In late January, I posted an essay on this blog called “Suzhou Blues II.” Today, back in Baltimore, I re-read that essay for the first time in a long time. Maybe the mid-point of any long journey lies at the nadir of an arc that ascends twice: one arrives, rises on the crest of the new, tumbles, recovers, and rises again. In any event, for me, the “Suzhou Blues” essay documented the low point of a nearly eleven-month stay in China, and it gives the false impression that I was miserable much of time in Suzhou. Misery, as you will see, was the exception rather than the rule, and now that I’ve returned to the U.S., it’s time to take stock of what I learned from the experience.
Adaptability
Through living and working in China for almost a year, I’ve discovered that I am quite adaptable. I went to China alone, speaking only a little bad Chinese and knowing only a handful of people--most of whom I knew well enough to call acquaintances but few of whom I could call friends. From this spare beginning, I made a life for myself in Suzhou, riding my bicycle each morning through sun, rain, and snow to the bus stop to Wenzheng; bargaining for vegetables in the market with my garbled Chinese, eating with chopsticks like an old China hand; witnessing a culture that had once seemed foreign and strange become familiar and friendly to my eyes; forming close friendships across cultures, friendships that transcended cultural difference, that were in fact energized by a recognition that difference and commonality can exist simultaneously when people have hearts and minds big enough to hold them both.
There’s a lot of discussion these days in the West about how China is changing, and perhaps the survival of an individual as much as that of a nation depends on adaptability. Once disparaged by Westerners as “the sick man of the East,” China is now on a course of rapid economic growth that has aroused both admiration and fear. Regardless of the reaction, China’s capacity to adapt is undeniable. In just thirty years, China has utterly transformed itself; over the course of sixty years, it has done so twice, moving from Japanese occupation and civil war to Maoism to capitalism with Chinese characteristics, all within the ordinary span of an individual life. Maybe there is something infectious about such adaptability, for I feel it within myself, too. I arrived in China a sick man of the West with a wounded heart and returned home with a restored capacity for hope. Life in China was varied and interesting to me, and I rediscovered a talent for friendship that I once had as a child but assumed I had forever lost. The true test of these changes, however, comes now, back in America, without the charms of place to prop me up. My fate, like that of China itself, still hangs in the balance.
In the last paragraph of “Suzhou Blues II,” I offered an embarrassingly quick overview and dismissal of Albert Camus’s use of the Sisyphus myth as a metaphor for life. I closed by suggesting that I might be better off finding another metaphor. Perhaps now, in noting parallels between the adaptability of nations and of individuals, I have found one. People who resist change, like nations, drown in the sea of their own defects. Those who adapt change and grow--sometimes painfully so--and in the process reinvent themselves.
Necessity
By American standards, my life in China was almost Spartan. I lived in a room that might generously be called an efficiency apartment and less generously simply a room. It had a tiny kitchen with cabinets that opened at chest-level (for me). The water in the kitchen and bathroom would shut off on a whim, though I fortunately avoided being caught tall and dry with shampoo in my hair or soap on my skin. The bed was a queen, and the room had three hard wooden chairs but no recliner or couch. The desk by window was long, but soon after I moved in, I had covered every inch of it with papers and books, concealing the faux-wooden surface.
The room was on the fourth floor and overlooked a parking lot, but I still liked to sit outside on the balcony on cool nights and play my cheap Chinese guitar in the moonlight. And everywhere there was dust; it filtered through the air conditioning fixtures and laid claim to the room; it blackened the white tiles on the balcony floor; I can only imagine what it has done to my lungs.
This was all that I had for nearly a year, and I never found myself wanting more. I hadn’t known there would be a washing machine in the bathroom, and I’d stuffed the wardrobe too full of clothes. I often found myself wishing I had less. Some of my old clothes and even my sneakers I wore to threads and threw away when I moved out. My two suitcases were lighter when I departed than they had been when I arrived.
For nearly a year, I didn’t drive a car and never once had the desire to do so. I got around Suzhou by bicycle and bus and on foot and traveled between cities by train. I didn’t spend a penny on gas in eleven months, and a single trip on a Suzhou bus typically cost one yuan--about 15 cents.
My salary was about $600 USD a month, and I never felt exploited or underpaid. The school provided my room for free, and, despite traveling frequently within China and eating out on average four or five times a week, I managed to return with quite a bit of cash in my pocket.
I’m writing this now in my old house in Baltimore, feeling a little weighted down by things, knowing as I do now how little I really require, and how believing that I need more is a kind of disease.
Happiness
For a long time, I was a skeptic of happiness and assumed that smiles were ill-omens in disguise. Perhaps this stemmed in large measure from sharing my life with another depressive. If I could not make her happy, at least we might be united in our gloom. In China, there were no rewards for unhappiness, which made it much easier to let the mood pass.
This ability to let go brightened my life in almost every respect. It made me receptive to friendship, pulling me out of myself in proportion with my willingness to let others into my life. It enabled me to find pleasure in my work. During the spring semester, I actually found myself enjoying teaching and the rapport I had developed with my students--even if I never did learn all their names. For the first time, I felt no anxiety about walking into a classroom, nor did I need to survive the semester by counting the days till its end. For the first time, I was genuinely sad to see the last day come. Maybe that sensation is a marker of happiness--the desire to linger a little longer in the moment rather than to escape from it.
Words
I began this blog with an entry in which I wondered who would read it. I’ve always sensed that my readership was small, and I sometimes feared that it was nonexistent. There were days when that sense stifled my desire to write, but I always found a way to push on, even when I believed that it mattered to no one but me whether I did so or not.
In the end, that was reason enough, for writing such as this is as much about discovery as it is about communication. Through writing, I discovered much about both China and myself, and working in the medium of words enabled me to bring clarity and order to a jumble of thoughts, impressions, and emotions. I do hope others were able to take pleasure in and gain meaning from what I’ve posted here, but, in retrospect, I can see that the words have inherent value to me regardless. Anything beyond that is appreciated but by no means a necessity.
Note: This entry is a kind of conclusion, though there are a few unfinished entries that I may work on and post in the weeks ahead. Even though I’m no longer in China, China is still very much within me.
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