Reminders

There are times, such as a moment sitting in one of the ever more popular Taiwan-style coffee houses sipping "Brazilian" coffee or milk tea with some other foreign teachers, that it becomes possible to forget you're in small-town China. You can, if you choose to, try to insulate yourself from the differences of life here. Some days it's tempting to try to escape the things that grate on you, but watching the way some people react to being here by retreating into the shell of the familiar makes me question why anyone would bother coming at all.

There are also so many moments when it should be clear that this is a really different place, and yet more often than not, those moments pass unmarked by contemplation. At these times, all the little things that were so different, annoying, or exciting for so long are now part of a new normality. We are distracted from some of the most fascinating events of our lives merely because they happen all the time, from some of the most fascinating places because we see them all the time and from some of the most amazing people because they're around all the time and we end up remembering only what is out of the ordinary, for better or for worse. How do we go about making sure that we notice what we should notice?

Reminders are what snap us back to the fact, to the uniqueness of the situation.
Example: Everyday twice a day, without fail the students of Tian Jiabing Senior Experimental Middle School and every other school in China take several minutes to complete a somewhat complicated series of eye exercises that involve rubbing various parts of their faces in various ways. At first I found it bizarre despite the explanation of one of the other teachers that if the students didn't have these exercises, many of them would need glasses. Unfortunately, I've never seen such a high percentage of kids who need glasses in my life so either the eye exercises aren't working or they are working and otherwise every single kid in China would need glasses. Nevertheless, I no longer find any of it note. I bring this up only because yesterday I had one of those reminder moments when I watched my students pass around a single pair of glasses between themselves as they struggled to complete the exercises on the board. I'm not sure why it stood out at the time, but in the second I found myself scribbling a note to myself to remember, it did, and I remembered where I was.