Wow! It's been a long time since I wrote anything here. I'd like to give a bit of a postmortem looking back at my experiences in China and to give some sort of closure to this blog. There are a couple of things I'd like to touch on: a little bit of an update as to what happened to me after the last post and a critique of what I have posted here from my current point of view.
After Sang's sister's wedding, there were a few more interesting things that happened. First, I went with Max to his hometown 偃师市 for Spring Festival 春节 (Chinese New Year). His father owned an apartment in a penthouse suite of a hotel and took me out to all their fanciest restaurants (numbers like $500 per person were whispered to me confidentially) and made me drink 2 entire bottles of Mou Tai (China's most luxurious and sought after hard liquour) at one sitting. They were, by contrast to Sang's family's condition, living in high luxury. His father owns a number of factories which produce heated flooring. One cool thing about their home village (in which they still maintain a house and have one of their factories - his father's way of giving back to his roots) is that they live just a few hundred metres from one of the oldest known palace complexes of a Chinese emperor, dating back several thousand years.
While with Max, I also visited Kaifeng's 开封 old city which has a theme park of another old palace. After that, we went to Luoyang 洛阳, which is where Max's father has his head office. In Luoyang 洛阳, Max took me to see White Horse Temple 白马寺 and Long Men Shi Ku 龙门石窟 (Longmen Grottoes). I can honestly say that the grottoes are awe-inspiring. They consist of a mile-long river valley flanked by relatively sheer cliffs into which were carved many thousands of statues of Buddha, ranging from a few centimetres in height to more than 30 metres tall! Some of the statues are more than 2000 years old and it is a UNESCO world heritage site. Unfortunately, many of the statues were desecrated or decapitated over the years by looters of Chinese artifacts and by the Japanese during World War 2. I loved it so much, particularly the view from the temple high on one of the cliffs which was said to be one of the favourite retreats of Emperor Qian Long 乾隆 and poet Li Bai 李白.
I still have all the photos which I would love to share except that, for some reason, they won't download from my old HTC phone (the one I talked about in a previous post) to my desktop.
My first Chinese New Year in China was a blast. Literally. In my entire life, I had never witnessed as many fireworks going off simultaneously as I did within the first 30 seconds of nightfall. The fireworks lasted the whole night across the whole town. It was incredible and insane and indelibly imprinted on my brain. It was like living through a battle, I imagine, without any casualties. The next morning, the entire city was enveloped in a yellow gunpowder haze. I am very glad to have witnessed it first in his hometown as it felt incredibly genuine and fun.
Unfortunately, on a more personal level, I was experiencing a period of depression and loneliness as I visited with Max and found myself feeling adrift in my hotel room late at night (the owner of the hotel in which Max's father had an apartment gave me free lodgings as a favour to Max's father). It had nothing to do with Max or his family's hospitality, but more of an existentialist weight bearing down on me in the form of a question of: "what am I doing here in China?" Let me clarify as this is an important point that I will come back to later. With the exception of some of the university's administrative faults, I had received nothing but incredibly warm welcomes and been treated wonderfully by nearly everyone I made acquaintance with. But this last word, acquaintance, was the problem. I was making many friends, but even those who I spent relatively large amounts of time with were not close friends in the sense of people who would be there for me at all times. I missed my friends back in Canada. I missed my family. I missed the feeling of having people around me for whom I wasn't just an amusing foreign diversion. I had a deep sense of insecurity because this feeling was lacking for me. If one of my friends had come with me, or if I had come with my family, I would have felt better. This period of my life was the first time that I had no one I could really fall back on for help or comfort. It finally got to me during that trip to Max's hometown.
These feelings stayed with me until one day I chatted with a Chinese friend of mine from Beijing. She said she wanted to come see me and I readily agreed. This turned out to be a fateful decision because after her arrival, we completely hit it off and she never went home (at least not until much later and not without me). Yes, I met my now wife of 5 years in Zhengzhou.
And my, what a difference it made to have her there with me. Everything became much easier and we had an incredible time exploring Zhengzhou and we even went to far as to visit Shaolin Temple with Sang. There were plenty of ups and downs and lots of interesting stories which I may share one day (including not getting paid for months and eating at the same super cheap restaurant all the time as a result), but I always felt I had someone with me to get through it together. I am extremely grateful to her for this (maybe more than she knows).
After that Spring semester ended in June, we decided to move together to Beijing. We sent all our stuff by bike courier to Beijing (poor guy had to drive 800 miles with a motorcycle towering high with our knickknacks), then we hopped on a plane to Beijing. We never went back, sadly, though we would like to do so one day.
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And now for a short critique: I tried to be accurate in my portrayal of what I was experiencing. This means I would try to give credit where it was due and to criticize where I felt it warranted. However, looking back, I realize I was far nastier and snarkier than I needed to be in many cases. I was also emphasizing things which I felt were negative or shocking to me and leaving out many of the day-to-day excellent experiences which befell me. Literally every one of the students I met was awesome. There is no way any foreign teacher coming to North America would be treated with the same level of warm welcome, respect and enthusiasm as I was met with there. I have no excuse for this lack of appreciation on my part. I can only say that a large part of my negativity stemmed from the shock of constantly being put in new situations and, as I said earlier, my terribly lonely and insecure frame of mind.
Henan is a lovely place to visit and I highly recommend it to people who are willing to try something new and out of their comfort zone. As a neophyte traveller, I was overwhelmed, but it was the adventure of a lifetime and I have no regrets.
As always, if you have questions, please let me know!
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