Four weeks

We're heading back to San Francisco in four weeks after spending nearly a year here in Beijing.  I won't be ready to sum things up for a good long while, and imagine I'll need to hunker down in my house in SF for a bit, hiding under the covers.

I remember our return to SF the summer before last after we'd spend five weeks traveling around China.  I couldn't figure out where all the people were.  San Francisco's population is about 800k.  Beijing's is about 22M.  A good friend spends July 4th on the Lake Tahoe beach every year.  After a month in Beijing, she said the Tahoe celebration was not so well attended this year.  Her friends thought she was nuts and said it was the most crowded ever.  I remember that in SF it felt like a bomb had gone off or something.  I hung out in my front room library for hours staring out the window and during that time one person...ONE person...walked up my block.

We had our friends over for dinner last night, the ones with whom LiLi was in SF MI school.  We live on the West side of the park and they live on the East side.  The (very global) dad doesn't speak Chinese and was laughingly recounting some times when the kids go on strike and say, "I don't know how to say that."  We've experienced it a lot too.  Sometimes it's a general strike as in, I'm sick of translating and my brain is tired.  But oftentimes I think it is not knowing how to say the thing in the exact words we are using at the time.  For example, I know maybe 50 words that include:  good-not good; want-not want; can-can't; cold; hot; left; right; week; days of the week; hours; numbers; etc  (okay; maybe I know more than 50 by now).  So I can ask for things, or ask for not-things, but my sentences aren't pretty and are probably mostly wrong.  But I can get my point across, get around town, order at a restaurant, tell a taxi driver where to take us, etc.  But the kids, they think we mean:  translate this sentence into the exact sentence in Chinese.  "LiLi's not going to afterschool today and won't take the bus, so I'll need you to go up to school and get her in a car.  She gets out at 3:40."  LiLi might say, I don't know how to say that.   I'd say:  "LiLi school.  Want car home.  3:40.  Car.  Can-not can?"  Of course, it's also true that I taught myself to say, "I am studying Chinese.  My Chinese is very bad."  To which I invariably hear back, "your Chinese is good; I can understand you," even when it is clear that they do not.

Another factor is whether the person gets that I only have 50 words and uses those same words.  One can communicate a lot A LOT with just those basic words.  But so so many times I say my simple non-sentence and the person just starts talking a mile a minute.  I can say, "I do not understand; I do not know; I do not speak Chinese; she speaks Chinese, I do not speak Chinese; I understand a little bit of Chinese."  But many people, like our Ayi at first, cannot modify their responses to the simple handful of words.  Now, our Ayi knows about 25 English words, so now she gets it.  Between my Chinese words and her English words, and both of us keeping our sentences simple, we can communicate pretty well.

Four weeks.  It's been over a year since I made the decision to close up my house in SF, quit my jobs and move LiLi here.  For the longest time it was impossible to imagine myself back in my SF house, sleeping in my soft bed with all of its pillows, waking up to my SF view.  But lately I've been noticing those thoughts creeping in.   I've noticed that I've started using the word "home" to refer to San Francisco instead of Beijing.

My office mate is an attorney from Canada educated at Cornell who has been in BJ for many years.  She and her husband, both Chinese-North Americans, both work for non-profits here.  They have a couple of kids too so we talk about life here and in North America, on the East Coast, with kids and with our non-profit bent.  I found myself describing our humble nearly 113 year old house in SF, and my brother's 230 year old house in NY, and my other siblings' houses and our lives in different parts of the U.S.  After every one I found myself saying, we/they "have a good life."  And that is true here, too.  We have a great life here.  We have good friends, good work, a comfortable place to live.  Suddenly, in talking with my office mate, I realized that we have a good life anywhere.  We're so lucky to be healthy, to have each other, to get to make choices about where we live and what we do for a living.

I've heard it is an American thing, to think we get to be happy. Maybe it's our greed or sense of entitlement.  Maybe it's our good fortune to have resources (squandering them is the subject of another post).  Maybe it's that bit in our Declaration of Independence that somehow gets into our brains when we are young and sticks with us:  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I love China deeply, profoundly and in ways I can't even reach with my rational mind.  Yet I think my dad gave us the greatest gift of all:  to be born Americans.

In four weeks we are going home.