East is Relative

Missing pieces

After having been away from the blog for a long time, I just read the post I wrote a week after having returned home. I can’t believe I said, “I don’t really miss China.” I do miss China. A lot, actually. It comes on strong, at strange times. I miss the food, or I miss being on a train eating dried fruit, or I miss speaking Chinese (okay, I really miss speaking Chinese). I especially miss traveling. I’ve been home for two months, and given my in-China passage of time, I would have taken at least two or three trips by now. I’ve gone down to Bloomington-Normal (where I went to college), two hours away, a few times. And I had a teaching job interview 4 and a half hours away. And I took a train down to St. Louis. But given that I’ve been all those places before, it doesn’t really feel the same.

I miss being an outsider in a culture where I’m supposed to be an outsider. In China, I didn’t really have issues of self-esteem, and being cool or liked or fashionable on a daily basis wasn’t a concern. Of course, I spent a lot of my time alone and didn’t have many friends, but even that was alright. I liked being on a bus or a train and being alone with my thoughts while the other people carried on with their lives around me. My inability to understand the language made me a bystander by nature, but even if I’d understood Chinese, people were unlikely to talk directly to me. They stared, of course, but few directly addressed me (except in Tibet). If I wanted to be left alone, I would be left alone.

Of course, that’s not saying that people are bothering me here; but I am much more actively involved in daily goings-on in America than I was in China. I didn’t realize how much I would appreciate having no schedule or obligations until I came home and had to interact with other people’s schedules again.

It boils down to this: I spent my life from ages 5 to 27 getting increasingly busier and more involved. From 2000-2009, I was in various colleges, involved in classes, extracurricular programs, fundraisers, student organizations, majors, double-majors, minors, part-time side jobs and social activities. I was going non-stop. I had homework and side work and personal work and I was just so busy all the time.

I have always chalked it up to my own preferences; I say, “If I didn’t have something to do all the time, I’d go crazy.” And in China I complained about having nothing to do; but now I’m starting to think that was a knee-jerk reaction, and it was just me adjusting outside of my comfort zone. Since my return, I still haven’t been able to get myself back on a real schedule. I forget things. I missed an appointment (something that’s not happened in about 5 years). I keep misplacing lists. I can’t seem to get myself back on the schedule or rhythm that I had before I left. And I miss not having to be on a schedule. I miss being able to decide at the drop of a hat to go to Sha’anxi province on an overnight train.

I’m starting to feel like the decision to leave China was not the best one; I think I panicked and left. It’s okay that I did that. But I should acknowledge it for what it is. It was scary to be without a schedule or a plan from 7am to 10pm every day. And now that I’m back to social obligations and work obligations and family obligations and all obligations, things I always said I couldn’t do without, I’m finding that I really did enjoy not having them for awhile. I’m not saying I want to go off the grid and be a solitary nomad for life; I’m just saying that I should be taking advantage of it now.

I still don’t have a teaching job for the 2010-2011 school year, and I’m going to be applying abroad if I can find an international school. Unfortunately, many international schools require two years of teaching experience, so I might have to wait until I’m a littler further in my teaching career. Given the terrible state of teacher’s jobs right now, though, it may be easier to go abroad again in two years, especially if I get a job in a district that fires and re-hires first-year and second-year teachers to keep them off of tenure. It just means I have to get a teaching job, no matter what.

Either way, I want to go back to China, or to another country, and try again. I’m not homesick anymore; I’m abroadsick.