China Truths

As I lay on the floor, tears streaming down my face and gasping for air between bouts of laughter, I could not help but think over all that had led me to this moment. Insanity and enlightenment in the most bizarre of times…

It was six months in the making.

I never really had that moment where I stopped to think this whole thing through.

I mean, the opportunity arose and next thing I know I am…

Running across campus meeting people.

Hounding teachers for help and knowledge.

Signing, printing, copying, folding and anything short of making papers.

Getting, writing, sending letters.

Paying, losing and wishing I was receiving money.

Once I am approved, packed and utterly confused I find myself on a plane heading west.

In yet another rushed and hurried feat I find myself cramming month’s worth of training into a week’s time before being shipped of on yet another plane to an even farther place.

I had suddenly gone from being in my family home doing nothing to being in a foreign country, alone and over worked.

Everything was upside down.

New country.

New culture.

New language.

New people.

New job.

New information.

New experiences.

I was learning too much too fast.

How to live on my own.

How to cook.

How to teach.

How to communicate without knowing a language.

How to get around the new city.

How to pretend everything was fine and I was not going insane.

I was thankful for the little things.

My mother teaching me to cook and clean.

Working air conditioning.

Internet access.

The mountain view from my window.

The bamboo mat on top of my box spring.

Having mastered chopsticks at an early age.

Milk tea.

And the lack of a drinking age limit.

All in all it was a whirlwind of everything and anything that could have been thrown into the experience.

Ups and downs, emotionally and physically.

Taking on more than what I had been trained for.

Adapting to a new set of socially accepted rules and encounters.

Good moments, funny moments and some horrible ones.

An all time rock bottom low was hit at some point as well.

But within the information and sensory overload that was my life I never had a moment to stop and think why or how I had ended up this way in the first place.

I was at work.

My last day of work and I had nothing to do.

Opening up one of the books I was supposed to have read for school I set about the task of wasting time in a seemingly productive way.

A novel, based on the experiences and observations of an American raised Chinese woman who had found herself wandering back to the birthplace of her forefathers.

I feel it is safe to say she found more than she bargained for as she wrote of the lives of the young Chinese women who dared to migrate from their farming homes to the cities in search of factory work and better lives.

She wrote of the lives of women she met and listened to, learning about the migration phenomena from the point of view of the actual immigrants.

Fearless Chinese women, would be my description should you ask for it.

As I read all she had to share and say I found myself coming across words that struck home within my own life and experiences.

All though not Chinese and not a factory worker, I could relate.

I too was a single girl, playing pretend as a woman, trying to grow up, work and survive in a place that was foreign to me in every way.

Within the hundreds of printed words there were certain truths, undeniable truths.

Losing touch of people is the easiest thing to do.

The feeling of getting lost within the masses, becoming just one more amongst them all.

Calling home and never really sharing the extent of things due to shame or they fear of your families worry.

The struggle with money.

Becoming dazzled by the new life and possibilities.

The want for more, always more.

The fear of uncertainty and reality.

Becoming something new.

Eternally unfinished, ever in the process of becoming something new.

The pep talks you give to yourself because you are the only one you can rely on.

Being alone eve n in a place teeming with millions of lives.

Friends are as much a hazard as they are a necessity, and yet, even the close ones are fleeting.

As I read every truth she displays seems to be hitting home…

What I have lived.

What I have seen.

What I have become.

What I have ceased to be.

What I have hidden.

What I have boasted.

What I have wanted.

What I have achieved.

Simply what is.

As well as the why of all these things.

The truths within my own existence.

And they hit my like a ton of bricks.

Everything I had not found the time to think of came crashing down on me.

And suddenly I am crying my eyes out, utterly terrified of the truth.

And suddenly I am laughing so hard that it hurts at the fact that it took me six months in a foreign country to figure it out.

And still, the truth is only true for as long as it takes me to learn something new…