Growing up in China

by Chris Hearne

“So Chris, how was China?” is the question I think I can expect to answer when I finally go home. There are two types of people that ask you this type of question. The first is by far the most common. Was the Forbidden City neat? How about those chopsticks? Worst of all, did you eat a lot of sushi? For these people I will nod and politely say that of course, I had a great time in China. Chopsticks aren’t so hard after all and the sushi was delicious.

It’s in preparation for the small fraction of people that might actually be interested in really hearing how I thought my year and some change in China was that I’m considering this question now. How can I take this amazing, wonderful, awful, exhausting, frustrating and enlightening experience and put it in a box so people can understand?

It’s difficult to sum up how I feel about this place. Before I came here, I had never left little Bellingham, Washington for more than three weeks at a time. Every day I stay here, it is the longest I have ever been away from home, so I’m a little embarrassed to admit that despite the benefits of an ongoing education and the influence of worldly and intelligent parents, I had little idea how the outside world works. Going from having almost no impression of a place to having an overwhelming amount of emotion attached to it – good and bad – in a relatively short amount of time leaves the mind whirling and grasping to use the right words. It’s as if a light turned on suddenly in my head, but my brain had been in the dark so it has to squint and open its eyes slowly.

I can tell people I love China. I love the sound of cicadas lurking in trees, and the feeling of walking into an air-conditioned building from the sweaty, dusty Beijing street. I love friendly, salt-of-the-earth type taxi drivers, and tipsily riding bikes home in the middle of the night with someone riding on the back. I love running on a track in the middle of the night and not being the only one there, and I love walking far along the Great Wall and hardly seeing a single other person. I love Chinese people pretending like you’re the most important person in the world when you go to their house, and I really love baozi. The feeling of being on top of everything, of finding something new everyday and solving some problem everyday, and meeting new people at every corner and finding something to laugh about every time you outside; that’s what China is to me. Yeah, I could tell people I love China. And I do.

I can tell people I hate China. I hate Beijing traffic jams and I hate people on hard-seater trains staring at me like I have a growth on my face. I hate bargaining anywhere and for anything and I hate trying to find places in dust storms. I hate scammers and I hate the constant cough I’ve developed from breathing Beijing air. I hate cramming onto busses during rush hour and I especially hate people that treat you like a child because you clearly aren’t Chinese and therefore clearly can’t function. The feeling of utter dejection one feels at the back of a train ticket line that stretches all the way to the basement just before Chinese New Year, or the distinct weight of despair that hangs over you when you can’t understand a simple question from a waiter; that’s what China is to me. I could tell people I hate China. And I guess I do, a little.

These things that I love about China, and these things that I hate about it, will be part of who I am for the rest of my life. Something about being cut off from the world I knew for the first 20 years of my life in such a sudden way makes whatever happens afterward that much more a part of you. The way I think, the way I look at the world, and the way I see people are all related to China, what I love about it and what I hate about it. For 20 years I was a child. China raised me into an adult.

So when that second type of person does ask me how China was, I know now what I can tell them. China made me want to laugh and to cry. China made me want to think and to act, it made me high with inspiration and pushed me to complete desperation. China made me decide deep down inside what I need to do, and also took my heart and split it in two directions. It woke me up sometimes, and let me keep dreaming at others. This place, or this thing, called China was like a strict father and a forgiving mother. In short, it isn’t a place I visited or went to school for a while: China is the place I grew up.