Expatriation, or something

Possibly the biggest challenge I have been facing in myself is how exciting living in a different country isn't. I mean, yes, I am building awesome friendships with people who have quite different perspectives in life (in some ways, anyway). I am seeing new places, learning new languages.

But I still wake up every day and think about going to work (or other things I would rather be doing). I still get unnecessarily anxious about social situations. I still have to get out of the house and DO things, and it is still just as easy to sit at home on the computer and waste time.

And more than that, it can be lonely. It is harder to start new relationships, though I find the payoff of connection is generally much bigger when friends are coming from different cultures, it is much easier to step on each other's toes by not paying attention to "the things that actually matter" in a relationship-- since we may have quite different ideas about what those are. I don't want to go shopping some days because I don't want to deal with the fear in employee's eyes when they realize they might have to deal with me.

I don't mean to be complaining, really. I know I am very lucky to be here and am grateful for the experiences I am having and the ways there are making me grow. There are just always people now and then who tell me that they are impressed that I can live here, and (aside from just not being very good at taking compliments) I always want to shout "Don't be!" I am dealing with most of the same problems that I dealt with in my life in Iowa.

I continually realize that no matter what exciting scenery I find for myself, I will always be me. I am lucky, but if any of my family and friends still in America (or wherever their home country) moved to a new country, they would very quickly discover that I have done some things well, but that they could do a lot of things better.

"There's so much more to get than wronged"

I have been trying to take a step back from the expectations I have of myself and see who I am and where I am and should be going.

I have been praying more. I have been trying to make my days expand into tapestries of things learned and seen and loved and not just the passage of the sun over my head. I have been trying to look around more.

I was almost overwhelmed in Nanjing. Not quite, I struggled through my classes well enough (I think. My civil law professor has still not told me if I passed or not) but had a hard time reaching out to the people around me. I'm hoping I can change this when I go back; that I can let people matter to me. Of course, half our time will be over, so everyone else's focus may not be on forming friendships, but I do the best I can.

I have been realizing that it might be okay for me to get used to things being alright. Not that I'm never going to have to face anything difficult again. I'm sure I will. I will be miles away from you when bad things happen. I won't be there to hug you or for you to hug me. I will be confused and in over my head and helpless. I will be human. But it will be okay. I will rely on the knowledge that I am not the most important thing in existence. I will call this knowledge "God" and scratch the surface. I will rely on the beautiful people I have in my life, all over the world.

The title is from "Earth to Bella, Part 2" by Incubus

i'm just a little bug who tries real hard

I am not in Wuxi! But I have a ticket for tomorrow morning, so I will have to stop sitting around and being a lame-o by 9:06am or I will have wasted 54 yuan.

I have been having trouble getting myself going, and kind of letting little things pile up. I am currently trying to figure out how to get a package from Fedex, but so far have been unable to find anyone who know their number, or where I might look for it. I have sent an email to a member of our super helpful administrative staff, and hopefully that works out. I just finally added money to the sim card on my cell phone, so I can keep making phone calls without worrying about it. I am going to do one final revision of my SOP and then finish Berkeley's application- it's due Tuesday! Ahh!

A friend knocked on my door an hour or so ago and said that through a professor's student she was being interviewed in Chinese about Thanksgiving and wondered if I would join her. I did, I told them that I generally eat food and hang out with family on Thanksgiving, and that what I am most thankful for are all the wonderful people in my life. Then they took some footage of Anna and I reading and writing Chinese, to make their segment more impressive.

And here I am, back again! I am gonna do some homework. For serious.

(oh, and my title refers to Morris)

"But everything looks perfect from far away..."

You all may notice that my posts here get more frequent in proportion to the number of other things I should be doing. I am trying to just let myself be productive in whatever way I can, however, so I've decided that's ok. My courses are honestly far less demanding (at least so far, you can ask me again when term papers are due) than most years at U of Iowa, so it will probably work out.

I am still stressing about my presentation on Monday, but I have more or less convinced myself that the stress + my worn-out state from the rest of today make it not worth working too hard tonight. I am instead trying to regain my emotional and intellectual strength for tomorrow. I am doing so by drinking tea, reading fiction, and journaling.

I helped out teaching 5-6 year old boys again this morning, probably for the last time. Getting up very early on a Saturday morning, on top of the discrepancy between my energy wavelength and that of kindergarteners, leaves me ill-equipped to be much use to them. I have found other venues for out-of-school productivity though, so don't be too unhappy for me.

I climbed a mountain today! I was an awfully small mountain- when we first got off the bus Xiaoxuan turned to me and said "山在哪里？" (where's the mountain?)- but I still give myself a lot of credit for climbing it.

Xiaoxuan told me the other day that she had been worried about living with an American, she wasn't sure what cultural problems might arise, but that her fears were misplaced because I am more like her than most people. She, and independently a number of other Chinese classmates both male and female, has told me that I am more like a Chinese student than an American. I am too 文静 (gentle), too 安静 (quiet, peaceful). This is perhaps in large part due to stereotyping, but also to the fact that Americans can be of ridiculous when they travel abroad. Perhaps especially in China, where the first impression people have of foreigners is: FOREIGN, and one quickly realizes that it will be impossible not to stand out.

One thought this repeated observation about myself has led to is that I must be a very odd (perhaps eerie?) presence a lot of the time. I try to let people know I approve of them. I don't sit in silence out of spite or frustration, though perhaps occasionally out of self-doubt. Mostly, I just find a lot to think about in the spaces between the lines on a highway, or the different ways houses seem to greet the world with the lines of their eaves and the sizes of their windows, or the sentences people choose to say when they don't want everyone to know what they are thinking. I am not sure I would not call this wisdom; I seldom reach meaningful conclusions. I just see a lot of interesting paths for my thoughts to travel and generally feel it's better to take them.

Can I tell you a secret? I don't really like to travel that much. I am not very good at transitions. They leave me feeling tilted and worn-out, and it can take a long time for me to recover. I think it took more than a month for me to be okay with Nanjing, and I think I probably won't really have anything solid to say about how I feel about this city until I leave in January and come back in February. But I think that the patchwork quilt of places spread across our planet is one of the greatest gifts we have as residents here. If one dimension of the universe can be described with math and physics, in describing the shapes of the lines that connect all its points, another can be described with biology and ecology, in all of the incredible diversity that those elegant essential truths can combine to create. Another more complex dimension is human, sometimes messier to sort out but all the more poignant for its layers. And all of these are woven in and around and through one another all over our beautiful planet so that whole worlds exist in any one place, and even beginning to draw a line between two of them is magic.

If I chose each day what I would most like to do, I would almost always end up sitting someplace sunny, drinking tea, reading, writing, twirling my hair absent-mindedly, rambling in mutter-y and introverted kind of way, and looking out of windows.

I cannot promise that after next summer I will have seen all the sights in Nanjing, or sought out all of the worthwhile people I could have. I am so grateful for my chance to just be here for a year and let the reality of the place sink in to my consciousness.