Longing...

I am about a week into my travels and I am experiencing a deep longing, not for home (though I do miss everyone) but instead for the Streets of Shanghai, my home the last time I was in China, if you can have a home for only four weeks. Shanghai was a city filled with excitement, an aura of grandeur, of being on the verge of the future. The architecture was something out of 1980’s science fiction, the people assured and confident, the surroundings are foreign yet oddly familiar. You could walk down the street and have many choices of food, western with a Chinese twist. In short, paradise, but a safe paradise. Shanghai is my London of China. I love London because it is distinctly European, not American yet it is a safe destination. I know that I will be able to talk to anyone and have no major problems communicating. In some ways, Shanghai offers this same level of comfort. Knowing that there are Western restaurants, and, if you are patient, someone that has at least some level of English. As of yet, I have not found this in Beijing.

Three Blind Men are shown an elephant. One of the men is at the front, another in the middle and a third at the back. The one at the front feels the trunk and thinks he is holding a snake, is convinced of it. The second is sure that he is at a wall and the third thinks something else entirely. Each of these men are at a different part, yet they think they know exactly what they are encountering. No one can see the whole thing at once or even perhaps at all. (adapted from “Oh the Glory of it All” by Sean Wilsey…sidenote; this is a great book, which you should all go out and get…or wait for me to bring it back home and borrow it) China is like this elephant. It is a huge place with all sorts of different experiences depending on where you are. None of the parts are alike and the parts can even change given time. With the current rate of change, the China that I am experiencing will never again be reproduced. On my first trip here, I knew one small part of China and had hoped that my experience the first time would be recreated here in Beijing. I am reminding myself that I need to stay patient. I am sure that I will soon discover that part of Beijing that evokes similar emotions to what Shanghai has.

I am longing for the safe expatriate haven where I know I can see familiar faces; hear familiar sounds, smell familiar scents and perhaps most of all taste familiar cuisine. It has only been a week, but I already miss many of my favorite dishes at home. I feel, and it is perhaps too soon to really know, that the people in Shanghai were much friendlier than they are here in Beijing. (It also could be that time has made me forget the less friendly in Shanghai, leaving only the pleasant memories, see “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert...another good book) Western faces are so few and far between here in Beijing that when we stumble upon each other, we almost are more prone to glaring at each other for ruining the exotic and foreign mindset that pervades Beijing. In Shanghai, I seem to recall the Western faces as smiling, almost smirking, knowing that we were sharing in the experience of a city at the cusp of great things, a city which in many ways is busy staking its claim as one of the most important economic centers in the entire world.