A Simple Dream

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One of the great things about living in China these days is the relatively unrestricted access I have to information resources. If I get a little homesick, I can log to the web and hear the latest twist in Washington scandals or the growing dissent over America’s latest war. Sometimes, I log onto NPR and cherry pick the best stuff. Today I listened to NPR’s China correspondent Rob Gifford talk about President Bush’s visit to Asia. Gifford gave up the post a couple months ago and is writing a book about his six years working in China. During that time, he had countless encounters. Among his favorites are filling in for a missing pastor and delivering Sunday Mass. At the end of the conversation, the host asked him what he missed most now that he was living in the West.
“It’s getting up in the morning and not knowing what will happen,” or something to that effect. As I reflected on his words, they sunk deeper. Theoretically, even when we live in the West, we don’t know what the day will bring. No one ever does and that’s what makes life interesting. But at home, life is fairly predictable. Work, bills, dinner, death and taxes. Whatever, we all have our patterns and it takes conscious effort to turn up the serendipity and break loose.
Here, all I have to do is walk out my door. And that is what Gifford was getting at. The pace of change in China has been so fast, everyone here faces a new day, nearly every day. Or at least it seems like it. Shanghai has gone from dirty and backward to a modern city in just 20 years. Gifford says there is a sense in China that the country has been in the backwaters of modernization for 150 years and it’s doing all it can to catch up in just a couple generations.
I had lunch today with an ex-pat couple who have lived in Hangzhou for about a year. They see it too: “The building this restaurant was in wasn’t even here a couple months ago,” Tim said. While you could certainly say that if you were having lunch in a new Walmart in Fairbanks, the phenomenon is happening all over the place here. Sometimes it seems to be happening on every block.
For individuals, opportunities and ideas are appearing just as fast. I was speaking with Esther the other day. She’s our strongest English speaker and comes from the one-child generation. She’s 24 or close to it and living with her boyfriend, a black man from Canada who is here teaching English. She asked me the other day if, hypothetically, my parents asked me to choose between them and my girlfriend, whom would I side with? I wasn’t about to be boxed into that because it just doesn’t seem like an “either/or” proposition. But in China, such choices are common and respect for the wishes of parents is paramount. Or at least, it was. Esther says her mother knew here daughter all too well: “You’d choose the boy,” she said.
But even among someone with such radical ideas as Esther, a common question in America stopped her. “Esther,” I asked, “What do you want to do with your life?”
She looked at me and scrunched her face and barked “Huh?”
A couple days before she told me she couldn’t imagine spending a year working here.
“You know, what do you want to do? Get married, have kids?”
Another scrunchy face.
“How about traveling?”
“What would that get me?” she asked, scrunching a third time. That’s when I explained that to me, life isn’t about “getting” but about experiencing. I suggested she consider traveling for a year. Save some money, then go to, say, Australia and try Wwoofing, an acronym for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. (www.wwoof.org) Its a cheap way to travel, do interesting work, meet interesting people and sort out a life, or just enjoy some time in a garden. I spent a month at it when I was in Tasmania and it was a gas. There’s lots of young people and some older ones, from all around the world. I gave Esther a piece of paper with the information on it.
“Okay,” she said. “This is my dream now.”

PS. Now you can get two blogs for the price of one. My co-teacher Ian, the dredlocked Jamaican, is writing a blog of his own, right here at travelblog.org. Just search "Hangzhou" and you'll find it. It's a nice compliment to this one. - John

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Comments

[Rita]

Contrast of old and new
It has been nine years since we were in China, but things were happening very fast then, too. It was interesting to me to see how the new was leaping ahead, but the old was still in evidence. There would be huge machines building a new road, and old women with brooms sweeping the dirt off the newly paved section. There would be a fancy new house just like one in America in a village where all the others were small and shabby and chickens and pigs roamed freely. As my eyes opened to these contrasts I became more and more aware of pace of the new, but the reality of the old.