Information overload, sans any real information...

And just like that, I knew it. It's time. Sitting in a hostel in Chengdu I believe I've realized that China is no longer the place for me. It may be that I've talked myself into this in the face of my imminent departure, but there I was and suddenly it seemed that China, a place of increasing interest to so many millions around the world, is, in some ways, becoming less interesting to this one. Newspaper articles pour forth in alternating glowing and critical tones (depending on whether you're in the travel or the business section), books are being written as fast, or perhaps even faster than new perspectives are conceived. In short, I'm a bit tired of hearing about it, of being inundated with snippets describing flashes of a nation which steep themselves in important language but tend to capture absolutely nothing about what it's like to live here. It could be that a short time away from here and I'll be itching to return (there's so much that I legitimately love about life here), but at the moment there's just something overwhelming about the media and marketing machine that is constantly reminding us that the 21st century will belong to China. I long to live in a place nobody cares to write about, someplace where life is about improving what you have, day by day, and not about purported international consequences and geopolitical considerations. Send me to the end of the earth, and don't send me with a newspaper subscription.

My last day...

The morning arrived, cloudy and muggy with a fine drizzle, either thanks to, or inspite of my feelings. It lacks originality to say that I'm facing the day with mixed feelings (I even taught all my kids the word bittersweet a few weeks ago in an effort to describe my state of mind), but at some point every person is confronted with events in their life which produce such a range of feelings that it can be overwhelming and it is the universality of the experience that gives it some of it's strength. However, such universality is hard to notice when I find myself the only one leaving and not coming back. Isolation is a far better word; at the same time I feel disconnected from the very people I find it so hard to believe I'm leaving, thus adding yet another confused layer to the cake. For the last two weeks I've been plodding through final lessons for each of my classes, realizing that as each one comes to an end, so to does my chance to impart a message to these kids. Each class contains, among the blended sea of faces, a few who have come to stand out in my mind and will remain there for some time, Silence, Empiy, Alan, Jacky, Jane and more. And now on the last of such days, I'm not terribly sure I'm ready to face several more significant goodbyes and a last class with the students I've come to know the best, my little brothers and sisters. In seeking out my final words of wisdom I've been thinking less and less about big questions like my role here and am now left with these personal relationships and I think this is what my students take away from my time here, a single good relationship that might serve as a foundation for others. Well, that and what I actually taught in class.


Now today is here, just as today always is, but this one brings with it the prospect of a very different tomorrow.

Gao Kao and a search for solitude...

In China, the beginning of June each year brings the national university examination, known around these parts as the gao kao. One of the most common criticisms of Chinese education is that it's too exam focused, leaving no room for creative thought, and thus depriving students of usable real world skills. The gao kao is the reason for this. Almost everything done at Tian Jiabing is done with the goal of achieving better results on this the culmination of secondary education. The grade three students have been locked away for close to a year now preparing via countless practice exams and even the grade one and two students have had the importance of this two-day exam drilled into them, by classmates, teachers, parents and every other imaginable source. The reason? A student's score on this exam is the sole determinant of if and where a student will continue their education at university. No grades in high school, no extra-curriculars, no application essays or interviews matter at all, so no matter whether you agree or disagree with the system, it's hard to deny the importance of these days in the life of every senior middle school student. Until the system changes (which doesn't seem imminent thanks to the argument that, given the Chinese propensity for personal relationships and connections to trump the fair implementation of any rule, that this is the only way to objectively and fairly gague which students should attend university) it often seems the best we can do is try to round out the educational experience in whatever small moments fall through the cracks in the gao kao oriented sidwalk.




On the upside this holiday has left me with an annual mini-holiday each of my years here. Last year I journyed south to the karst of Guilin and Yangshuo with Mom and Pop Harris, but like a few other times in my second year here, when the exam rolled around I just couldn't find the motivation to get myself out of Liuyang, so I decided something closer to home might be better. On what amounted to little more than a whim I then set out for a small town in the northwest of the county, so small it isn't even on the county map which in and of itself made Zhou Luo an appealing destination. I couldn't help but be excited about going to a place that not only wasn't in any guidebook but was even unknown to many of my students. In fact, the only reason I knew of the place was that one girl in my class mentioned it in passing during a discussion of the word "scenic". Turns out it was her home town. With no direct buses to Zhou Luo I grabbed a window seat in a mini-bus headed for Shegar, home to Number 8 Middle School and the closest town with bus service. Scenes flashed, unfolding themselves and running past the van in fast-forward. Terraced and geometrically compartmentalized fields fought for orderin contrast to the chaotic mottled complexion of the hillsides which encircled them in varied shades of green. In front of me, a young boy fell asleep in his father's arms in a series of progressively longer and deeper nods. From the hot and dusty intersection that serves as the Shegar bus station (three destinations available at last count), it was 20km on a moto-taxi to the village of Zhou Luo. Here in the true rural heart of the nation, the late spring season revealed itself in the varied states of the fields; some lay fallow for another season, some muddy and furrowed with recent tracks waited for their residents to arrive, cast by the handful by their owner. Small nursury fields played temporary host to close-packed rice seedlings, and a few, but growing portion of the land showed off its orderly procession of still young individual rice stalks so recently planted to be watched over by their bigger brothers, the tall stalks of corn and broad leafy greens.
Arriving in town I was suprised to see it so calm. Both common and exceptional places in China tend to bustle with activity, but at first glance the village seemed sleepily quiet in the late afternoon heat. Being the only outsider, I was left to my own devices to wander the paths around town and with nothing on my mind other than clearing my mind I was all to happy to simply observe. What had first appeared to be an absence of action was in fact just an absence of hassle. Everyone doing something, no one hurrying to do it. Nothing to sell, nothing to buy. Slowly the rhythm of the village began to show itself in the action and lack of action that combined to form the scene; the slow but steady crack of a whip, the plodding steps of a draft ox. The sound of a breeze moved quickly through the mottled light and dark greens of hillside stands of bamboo and tree and a woman, calf-deep in the flooded fields, raised her head from the transplanting, pausing motionless to enjoy its refreshing touch.
As dusk fell in the valley of Zhou Luo a combination of haze and darkness obscured the finer details of the mountains above, but their hulking shapes dominated the horizon and for the first time in months the mountains rather than the valleys that seperated them became the dominant element. In this moment, I found myself thinking of missing the mountains of Colorado and that my impending return home might be something I'm ready for.

Evening in Guankou

Row after row of dull blue glass sit restively between layer upon layer of the white tile that haunts the national architecture. The grating of their slides to the left and right only to be interchanged and replaced with a dull blue screen punctuates the silence. A change without change. Had I looked out another other window, I would've been rewarded with a static scene of half-prepared fields, flooded in anticipation of their seasonal guests, waiting between green hills, but such is the pull of a soft chair and a place to set my wine. Other sounds begin to rise, jumping into the evening fray, seeking to replace the sights of day with the sounds of night. The tinkling stir and the buzzing fry of a stir fry dinner whose other offerings to my senses are thwarted by the chasm between our buildings. The rumbling and booming of the fireworks cry out in a living example of what I had hoped to teach of onomatopoeia. As the day's final light escapes behind its nightime mountain home I'm finally left with the familiar battle between the frogs and cicadias for nightime supremacy.

King Kong

"One country, two systems" is the mantra which defines Hong Kong's current relationship with mainland China. However, as an observer it remains far easier to see the "two systems" instead of the "one country." Crossing from the mainland to Hong Kong you pass through customs and stamp your passport just as you would in passing from one country to another. Trying to fly from one to the other you have to book an "international" flight. More personally, I noticed that over the last week or so I spent in Hong Kong that I constantly was refering to, and comparing things to, "China" as if it existed as an entirely seperate entity. The feeling, socially, intellectually, culturally, and in almost every other way, is in such great contrast to the mainland. Things about which we are banned from speaking and writing about here... are openly seen discussed, debated on the streets, in newspapers and outside metro stations. Speaking to those I met living in Hong Kong, there isn't the defensive reaction sparked from the tender insecurity in the mainlander's mentality if you should refer to the mainland as a seperate entity, and in it's place is what could almost be described as a sense of pride in the differences. A couple of newspapers articles from during my stay mocking the May holiday Golden Week influx of mainland tourists, their group shopping and individual squatting were evidence enough of this pervasive identity dynamic, although anyone who has so much as seen Hong Kong T.V. or films knows the stereotypes (often deserved) of the backwards mainlander.
Yet while all of this remains true and despite all the differences I think it's important to remember that today, Hong Kong is indisputably a part of the People's Republic of China. It's not important to remember for any political reasons, or for the reasons of national pride and collective identity that the government and those driving the approved social thought pushed in the approach to, and now ten years since, Hong Kong's return. Rather, it is for the reason that Hong Kong now in many ways represents the future of China, the possibility of what the rest of the nation can become. It is a place of comparative tolerance and acceptance both driven by and driving the internationalism with which it drips, embodied by the myriad of subcontinent copywatch hawkers, the African luggage salesmen, the Euros on holiday and of course the Hong Kongers who are an international mash in and of themselves. It's a place where no smoking means no smoking and one-way really means one-way; a place where I no longer feel on display and a place where, above all, they have cheesecake. I'll be back.

Pants

Well, sitting on the bouncing number 7 bus to town yesterday I noticed a small tear of frayed white edges working its way across the left leg of my favorite jeans (although just to make sure we're not over sentimentalizing this, it is also my only pair of jeans). As I stared, it got me thinking about the times in our lives when the things that are the most comfortable begin to wear out. Now, back in my flat, I'm thinking about the fate of the pants, and apart from the fact that this confirms the glory of the double-kneed duck Carhartts for which such a fabric thinning would never be an issue, it might just be that these pants are now borderline for making the boxes to go home.

"'Home' you say?"

Why yes indeed. Sometimes you've just got to let go of things, whether those things are as simple as a pair of pants or as complicated as the place you've lived for the last two years. The next two months are now the time I have to figure out how to say goodbye to Liuyang and to China for the time being as I've decided to move on, first to Denver and a return to the greatest comforts of family and friends and then to London where I'll be entering the London School of Economics for a Masters in development studies. Big changes in life are big because they shatter the comforts of the past with the uncertainty of the future, and while I often rant against settling into comforts and routines, there is something, well, comforting about the attachments we inevitably form to places and even more so, to people. So as the months become weeks and the weeks days and packing approaches the sorting won't be limited to pairs of pants, which is too bad, 'cause man would that be easier.

Extraordinary

Speaking of more than a list, I've been prompted recently by Mike Lanemusings, a man who, not-so-recently returned from more than a year of travels around the world, has continued to solider on in the blogging world with some thoughts from home about the presence of the extraordinary. Check it out here for yourself http://mikelane.blogspot.com/ (Feb. 1st post) to say that I think what might seem unique to the situation of someone who's been bombarded by the neverending fresh stimuli of living out of a backpack for months on end is in fact a nearly universal phenomnon that assails our willingness to seek the extraordinary wherever we settle. There is some valiance in the fight against a comfort that blinds us to the opportunites for variety around us. I lamented to several people when I first started this blog that it sometimes seems so hard to write something worthwhile because things that would have seemed noteworthy upon my arrival now blur into the evil of a routine. So I'll wake tomorrow with a re-commitment to seek the extraordinary in the common of Liuyang, realizing that once you start looking, it's everywhere.

Unrelated note - Due to the rapid approach of the next holiday (5/1), I've gotten my butt in gear to start posting new photos on the Kodak site, including those from my trips to Fenghuang and Tibet this past Spring Festival and will post a day's travel worth each day. Take a look if you're interested.