Coming Home

It was a sort of slow realization. First the dustied window of a regular shop appeared, the words “laundry” in the window, with pale blue siding framing torn out Chinese paper and detergent. Then, a tattered book cover came into view, surrounded by others, old worn copies with tags sticking out of their middles like belly buttons on the top of their heads, displaying the author, title, and date of this edition. It was here, on the blue LCD screen of my personal TV on Cathay Pacific airlines on my return from China, that I got my first glimpse of home.
The sense was one not unlike when I was a child, pretending to sleep in the back of the car one of my parents would drive as we returned late at night from a trip. As we curved up the steep hill of my driveway I would watch the stars flicker overhead before pretending to be asleep again so that my father would carry me back into my home. I remember the way my bed felt when I sat on it the first time after living in China for a year, the way my body sank back into it, as if the silver stars painted on my walls responded in relaxing, as if they were awaiting my return.
I have mourned the loss of that house and those moments for years and now, I can finally say, that I have found another home. It consists of Roma and Bea and Frances running outside my room and the cobblestone streets outside my apartment building. It’s tied up in scattergories on my front porch and bottles of wine by the Hudson river. It is New York, and 338 west 12th street and I could not be happier to be returning, to my home.
It was hard to lie in these past few days. I’ve been lying all summer to people, telling them I am doing education work, telling them I merely have tutors and am studying Chinese, telling them (perhaps the worst lie of all) that I am merely a visitor for the Olympics. In the past weeks, however, as I said goodbye to the security guards, restaurant owners, illegal cab drivers and the like who composed my daily life, that I planned to return to China soon, that I would be looking for jobs here after I graduate and that I was only counting the days and moments until I could return. Which is, of course, not true.
I think there are many reasons why I did not find my central happiness this summer. I don’t like to say I was unhappy because I wasn’t but, it was certainly filled with more frustration, anger and dissatisfaction than I’ve found with my incredibly blessed life in New York. To start with may be the job itself. For those who did not know I was researching access to treatment for children living with HIV and AIDS this summer. I still haven’t processed it enough to be able to adequately write of the experience, and my over active body tenses up at the thought of tackling the task at the moment, let’s just call it the single most challenging, frustrating, defeating, depressing and inspiring job of my life. Least of all because it taught me so much of who I am and what it is I want, no, what I need to be doing with my life. And that need, at this time in my life does not, I fear, involve working on academic human rights issues in China. Though a report will be written which I will pour my heart into and changes may be made or, more likely, ignored, when I graduate in the spring of 2009 I hope and fervently wish and dream that I will continue my days walking by that dusty bookshop, stopping in once in a while to peek at the inscribed words written decades ago by a memory long since made.
Before I land, however, there are certain moments that I have held inside my mind that I hope not to forget which I hope to inscribe below so forgive me my last indulgence into keeping these moments from slipping beyond the grasp before my brain once again becomes packed with case law and let me send these moments into the void of cyberspace to be perused once and again, perhaps when I am in class.

One must start with the entire story of Ryan which is a blog post in and of itself. I shall post that soon.

Other moments:

At my school in Namu, children wait for me outside the second story of my school teacher dwelling. This especially occurs following the book ceremony where the money I raised so many years ago was finally put to good use. They sit in groups, fourth grade girls stuck in between childhood confidence and teenage embarrassment, ready with pens and notebooks, drawing to soak up the time I spend sleeping or reenergizing myself. The boys sometimes come, one is particularly loud and self aware, others act ashamed of seeing me in a too cool sense, rolling their eyes upward and looking off to the right when my host teacher asks them how long they were waiting for me. Before, when I lived here for a month, it was easier. The time was not so consolidated, the first few days were madness but the novelty of myself wore off. Now however, with new school children added to the old, the impromptu English classes and spur of the moment games and wushu classes literally turn into hundreds of students trying to engage themselves. Some are disruptive, purposefully mocking the way my voice sails high in the air when I get excited, kicking their neighbors when I lead wushu exercises. Others are overeager, barreling into me in waves of black-haired school children, bags and all. At one point a game of “fishy fishy cross my ocean” multiplies, like it’s own version of blob tag. Ten children turn into 20, 50, 100, 150, as word that teacher zhang is playing games in the lunchtime break weaves its way down the main road. Finally, there are too many children and I am too tired. “Who wants to run?” I ask. “ME!” shout nearly 50 kids, more boys than girls, and I am off. Running through the school gate in my white flip flops and long green skirt, making a left out of the paved school yard into the dirt road of Namu village, 75 eager kids dancing in my wake.


I am on a bus on the way to the support center for HIV positive women who are former Intravenous Drug Users (IDU) and current sex workers. I chose a back seat on the bus so I can open the window wide and let the wind toss my hair as I blast my ipod on a chosen playlist, jam packed with upbeat poppy songs I can release myself in as I reach the last week of my fieldwork which I am grateful for but which is exausting. A family comes to sit beside me in the back seat. A father, mother, aunt and two children. One 11 year old boy and his 4 month old baby sister. The boy sits next to me, nervous and shy. I ask him a question in Chinese, he turns smiling to his mother and doesn’t answer. I turn back out the window and discreetly mouth along to the music on deck. We make a pit stop and scores of women and young boys and girls hold high baskets filled with sweet smelling wine grapes up to our window. I open in and hands and baskets fly through the gap “3 kuai, green grapes, purples grapes.” I buy a bag and share it with the family. In between seed spits the boy points to my ipod and asks what it is. I hold up one earphone and place it into his right ear so we are each listening to one half and this is how we continue the trip, me and this boy listening to Miley Cyrus and Maroon Five as we roll through the highway cutting lines through the countryside.


Of course, there are others, the conversations with my illegal cabby who brought me to work most mornings, watching Micheal phelps win his seventh gold medal, cartwheeling with hip hop dance crews in the Olympic green, but these moments with these children are what I will miss most about this country and are what make this decision particularly guilty to face. There is a raw ability to form connections here, for those who are willing to take it, a conversation, a smile, an interaction which makes an imprint like a hot iron pushed to the skin. Of course it is because I am white and foreign and new and a novelty and have a certain lack of embarrassment, but it is there for the taking. I wonder if the same can happen in New York or if we are too jaded, too hardcore, too full of ourselves to allow those moments to exist and thrive. I wonder if I miss the experiences of New York and the long lasting connections and if those outweigh the adventures and challenges that lie in China. Sometimes I hate myself for feeling like I am giving up. Sometimes I love myself for knowing where I belong at the moment and what is right for me. And I shouldn’t dismiss my NY work, a place filled with so much injustice and inhumanity squeezed packed between its cracks it’s a wonder it hasn’t yet imploded, but knowing there are solutions here and that I can use them makes you feel bad you’re not continuing for those solutions to merely EXIST in a place where so many, maybe more, need them too.

For now, however, I need to allow myself to be in New York and be where I am. A place where the work is hard but I love the life which surrounds and supports it. And that, I now realize, is and important inextricable piece to the lives that we lead.