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.