When I returned to China in 2001 with my high school class, there were moments that brought back my memories with startling clarity: drinking tang and eating mahua, and the unmistakable smell of Chinese streets, an unmistakable amalgamation of night soil, pollution, public bathrooms and street food. When my parents secured teaching jobs at a university in northern China in 1988, the country had only been open to foreigners for a decade or so. Thus, we headed off into the unknown. Although we were in China during the democracy movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre, my memories are mainly that of a happy five year old: my house, my kindergarten, and my friends.
When we arrived, I remember looking out at the lights of Hong Kong as our plane touched down, and thinking that they looked like a postcard. We’d passed through numerous time zones and in my memory it seems like we were traveling for weeks. I don’t remember my first trip to the Great Wall, but I do remember being terrified of the Ming Tombs.
When we arrived at our house in Chang Chun, someone from the Waiban (foreigner’s bureau) showed us around our house. Downstairs, we had a large living and dining room with a table, an ink stained desk, a black and white television and some chairs. It was here that I had my first lesson in privilege when my mother explained to me that most Chinese people lived in apartments the size of our living room. Upstairs, my brother and I had our own rooms for the first time. At the end of the hallway, my brother’s room had a high, wide window seat. With a little effort, he could climb up through the window and onto the little vestibule over the front door.
Before we had been in Chang Chun long, my brother and I started school. My kindergarten was a small building, low to the ground, that consisted of a long hallway. There were a few classrooms and Chinese squat-style bathroom where my classmates and I would line up a few times a day. Our classrooms were large and clean, with high windows and regulation Mao-era green paint. Each of us had our own crib and home made quilts for naptimes. On the first day my mother left me, I remember standing in the drab, cement hallway, crying as I watched her disappear through the door. Although my teachers didn’t speak English, they doted on me. Before much time had passed, I was speaking Chinese almost as well as my classmates.
I learned lessons about cultural differences at my youeryuan that stayed with me for the rest of my life. I remember drawing a yellow sun on my easel, only to have my teachers laugh at me and tell me that in China, the sun is red, not yellow. My teachers loved me: Fu Laoshi used to pretend to eat my little plastic pig, Ro Ro (meat meat), calling herself “the Ro Ro Hotel.”
When we weren’t at school, my brother and I learned to be as relentlessly inventive as the Chinese kids, who had a solution to everything. Window broke, and scattered glass all over the yard? Dig a canal! Found a treacherous patch of ice, but don’t have any skates? Attach pieces of scrap metal to your shoes! We played in the small park across from our house, which boasted a filthy cement pond, a pagoda and a forked tree. The tree was a huge draw for us until one day it became home to hundreds of caterpillars. Mostly, I remember playing with my best friend, Mei Chi, my brother, and a small boy who belonged to the gatekeeper. The latter child seems to have been memorable to me mainly because he peed in our yard on at least one occasion.
In his Coming Home Crazy, a memoir of time spent teaching in China, Bill Holm writes: “Almost every China survivor will tell you that everyone goes on missing the point, until you finally give up trying to make it and either go back to China or adjust in silence. This is what culture shock really means, either making your own peace or leaving. Nothing is ever the same after you have gone ”crazy.’” Indeed, when my family had returned from our year in China, nothing was ever quite the same. Even though our year was full of leaky roofs, disasters, rodent infestations, cultural misunderstandings and times when we actually feared for our health and safety, we have never stopped measuring time in terms of “before China” and “after China.
