Home for the Holidays

Well, I'm back.

I wasn't sure what to expect from myself when I arrived back in the United States for the first time since moving to China.  Would I freak out at how different it felt?  Kiss the ground?  Start sobbing wildly?

But as always, arriving in New York felt like slipping into a comfortable, battered jacket.  The only real difference between my usual trip between the airport and my aunt's apartment and this one is that I babbled incessantly at my cab driver, ecstatic to be able to communicate with him in words more complicated than "Straight ahead!" or "Right at the traffic light."  (Fortunately, he was happy to be babbled at:  "Yo, you live in CHINA?  That's crazy!  Hey, how much is your rent?")

An Explanation For Why All My Blog Posts Are Late These Days

What it's like to teach in the last few weeks before Christmas, with examples from teachers around the world (well, Beijing and Federal Way):

"Today I put my class into two groups: those who did their homework (so they could work on the new thing) and those who didn't (so they could work on catching up).  You would THINK that the group who was behind would be the ones who were working diligently, and the group who was caught up would be the ones who were being ridiculous and off-task.  YOU WOULD THINK."

"I just finished world religions, on to the Middle East, so my enthusiasm is ramped up to irritating levels.  Freshmen leave the class with glazed-over expressions of awe."

"I am giving you a piece of paper, children.  You will bring it back on Tuesday so we can look at it again.  You will bring it back, or I will kill you."

When I Was Thirty-One, I

I still remember the night before I turned nineteen.  I was lying on the top bunk of my dorm in the ITHAKA compound on Crete, and I felt like maybe someday I might be beautiful.

I was feeling a lot of other things, too.  Thinking about my nineteen-y-ness inevitably made me think about my incipient twenty-y-ness (twenty-ness?), and all I could focus on were the things I hadn't done yet.  I'd never been to a party with people my own age.  I hadn't sung a solo longer than one line.  I hadn't been kissed (let alone that other thing).  I'd never written a paper longer than five paragraphs, and less than a year from then, I'd be at Yale University.  College.  People did things in college, right?  They kissed people and wrote papers and went to parties.  Probably.

And because of my gap year, I'd be almost twenty years old when I got there.  I'd be even more behind.

Victory Noodles

When I got on the bus to go home this afternoon, I knew that my biweekly blog post would be overdue if I didn't post it today but I just didn't see how it was going to happen.   I woke up with the typical pre-cold sore throat, and all day, my brain's been fuzzy.  When trying to tally up quiz scores, I found that simple arithmetic was beyond my capabilities.  I'm way behind on grading (mainly because of my own laziness), and there are a thousand school things clamoring for my attention.  Finally, I'm behind on writing my letters of recommendation, and the first early decision deadlines are this Friday.

So I didn't think there was going to be a blog post.  But then my sickness led me to crave noodles, and I decided to try one.  More.  Noodle place.  Maybe this one will be different, I thought wistfully.  Maybe this time I'll find a great noodle place and then people will come visit me and I'll take them to the great noodle place and they'll say, "Hey, Becca, what a great noodle place!" 

I will admit that I didn't have a lot of hope.  But then?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:  Victory Noodles.

Wide and chewy hand-pulled noodles with pulled pork and bok choy.  HECK YEAH.

Thank you, and good night.

New Breath

The weekend of September 21st was similar to most of my previous Beijing weekends.  I got up absurdly early on a Saturday morning to go into town do things for my new apartment.  The next day, I trucked out of Shunyi once again on public transportation to meet a friend and go on a bicycle tour of Lido.  So, waking up at an ungodly hour on a weekend:  check.  Running errands from Shunyi to Sanlitun:  check.  Energy-demanding social engagement:  check.  Same as it ever was.

But I noticed something new when I walked home from the bus that Sunday.

I wasn't exhausted.

Goals

This post was going to be about moving and settling into Beijing and how I don't feel exhausted all the time anymore and this one time when I walked into a noodle shop and asked for noodles and they took one look at me and gave me spaghetti with tomato sauce.  (Don't worry, that post is coming.  I've already started writing it.)

What changed, you ask?  Well, I'm listening to Janelle Monáe's new album, which is amazing, by the way, and makes me feel kind of bold and spiky (and if you haven't listened to Dance Apocalyptic while dancing around your place of residence like a crazy person, DO IT NOW).  And it's October break here in Beijing, so I've had a lot more time than usual to think about life, the universe, and everything.

But mostly it's that I met my grading goal for the afternoon.

Moving Slowly

This is the first time I've missed my deadline for posting to this blog, and I don't completely know why that is.  It might be that life has settled into such a rhythm here -- wake up, teach, plan, grade, navigate Beijing, be exhausted -- that I feel I don't have anything to write about.

That's so untrue, though.  So many things have happened.  For example, I have an apartment:  a tiny one-bedroom with light hardwood floors in a fabulous, tree-strewn neighborhood.  While every day seems to throw up another obstacle to actually being able to move into the place it feels enormously satisfying to have a place to stay, and when I walk on the streets around my new place I feel the most comfortable I've felt outside of school here.

Subways

I remember the first time I took the subway by myself.  I was nineteen and the subway in question was the Paris métro (you never forget your first love).

I'd taken the métro many times before, but always with my parents.  It was, as previously mentioned, the first subway line I'd ever been on.  When I was eleven, my family and I used it to transfer from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, a transfer pattern that I would later learn by heart.  When I was twelve, my father's glasses fell off as we were trying to pull our luggage off at a station and in a Herculean feat, I dragged all the bags off as he scrambled for his glasses and leapt off after me.  When I was fourteen and on a two-week cultural exchange program, our group leader asked me to plan a route for the rest of the group from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. 

Blue Skies in Beijing

Proof!

For the past few days, the smog has been gone from Beijing.  Beijing is beautiful in the blue.  The temperature is hovering in the high eighties.  And school has begun.  

My days are beginning to fall into a normal schoolish pattern.  School stretches and swells outside of its normal boundaries in time, filling my non-school hours; after a two-day school week, it took me thirty-two cumulative hours of sleep over the weekend to recover enough for the current five-day week, and the last eight hours were full of troubled dreams.

So, business as usual for the first days of school.  Fortunately, I still love teaching.  I still love my students, whoever they are.  I can now confirm to you that freshmen are the same the world over (this morning I passed one fourteen year-old putting another fourteen year-old in a headlock whilst singing the "song that never ends") and teenagers are wonderful in China just as they are in Federal Way.

Medical Checkup

In order to obtain a residence permit here, you must go through a medical checkup.  Sounds simple enough, right?  You go to a hospital and they run a bunch of tests on you:  TB, HIV, a chest x-ray, a brief physical, etc.  I dreaded it, but only for the usual I-hate-hospitals reasons.  I envisioned that I would be sitting in a typical exam room wearing an too-small hospital gown as I waited for a doctor who would come in and perform a physical and then send me off to a technician who would draw my blood and run some tests on me.  "It'll probably take a few hours to get through all of us," I decided, "so I'll bring a book."

Nope.

First Days

When I landed in Beijing, the first thing I noticed is that you can taste the air.  The runway area tasted strongly of exhaust.  The gate area tasted of rubber cement.  And as soon as I went down to the baggage claim, I could taste the smog: acrid, gritty, and yet somehow silky on my tongue. And it wasn't even a bad pollution day.

I did my usual bargaining with whatever-god-is-listening while I waited for my bags to arrive ("if my black bag survived the trip intact, I PROMISE I'll buy a new one for the next trip!"), and tried to eavesdrop on conversations around me.  As usual in a foreign country, I couldn't.  Unusually, though, I couldn't even recognize basic words; not a single Latin or Greek root stood out to me.  I knew this was going to happen, obviously, but there's still a certain amount of terror that seizes hold of you when it becomes real for the first time and you see that you are functionally an infant in your new world. 

T minus 4 hours, 32 minutes

In four hours and thirty-two -- make that thirty-one -- minutes, my alarm will go off.  I will roll out of bed, shower, pack my deodorant and my hairbrush, and double check that I have my passport.

(Five days ago, I lay on a massage table at Two Birds Tattoo and listened with half an ear to my friends chatter hilariously about everything and nothing, and had a beautiful flying little owl [athene noctua] tattooed on the inside of my right wrist. It's in the scabby and gross phase right now, but I love every inch of it and what it means to me, and when I look down at my wrist I feel no surprise to see it there.  The pain of the tattoo burned in a dull, fierce way, but I almost welcomed it.  It made it feel permanent.)

The Epic of Gilgamesh

O Gilgamesh!  O Epic Cat!

Evil mastermind.

Here's the thing.  In theory, I hate cats.  They're cruel.  (How many other animals play with their food before they eat it?)  They're manipulative.  They're a little bit crazy.  And I strongly believe that they are actually way stupider than dogs.  But they're cute and fuzzy, and they have big eyes and we like it when they purr, so we keep them around.  

In theory, that's how I feel.  But in practice?  I love my cat.  She's not an easy cat to love, but somehow I still do.  She's been my roommate for seven years.  She's been there through seven (human) roommates, one breakup, two plane rides, two cities, and five apartments.  Last month, when I had food poisoning, I was lying on the bathroom floor after five hours of vomiting.  I was trembling, sweaty, spent.  I couldn't move.  I wanted my mom.  Instead, Gilgamesh curled up against me and purred until I fell asleep, and I nearly cried with gratitude.

This is normal for her.  As bratty as she can be and as manipulative and cruel and crazy and dumb as she is, whenever I'm sick, or heartbroken, or have had a terrible day at school, she seems to know, and she always helps.

So this is the story of Gilgamesh, my constant companion for these seven years.  As you've seen, there will be pictures.  There will be a video.  And then I promise never to post about cats again.

Two Weeks and Counting

In two weeks, I will be on a plane to China.  In two weeks and a day, I will be at a new school, under a new sky, with a new roommate, learning a new language.  In less than a month, it will be the first day of school.

I am unbearably happy.

I am unspeakably sad.

And I want to throw up.

On Food

I am degenerating into my usual summer anarchy, albeit with the everpresent knowledge that in three measly weeks I'm going to be getting on a plane to China and I should probably start packing at some point.  

Things I've loved about this summer so far:

• Fresh tomatoes
• Pelee Island 
• Seeing my family
• Passing out on the couch until 5 a.m. for no good reason other than I can
• Finishing two books in one day
• Having a 2.5 hour conversation with a hilarious twelve year-old girl on the plane.  I don't normally like talking to strangers on airplanes -- I like reading or sleeping better -- but this girl was amazing.  We talked about EVERYTHING:  The Hunger Games, the Outsiders, blowing stuff up for the science fair, her reading level, ziplining, Debate Class, how laws are boring but necessary, Tyler Perry, Trayvon Martin, Criminal Minds (her mom claimed it was based on true stories; the girl shook her head at me and mouthed exaggeratedly, "NO IT ISN'T), the Green River Killer, and crime in Cleveland.  At the end of this conversation she told me that her name was Diamond and that I looked like my name should be BeJewelia.  

Where I'm From (with apologies to Joan Didion)

my backyard in summer; photo credit Rudd Crawford

Ohio -- for me -- has always been a place of stark color and beauty.  In the winter, we are encased in bleakness:  grey sky, brown trees, white snow, frozen mud.  Every now and then there is a snowstorm, and we live in a world of swirling, shimmering whiteness.

I hardly ever get to see Ohio in the summer anymore.  I have childhood memories -- riding my bike on the old railroad tracks, catching fireflies, falling in the creek next to my house, playing planet tag with the King Street crew -- but mostly what I think of when I think of Ohio in summer is a lush green, green everywhere and on everything.  Sometimes even the sky seems green.

(Usually, though, that's right before a thunderstorm and then you push your luck, staying outside for one more berry to pick, one more game to play, one more dance at Illumination, one more adventure to have, and then CRACK, you hear the first peal of thunder and you're running as fast as you can for shelter, laughing with the friends and strangers who are running with you, and the rain starts to pelt down and it hits your skin like bullets but the air is still warm and for some reason the discomfort is good, amazing, and you reach home or the bandstand or the library or Gibson's Bakery and stand there shivering, soaked through, and you grin so wide you think your face is going to fall off.)

(I used to want to get married in a thunderstorm.)

Idea: A Blog

Ahem.

Testing, testing.

So, here it is.  A blog.  A lot of people asked if I were going to keep a blog to document The Big Move To China.  I like the idea, but I’ve never been a reliable writer.  I tend to write in fits and spurts: that time I gave the graduation speech, when my friend Robin signed me up for a murder mystery writing class, when my roommate suckered me into writing a slam for a thing at school, when we needed to rewrite the lyrics of “We Are Young” for the talent show at school to make them school-specific.

But perhaps now is a time for reliability.  It is definitely a time for change.