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.

Limits

Last week, I went on a three-day sea kayaking trip for school.  The day before we left, the kids and I piled into a basement classroom to get prepared for kayaking on the ocean, and in doing so we watched a video put forth by the New Zealand Wilderness Somebody-or-other that gave us five rules to follow for a safe outdoorsy trip.  The rules were as follows:

1.  Plan your trip.
2.  Check the weather.
3.  Tell somebody.
4.  Know your limits.
5.  Take sufficient supplies.

Hm, I thought.  Know your limits, huh?

Requiem

Right now, according to Bloomberg News, there are 268 people trapped in a sunken ferry off the coast of South Korea.  28 more people have been confirmed dead.  Of the estimated 475 people on board, 325 of them were high school students in the eleventh grade, on a school trip.  This means that almost half -- and probably more -- of the missing were teenagers.  And given that the ship sank about two days ago, we can probably assume that those we've been counting as missing can be added to the ranks of the dead.

We should mourn every death, I know.  There were fathers and mothers and grandparents on that boat, as well as grown-up sons and daughters and nieces and nephews.  But I can't stop thinking:  how does a school come back from the death of over half of its junior class? 

Rivers in China

I have published a thousand blog posts in my head in the past two months.  I've been tossing around writing ideas based on things like:

• animals in Beijing (where ARE they?)
• a wild, starry-eyed week in Paris with my mom over Chinese New Year
• what it was like to come back to Beijing and a week of horrible pollution AFTER a wild, starry-eyed week in Paris
• feeling disgustingly behind on learning Chinese
• going to Singapore, and how it is NOT A REAL PLACE, OKAY?
• and traffic patterns.

I even started an entry about schools, and how I've spent my life thinking of school buildings as an extension of my home.  Really!  It's about four paragraphs long so far, and will include an anecdote about how I was recently thrown out of a cab in the middle of the street (tears and snot streaming down my face) after flying into Beijing on a red-eye.  One of these days, I'll finish it.

Re-entry

I've been putting off writing this post for, oh, the last three weeks or so.  I kept thinking that if I could only wait to feel better, less unhinged, less slightly completely insane, then I'd be able to write about my re-entry to Beijing with poise and grace.  I'd wink sideways at my insecurities and chuckle at my follies and be totally mature and adult and sane.

And to some extent, that's true.  I feel pretty sane now, mostly because of the end of the semester and some extremely therapeutic Days Of Fun with some extremely excellent people.  But the fact is that the last few weeks have been difficult, and I still don't feel completely settled.  Something about re-entry has pitched me tumbling up into the air and shaken me hard.

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."