China surprised us “new” foreign teachers by lengthening a national holiday – students and teachers will be free not only on Wednesday, but on Monday and Tuesday as well. Of course, in exchange for the extra free days, we were all required to teach last Saturday and Sunday. The news made me angry at first, but now that the holiday has begun and three free days together are before me, I feel differently. I’m just about done with my first year of teaching oral English. Only two classes left, which I will teach Thursday after the holiday has ended. I start a long journey home on Saturday evening.

When I consider all the relationships that have begun, grown, or dissipated, the myriad of emotions I’ve felt, the extremes of weather I’ve experienced, and all the things I’ve done, I can believe that ten months have passed. But when I think about arriving in China, my Culture Week performances the first semester, or Christmas in Peter Hall, nothing seems to have happened so long ago.

One thing that does most definitely seem as if it happened ages ago is that day I cried and said goodbye to Mom, Dad, and my brothers. I’m very ready to attempt to somehow catch up on the ten months I’ve missed with them.

July 5, 2010 (At home in America)

Before this weekend, being with the family hadn’t worn on me at all because there were only six of us at home – Mom, Dad, Kim, and the boys. There was an empty room for me to go to. Now, when I walk around the house people are everywhere. Bedding is on the floor. I’m close to everyone and everyone speaks English. I’m expected to interact with all of them, or at least I expect myself to. I’m still reeling from all the emotions I’ve felt in the past few weeks. And now everyone is going swimming at the neighbor’s pool. If I don’t go, I’m afraid I’ll be looked at as strange, and questioned: “Why don’t you want to be a part of the family activity?”

I feel, around people I don’t know or around large groups, that I’ve been rude and disconnected. Last night at a Fourth of July barbecue I felt I couldn’t summon the energy to talk to even one person. I knew the kind of talk I’d have to do, and I didn't want to do it. Few people ask about China, few people care about China. If I want to talk about it, I have to bring it up myself.

It’s not necessarily the people who alienate me, but the circumstances. I’ve just come from a world that no one here knows much about, a world that may have changed me forever. And now I’m supposed to sit in the family circle in the living room and talk about the new iphone, or a Youtube video, or the Fourth of July fireworks.

And it’s not that the family can do anything differently. I can’t expect them to change their way of life for a few weeks. It’s I who has to fit into their society. I have to find my place again.

Hebrews says of people of great faith that they “admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth… If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:13-16). Perhaps I ought to consider this time as an opportunity to long for my heavenly home. Maybe Christ would say to me, “Get used to feeling like an alien. You are one.”

My house and my family are things I’ve often longed for during the past ten months. Now that I’m here, nothing is as wonderful as I dreamed. But life back in China doesn’t sound wonderful either. I guess I’ve not yet arrived at home.


September 19, 2010

It is a Sunday, four days until I leave for China. We are celebrating Mom’s birthday by having a small, early Thanksgiving meal. Mom put a small turkey in the crock pot this morning. I am struggling with, among other things, a dread and a fear of leaving. I don’t want to leave my family for so long again, and there’s no telling what things will be like when I finally do come back to America again. What if the next re-entry is as harsh as this year’s was? Or worse? No, I can’t ask that question. I still believe it’s right that I go back to China.

September 23, 2010

I sit at the Austin airport, waiting to return to China. First to Chicago, then on to Beijing. I just said goodbye to Mom and Dad, the last in a long string of drawn out family partings. I waved to them about five times as I progressed through the line at security. Only a few tears showed up. I told Mom and Dad, “I’ll be back before you know it,” and Mom reminded me that when I do come back I’ll be an aunt. It’ll be a bigger, better family reunion than before. These are the things to think of. What not to think of is that this will be the last I see Mom and Dad for a while, and the last I see real blue sky for awhile.

I was stopped in the security line because the guards thought I had jelly jars in the bottom of my backpack. I watched a young guard pull out all of Mom’s fudge bars and chocolate peanut butter balls and unwrap thick layers of newspaper to find not jelly jars, but candles. I told him I was sorry, but I was going to China and needed something that smelled good.

Moments: An Orphanage in Xinxiang

Goodbye, China.

I have moved back to the States to be closer to my family and attend graduate school. I arrived home July first, and in August I'll begin studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

My biggest excuse for the year-long blog silence is that blogspot is blocked by the Chinese government, so I was not able to access my blog from my apartment in China.

I'd like to post at least a small taste of year two in China, so over the next week or two I'll be going back through my journals and posting any little "moments" that seem interesting. Hope you enjoy them. Here's the first one:

May 2010

What a weekend. I wish I had more time now to say just what has happened. I am at the orphanage now, and will probably turn the light out soon. I’ve never seen anything look so much like Oliver Twist – worse, actually. The girls sleep in one open room, all beds pushed against the wall. We played “Uno” in this room just now, before the kids went to sleep. Paint flakes off the wall and falls onto the cement floor. Blankets and clothing are piled in one corner, and on the other side of the room are desks littered with picture books, textbooks, Chinese checkers, playing cards, and colored markers. Each student has his or her own desk, and inside they keep whatever treasures they own. When I told one little girl she could keep the “Uno” cards, she yelled out something in Chinese, jumped into the air once or twice, then marched to her little brown desk and threw the cards underneath the lid. I gave them to her because she has repeatedly grabbed my arm and shouted, “Pai! Pai!” In English, “Cards, cards.” I’ve learned at least one Chinese word here.

Earlier we sat on stools in a circle in the courtyard and sang songs. They wanted the other foreign teacher and I to sing a song, so we gave them “Amazing Grace.” Colored flags are strung over the courtyard. It was here I played badminton with a boy a few moments after we arrived. Badminton was the first task I found to keep myself busy with, so I kept at it until the little boy put his racket down and said he was tired.

The dining room is another white-washed, paint-chipped space. There are two long, narrow tables lined with stools. We ate corn porridge, steamed bread, and fried fish for dinner. The meat, I'm told, is a rare treat for the kids. The kids stand in a line at the dining room door and quote a Tang dynasty poem before every meal. Then everyone pulls their bowls and spoons from lockers. We’ve eaten steamed bread every day. The aunties roll it into little buns and season it. It supplements the bland gruel – porridge made from rice or corn or wheat. Sometimes we have a plate of vegetables, too – salted cucumber, salted radish, or salted eggs. Most everything is very salty.

I believe the only rooms I haven’t described are the bathrooms, the little room where the volunteers are sleeping, and the boys’ room. That’s the orphanage. Not a very large space for all the people that live here.