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.

Days spent in China: 201
Days spent on vacation: 75
Classes taught each week: 15
Hours of classroom time each week: 12
Students taught each week: 825
Number of days before I got used to spicy Hunan food: 4
Number of days before I started to prefer spicy Hunan food: 7
Cities visited: 13
Sleeper bus rides: 1
Plane rides: 7
Bus rides: 9
Train rides: 23
Highest ground altitude: 5079m
Total attempts to see Mao or his birthplace: 5
Successful attempts to see Mao or his birthplace: 0
Books read (including audiobooks): 13
Balls of yarn purchased: 80+
Balls of yarn lost (and then hand-delivered to me in Changsha): 8
Socks knit: 7
Stitches knit onto my sweater by a Chinese woman: approx. 100
Number of days I went before eating McDonald’s: 176
Number of times I ate McDonald’s after that: 20

I’m still processing about everything. It was weird to get dimes back as change in the Seattle airport (the common Y1 coins in China are a lot heavier). It was weird to see people waiting to get on the airport tram until after everyone else had gotten off. It was weird to see people driving in the lines on the streets (when I picked up my car, I was worried I’d forget the rules of the road; I didn’t). Things are just…weird right now. As is to be expected. I’m going to go into full-on job hunt in the next few days. I need some serious cash to pay my credit card bill, student loan payment, car insurance, and cell phone bill. I’ll also be applying for teaching jobs for the 2010-2011 school year. Wish me luck on that. More news as I really start to interact with America again.

Also, Chengdu pictures have actually been added to the photos page; I had uploaded them to flickr, but didn’t put them in a set, so they weren’t showing up. Sorry for that. Also, all the videos I’ve taken (8 total) have been added to the “China Videos” set, as well as the set for the location where they were taken, so if you want to look at those, you can find them both places now. There are videos from Chengdu, Lhasa, Hanzhong, Yangshuo (the Return of the Laowai set), Changsha (the Round 2 set), and Shimen No. 1 Middle School. enjoy!

Waiting in Beijing – surfing the internet. Can’t go see Mao’s preserved body tomorrow (as was the plan) because they’ve closed it for maintenance from 3/1 to 3/20. Blast.

Uploaded all the photos from Chengdu. Photos page is now up-to-date with all my photos. When I get home, I’ll upload the rest of my mom and Josh’s photos from our trip.

Now I just have to remember where I put the box with all my clothes in it…oy.

I left Shimen on January 29th after my last classes. I spent the last week in class asking my students to think about what they wanted to accomplish with English one year from now. We took pictures, and we listened to “Dangerous” by Michael Jackson, a song they’ve been talking about all semester. I tried to convince them that there are much better MJ songs, but they won’t have it.

I took a train to Changsha, and on the way, spent time with a very talkative young boy (who spoke no English and seemed not to be bothered by the fact that I don’t speak much Chinese), and a very shy young girl. I gave them English names (Lily and Toby) and Toby and I messed around with my iPod Chinese dictionary so we could half-communicate. It was quite a fun ride (but my head hurt at the end). I took a train to Xi’an from Changsha, and met up with my friend Laura at our usual Xi’an hostel. We spent a few days deliberating our decisions about teaching, staying in China, etc. You already know what my decision turned out to be.

On Feb. 3rd, I left Xi’an on a sleeper train to Beijing, and I arrived really early in the morning on the 4th. I met my friends Donovan, Sarah, and Taylor for lunch and to drop off one of my bags with them so we wouldn’t have to check it into a Beijing train station for a week. For dinner, I met up with a fellow China blogger, Fred Dintenfass, who took me to a really awesome Yunnan restaurant. The food was fantastic and the company was great. It was nice to make a new pal, too.

In the morning on Friday, Feb. 5th, I went to meet my parents at the Beijing airport, and they brought my younger brother Josh with them. This was supposed to be a surprise, but in actuality, my mom had slipped a few weeks ago and I’ve been telling everybody that I thought they were going to bring him. I had become quite the conspiracy theorist about it, reading between the lines on everything they were saying for the past few weeks while we made plans. But despite the fact that I knew he was coming, I was no less thrilled to see all three of them come through the International Arrivals gate. We got on the Airport Express subway line back to the city and we were off.

Once in the city, we dropped off our bags at the train station (we were leaving for Harbin that night), and headed for Tiananmen Square. We met up with a guy from our travel agency at a hotel, exchanged money for some of our train tickets, and then headed to the Forbidden City. It was really awesome to check out all the buildings (which are in much worse repair than I thought they’d be). It was pretty awesome to be in all the same places the various emperors since the Ming Dynasty had wandered about, especially since I’ve been reading up a bit on Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who was essentially imprisoned in the Forbidden City for a while by the Chinese government after the end of the Qing Dynasty.

After the Forbidden City, we took some tuk-tuks (essentially motorcycle rickshaws) to one of the hutong because I wanted to show the area to my parents. I told the guy we had 4 people, and he told me Y20. When we got out, however, they tried to charge us Y20 per person, which of course was nonsense – I had already bargained him down from Y40 and I had specified we had 4 people. So I got into a huge argument in Chinese with these two drivers who kept trying to drive in front of us to stop us from crossing the street. Eventually, since I had already paid him the Y20 we agreed on, we just crossed the street away from them and went into the hutong, and they left. I was so angry because I have never had a taxi driver do that to me in the six months I’ve been here. I’ve been overcharged for sure, but the hutong where we were going would have been Y10 in a regular taxi; Y20 for two tuk-tuks was even an overcharge. I couldn’t believe how stupid they must have thought I was, even though I spoke Chinese. I think I was angrier at that driver than I was with the 2-week process of sending money home through the rural Postal Savings bank in Shimen, and that time I had been pretty upset.

Anyway, it all boiled down to a lot of stress for me and the family. Josh was feeling really uneasy because people were staring at him a ton (after all, he’s almost 6′ tall, pasty white, and has red hair and a long beard – not exactly your typical foreigner), and the tuk-tuk drivers had been driving crazily against traffic, and then I had gotten in the argument. All of these things combined to make him and my parents really anxious. We ended up walking to a bank near the hutong to get some money, walking around one of the parks near the hutong, and then hailing a cab to the train station. Things were really touch-and-go at that point. On top of the previous anxiety, we were supposed to get on a sleeper train to Harbin that night, and our train tickets weren’t all in the same car, so Josh and my mom were going to be in a cabin with strangers (and Theo and I would each be by ourselves in a cabin with strangers). Obviously, that’s something I’m used to, but they’re not. We decided to give it a shot anyway, though.

During the anxious part, we decided to get some western food so everyone could have a little comfort, and I broke down and ate McDonald’s. That’s right, I broke my no-McDonald’s-in-China pact. See how much I love my family? And everyone is right – it tastes almost exactly like McDonald’s at home. We’ve eaten at McDonald’s several times since then. Oh, well.

Stay tuned for the next part of our trip: Harbin!

Shimen was not a good fit for me for several reasons. Buckland has offered me several other options for schools, but they seem to be bad fits for similar reasons to Shimen. Ultimately, I’m a city girl. I had a good time finding out about small-town China, but I feel that all I will accomplish in six more months is to realize that I really don’t like small towns. Especially small towns in which I don’t speak the language.

I love China. I love the language and the people and the cities and the small towns. I do not, however, love teaching EFL. I love teaching, but there’s a reason I didn’t minor in English…I hate English. There’s a reason I didn’t certify in lower grade levels…I have to be able to reason with my students (something that’s impossible with low-comprehension, low-participation Chinese students). The negatives outweigh the positives here.

I’ve also been extremely lucky in this term as far as travel opportunities. I have been to Shanghai, Suzhou, Changsha, Liuyang, Changde, Hanzhong, Xi’an, Yangshuo. When my mom and stepdad come to visit, we are going to Beijing, Nanjing, Huangshan, Harbin, and Xi’an. After they are gone, I will go to Lhasa and Chengdu. I will have been to almost every place I wanted to go in China in around 6 months. I have been so fortunate to have that opportunity.

For all these reasons (and of course, more), I have decided that after I travel this Spring Festival, my time in China is over. I don’t want to continue to teach EFL, and I’d much rather leave China while I still love the country than stay another six months and risk getting bitter.

I will be coming home to the US around March 4th (I haven’t thought far enough ahead to factor in the time-changes – I leave Beijing on March 3rd). I will, of course, keep you up to date about my travels with my parents, and my impressions of America and China once I’ve left the Middle Kingdom.

It is a bitter-sweet parting, but I think the decision I have made is for the best.

- On the way back from Changde, our express mini-bus, which was supposed to be non-stop to Shimen, stopped 6 times to deliver boxes to random people in slightly-en-route small towns. Nevill informed me that this is “not allowed” (read: probably illegal) in China, but the bus driver did it anyway. The driver also waited until 4:30pm to leave Changde, even though the bus was supposed to leave at 4:00pm, to try and get more people on the bus. Nevill spent most of the hour drive home swearing in English about the bus driver. He was 3 minutes late to a staff meeting because of all this craziness. Poor Nevill.

- I again succeeded in avoiding eating at McDonald’s, despite serious prodding from Nevill. I refuse to eat it before I go home, dammit!

- Nevill is pretty much a fantastic photographer with a big fancy camera, and he took some pictures of me and I took some pictures of him on our Changde adventure. Hopefully, he’ll send them to me soon so I can post them here.

- Nevill informs me that there are “many more foreigners” in Changde. When I asked how many, he said, “4 or 6. Many more than in Shimen.” There are at least 10 foreigners in Hanzhong, which is like 14 gazillion according to this scale.

- This week, I will help my students choose English names, and then tell them I’m leaving Shimen. This, along with actually saying goodbye to them next week, will be the saddest thing about my leaving, without a doubt. I’m not looking forward to it.

- My mom and stepdad will be here in three weeks and I’m totally excited! I have to plan what I’m going to do between 1/29 when I finish teaching and 2/5 when I have to be in Beijing to meet them. I can’t wait to force-feed them amazing Chinese food.

[ETA: If you want another foreigner's perspective on this whole thing, check out this great post at Sinosplice about how this affects China, with further links to news postings.]

In other news, my friend Echo invited me to the opening of a new restaurant, of which her husband is part-owner, last week, and I added the pictures to the Shimen photo set. The concept of the restaurant is to have all the food prepared and cooked in an open environment, on outside tables, and with windows into the kitchen, so people can see the cooking process and see the locally-purchased goods. It’s their way of being “green” and local about their food choice and process. They also have indoor “hut” style rooms with fire pits in the middle where they cook the hotpots, and the smoke from the fires smokes the meat they hang from the ceiling to be prepared later. These are “traditional”-style cooking methods, apparently. It was really interesting and the food was delicious.

I have also updated the Location map to reflect my recent trip.