Leaving China

I’m sitting in the Air Canada lounge at the Shanghai airport. There are free cocktails. And mini muffins. Also free. But it’s hot in here. I’m seriously considering using the last of my RMBs to buy myself a t-shirt so I don’t have to wear this sweater anymore.

I’ve got mixed feelings about leaving China. On the one hand:

• It’s hot here and I’ve been sweating the entire time. And none of the AC works right.
• Everything smells like poo, and I’m unsure if it’s weird food, bad water mains, people with a lot of gas, excessive garlic, or actual poo.
• The air quality is actual crap today and it hurts my lungs. I mean, that’s from coal, not poo. So it’s not actual crap. But I’m not sure it’s better than poo.
• My tummy has decided that it will have no more of this non-Western food and has been revolting against my adventurous palate for no less than 5 days.
• My bed at home is nicer.
• I miss my People. And my cat.

On the other hand:

• I made so many good friends here. There’s Janet, my sweet little bird who picked me up from the airport and took me out to eat crabs and was my regular dinner buddy. There’s Yang, my Beijing tour guide and fellow adventurer and Will Sonja Eat It participant. There’s Jesse, my Westerner friend who speaks French with a Canadian accent and is a bad influence about drinking too much and talking too loud. And so many more! The goodbye card they gave me with personal notes made me weepy and I will miss them all so very much.
• Everyone has been so friendly here. Beyond my friends at work, taxi drivers and concierges and people on the street have always offered to guide me or help me when I looked like I needed it. A woman at the subway station helped me get through the gate when I derped out and thought my access card didn’t work. There are countless other examples.
• In China, I am what’s considered animated. With only a silly story or a joke at my own expense, I am suddenly the most entertaining person in the room. My coworkers compared me to a cartoon character and told me I was very demonstrative. If you know me at home, you will laugh at this, but it’s not that I act differently here. It’s just that the standard of how one acts here is different. So my quiet jokes and my easy smile, which blend in everywhere in America, stand out here as boisterous and extra friendly. I have never been thought of that way, and I don’t mind it.

In two hours, I’ll board my plane home, and a mere 17 hours later, I will land in Durham. I won’t be the same person, though. I’ll be braver. I’ll be kinder. (You try not being kinder to people when you’ve been the one completely at a loss in a foreign country and you know exactly how it feels to be alone in a crowd.) I’ll be smarter. (My colleagues have taught me so much.) And I think I’ll be more me than I’ve ever been, because I’ve had to discover who I really am here, away from everything I know.

I thought it might be fitting to close with a picture of two campus cats. Left is Peaches, beloved campus cat at Duke University in Durham. Right is the unnamed calico cat (I’m calling her Chichi) at Duke Kunshan University. It seems we’re not actually that different.