So, how was China?

On my last day in Beijing, I took the subway to meet friends for dinner.  It had just rained but was otherwise a beautiful night: the Air Quality Index was low, and the sky was clear and dark.  On the way to the subway, I was hyperaware of my surroundings:  there was the little old man with the equally tiny (unleashed) dog, the young girls (women?) strolling together in meticulously chosen outfits, the grandparents playing with their grinning grandchild.  I dipped into the Wu-Mart (the Fred Meyer of Beijing) to see if they had ribbon, but was disappointed; I bypassed the McDonalds and hopped lightly out of the way of the car driving on the sidewalk.  

It all felt so wonderfully normal, and I thought of myself at the beginning of my time here: out in the suburbs, too scared to take public transportation, with nary a Chinese word to my name.  Things have changed.

And now I'm back, and people are asking Questions.  To one specific, one question:  how was China?

It's absolutely a fair question, but I still have no idea how to answer it.

Sometimes I talk about the traffic, and how once I saw a car do a u-turn to drive off an on-ramp.  Sometimes it's about the pollution (and I am SO happy to be back in the Pacific Northwest, sucking down big gulps of clean air and stretching out under the blue-gray sky).  Sometimes I talk about the noodles, or the warm, impatient, beautiful aggression of Beijingers.  Or I'll mention my trip to Yangshuo down the Li River, and how it felt like being in a picture book from my childhood, or I'll discuss the school I'm at now and how I'm learning to be a teacher in a completely different way.   

But it's such a big question (and such a big country) that it's taken me a few weeks to come to an answer that's even a little bit complete.  It helps that I'm noticing things about my life in China simply by existing in Seattle over the past few weeks.

It's the little things:

• I wait at a traffic light and cross without fear or amusement (Beijing almost always brings both).
• I violently suppress the urge to say "xiexie" when a waitress brings me water.
• I'm obsessed with fresh vegetables.  Butter lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli: give it ALL to me.  Now, please.
• It's cool enough in the Northwest for me to move around without sweating, and I can wear jeans again.  This is the most exciting thing to happen to me all month.
• Things are quiet.  The ATM doesn't yell at me and neither does a cranked-too-high radio.  
• There are morbidly obese people here.  I feel odd about pointing this out, because it's not something that I like to notice, but damn: while there are definitely people in China who are overweight, we win the game when it comes to having some truly spherical people.  It's not even that there are that many here in Western Washington -- there aren't! -- it's that there are any at all.  
• On a related note:  in the last nine days, I've had four chocolate peanut butter milkshakes. I REGRET NOTHING.
• I am in control.  I haven't taken a single taxi here, and I remember how to parallel park.  I can drive down the highway and play obnoxious pop music as loud as I like, and I can go into a restaurant and order (and receive) what I want and I can find the books I want at the bookstore and go to the websites I want to go to on the internet.  
• I am comfortable.  I can feel myself relaxing into a summer stupor, and it's an effort to force myself to notice what's around me, to truly appreciate it.  I can use my debit card for just about everything, so I don't need to carry cash.  In two weeks, I haven't really felt like I need to fight.

And there's the ultimate thing:  in Beijing, while things have started to feel normal, I'm still not that comfortable and I'm certainly not in control.  And that's great.  When you're out of control, when you're uncomfortable -- that's when you learn.  You learn to step outside yourself and meet others on their own terms. You learn about the world and the people living in it, and you how it's both more accessible and more inaccessible than you ever dreamed.  You learn (and even though you already knew this, you always need to relearn it, again and again) that it's not all about you.

And you guys?  I am learning so much.