EVERYBODY LOVES ME --- SO WHY AM I SO GLUM?

I listen, I pay attention, I take notes; it’s part of the job description and it isn’t as if I have anything better to do. I still feel like a doofus most of the time but it seems that I am perceived as anything but. I have rapidly become a master of Beijing social life. In this context and this context only I can live up to one of my very first nicknames: I charm, I impress, I destroy.

I have an armory of anecdotes to deploy when conversation founders; any number of “high culture” proverbs to let loose; I know what to say to delight anyone from a shopkeeper or restaurateur to a high-powered lawyer or performer. This is in addition to the fact that my face delights. Many Chinese people doubtless think me a hulking foreign devil, but my comrades and hosts have nothing but good things to say. Either I am 双美 ("doubly beautiful", on account of being both from 美国 [meiguo, or America], the “beautiful country” and a 美女 [meinu, or pretty girl]), or I remind people of the 洋娃娃 (yang wawa, or “foreign doll”) with curly golden hair and pink cheeks they used to play with as children [Chinese in their 20s and 30s today only ever had access to the toys made in the south for the overseas market. There are now some dolls with Asiatic appearances produced for the domestic market, but yang wawas remain popular]. You would be surprised how often this comparison comes up. The possibility that I trigger someone’s childhood memory of toys and doll fantasy worlds concerns me slightly but as long as it makes them comfortable with me I’m happy.

There are parts of Beijing and of other cities in China where foreign faces are barely noted, but in the spaces I frequent I am almost always the only one. As a guest at a restaurant or a visitor to an office I add instant cache. My presence brings status and international panache. Some days on the subway I am grouchy and try not to make eye contact with anyone but on other days I play “how many eyes are on me”, looking around to count the people staring at me (my max so far = 14). This gets tiresome when I just want to blow my nose or when people on either side of me are reading the Chinese text message I’m writing over my shoulder but it’s just part of life here.

If I haven’t said it before, I should also add that the vast majority of people here are incredibly gracious and friendly. I couldn't count the times I’ve been taken out to dinner or treated to a show or a day trip. Taxi drivers, acquaintances, and people on the street often ask the same few rather invasive questions (where are you from? are you married? how long have you been in China? how much money do you make? etc), but they do so with enormously well-intentioned curiosity and so far I have never tired of engaging with them.

It helps a great deal that I love it here. I find it tremendously exciting and challenging; a project that my brain can wrap itself around and around. The place and the politics frustrate and anger me often, but many places do the same. I may worry endlessly about the direction the world is going in, and how it is being driven in part by this nation which composes nearly a quarter of the globe’s population, but that will never stop me from feeling a buoyant love for the people here: for my friends, for my landlords, for my “co-workers”, for people on the bus and the street, for the shy and respectful migrant students I volunteer to teach every other week. My compassion, my curiosity, my very heart - all are expanded by openness to this nation and this culture. I want to let people in. I want to learn.

So why is it so hard? Why do I not want to get out of bed most every day? All the logic I can muster reminds me how lucky I am to have this opportunity but all my logical defenses crumble in the face of daydreams of being at home. I don’t care much for money, having subsisted for a good long time on student-sized stipends, but right now I wish I had buckets of it: I want to fly back across the ocean for shows and birthdays, to fly everyone out here to get to know the country that has won me over and to see their minds blown.

Instead I sit in my office, on the bus, in the cars of my friends, staring out the window at the metropolis and making conversation, thinking of what I should write in my fieldnotes when I sit down to my computer and hoping that when I get home someone will be on skype. The point of this whole adventure, in the end, is to learn enough that I have something to share, enough so that in some small way I can increase cross-cultural (and particularly cross-national) understanding, compassion, and tolerance. I hope that is at the end of the road still but too often it feels like my experiences are only for me and I just don’t see the point of that. I didn’t come to be a dilettante, I didn’t come to be a star. It’s nice that so many people here think I’m great but it doesn’t bring the people I love any closer.

I miss you: Ryan and Montana and John and Mark and Vanessa and Sarah and Sara(h) and Carly and Mom and Gret and Dad and Rick and Nick and Georgia and Allison and Jessica and ELD and Austin and Emily and Carrie and Melissa and Paul and Kirk and Emmy and Marybeth and Matthew and Jason and so many others that I see only too rarely. I hope you feel how much I love you and how much I wish I could share this with you.