Thanks to a Stranger

Tonight Lukin and I stood on the street in our giant back packs and looked at each other. The three internet cafes we had located were all closed, we had 5 hours until our train would leave and we weren't hungry (food is usually a great way to use time!). As we stood, a man who had pointed us to the first of the three closed cafes came over to us. "I'll help you," he said, and motioned for us to follow him. He led us to a fourth cafe, closed. He motioned again for us to follow. He spoke with several people on the street who each answered and pointed in various directions. We followed as he led us across several intersections and over an overpass. He walked us to the door of internet cafe number five, open. This stranger on the street spent twenty-five minutes helping us find what we were looking for. When we thanked him, he gave the characteristic Indian head waggle and smiled, and then he walked back the way we had came. I cannot think of a single time I have done something like that for someone I didn't know.

Kolkata Christmas

Again, ages since I sat down to write. This time I sit in a very different context, an unfamiliar country and culture and climate- in Kolkata. We saw the students off from Beijing. It is a strange feeling, heavy and light, to go from being responsible for 9 other people to only being responsible for yourself.
The day following the students departure, my dad came to Beijing for a visit. It was lovely and laid back. We went on long meandering walks through the upscale neighborhoods and underground shopping plazas of WangFuJing street, and then contrasted them with grimy old-Beijing hutong walks. Each day we found our way into small street-side restaurants where we snacked on steamed buns and tea eggs. We met up with my old friends from Taiwan who have found their ways into jobs and homes and families in Beijing. It was fun for both of us to call a Beijing youth hostel home for a few days.

I flew from Beijing to Kunming on the 17th and from Kunming to Kolkata on the 18th and into the 19th due to an unscheduled landing in Dhaka, Bangladesh to wait out a thick fog that shrouded Kolkata. While I waited, sprawled out on the plastic seats of the Dhaka airport, Lukin waited, sprawled out on the plastic seats of the Kolkata airport. At dawn I landed in Kolkata and flung my exhausted and elated self into Lukins weary arms. At that moment we realized just how long four months can be.

We've spent the last several days absorbing what we can of Kolkata. The city is made of sounds; honking horns from 50's style Ambassador taxi's, echoing calls to prayer, "hellos" hollered from merchants hawking everything from lime water to cell-phone repair (seriously, brilliant men at street-side stands holding soldering guns who make me wish I had brought to India the phone I just put through the washing machine in Kunming), jingling rupees on tin plates gripped by street people ranging in age from infants to grandmothers.

The sounds are accompanied by scents; masala chai stands sprout up each morning at nearly every intersection and for 6 cents you can take a moment of your day to sit in a small wooden bench and breath in cardamom and cloves from a small clay cup (they're meant to be disposable as they easily biodegrade, but I can't bring myself to throw them away, so I now have a stack of them wrapped up in my backpack!), curries and chilies and cumin waft from street-stand vats of dhal which I dove into head first on my first few days of wandering, mixed with all this is the scent of people- incredible numbers of people- the streets are the hallways and kitchens and bedrooms and bathrooms of millions of bodies and the sharp odors of urine and bodies is ever present.

A good segue, back, for a moment into diving head first into street food. I also dove head first into my first bout of India-induced illness. In our first few days back together, Lukin spent a couple of them nursing my violently-ill-self back to health as India streamed from me. Romantic.

And now it is Christmas and we are spending our last few hours in Kolkata before heading to the train station to make our way south to Puri tonight, and then on to Pondecherri and tree-planting on Sunday. Today, walking through the streets was like waiting in line for a a Bollywood blockbuster. We shuffled sideways and maneuvered for hours to wend our way around town. The sidewalks are packed with bodies and glitter and Christmas families out on the town. It was wonderful and crazy to be carried for blocks by thick crowds. We are ready to make our way south, towards smaller towns and calmer scenes. I love Kolkata though. This place is incredible.

Strangers

It feels like ages since I last wrote. Using the internet in Xinjiang is a different ballgame. To gain access you first have to present your passport to the clerk at the internet cafe and then try to weave your way around the abundant firewalls by sneaking through all sorts of proxy servers. I failed at this game and couldn't access blogspot which is part of the reason I've been so long between posts. The other part is that we have been traveling pretty hard for the past few weeks and what access we have had to computers and free-time has been limited. In the past three weeks this group of 12 has found its way through five cities/towns separated by 75 hours of train rides and 22 hours of bus rides and hours of walking pack-laden through foreign streets in search of our home for the night. West across Xinjiang through Urumqi, Turpan, Kashgar, and the border-town ( w/ Tajikistan Pakistan & Afghanistan) Tashkorgan and then back through them all to exit through the south east of the province into Gan Su province, and across that into Qing Hai's capital city Xi Ning where we now rest for a day and reflect on the faces and places and worlds we have shared with our generous, deep-rooted, home-sharing friends of the desert.

This province, mountainous and many-bordered is home to 55 of the 56 ethnic minority groups in China (says China.org, but my cab driver this morning told me there are only 50). The people of these ethnic minority groups make up more than 2.38 million, or 45.5%, of the province's population. Largest in number are the Tibetan people (21.89% of the population) who have been living on the plateau for countless generations. The Dali Lama is was born in what is now Qing Hai. Tomorrow will find us in one of the small Tibetan mountain towns which border the city. A local non-profit organization dedicated to the cultural and ecological preservation of the Qing Hai Tibetan plateau has invited us to teach English and do some translation work in one of the schools where they operate cultural preservation projects including Tibetan language classes and Tangka painting workshops. These are links to the organization's websites, which are mostly in Chinese, some photographs that are quite nice: http://feiyu.tibetcul.com/49422.html and http://www.qtpep.com/. We will spend five days and nights in home-stays with families.

The process of a home-stay, arriving in a strange place at a strange home and then being surrounded by the daily life of strangers, is quite intense. This has especially been the case in the minority villages we have stayed in where Miao, or Tibetan, not Chinese, has been the language spoken. I often find myself feeling useless and helpless... and silent. Silence is not my usual state of being. I think it's really good for me to have no choice but to practice silence. Being moved to a level of communication that consists mainly of observation and miming is an opportunity to focus on the world of doing and being and away from the world of saying and explaining. It's a world where walk matters much more than talk, where the non-verbal arts of expression and perception are sharpened. I hope that I will make time in my life to practice these arts and skills when I'm back in the world where I often rely on my words to do my walking for me.

Finally

One summer before last I spent eight weeks in Southern Indiana learning a language spoken in Central Asia. Uyghur. Not many people have heard of this language, or indeed of this people. About 11 million people in this world are Uyghur, and of those about 8 million live here in Xinjiang Provence of Western China. Why study a language like Uyghur? Virtually unknown to the world... not likely to be appreciated if even recognized on my resume... a language dwindling even in the schools where Uyghur children learn. Why?

Eight years before last I spent a year in Beijing studying a language spoken in China. Mandarin. Everyone has heard of it. A fifth of the world is Chinese. I never have to come up with a reason why I study Chinese, the sheer enormity of the population of speakers provides reason enough. One in every eight people in the world is a Chinese peasant. It looks great on my resume. But is one fifth of the world Chinese... really? In a country roughly the size of the continental United States, there are 56 governmentally recognized ethnic minority groups and 236 distinct languages spoken, along with rich and varied dialects of each. What we think of as China, Kung Pao Chicken and Beijing Olympics, is topical and incomplete- what we think of as China is like the apple pie and baseball myth of America we export.

In December of that 2000 I got on a train in Beijing, hurled westward for 72 hours, and got off in Kashgar- a silk road city near the China-Pakistan border. My eyes opened onto a China that I had never imagined, and my ears opened to a language I had never heard that sounded like the curling twisting Arabic script in which it is written. The people I met personified the desert borderlands they have lived on for more than thirty centuries. Through those thirty centuries a nomadic imperative of kindness to strangers has prevailed; I was welcomed into homes, served raisins, pomegranate seeds and naan bread while the families that hosted me kept to the Ramadan fast- I ate with the children the elderly and the sick. I broke the fast with pool-playing teenagers. I walked in streets empty of men called to prayer, but full of women carrying baskets and chatting with me as I learned the ancient market routes. An American girl in Xinjiang, a month before the inauguration of Bush II.

In the years that have spread between my first visit to Xinjiang and my first return a week ago, I have not been able to erase the place and the warmth from my mind. I watched as the years plowed forward, horrified, as my own nation, my own people, were swept into a culture of aggression and fear. I watched as that fear spread outwards from ground zero in ripples of intolerance- blind to fact and reason and refusing accountability for our own actions. I watched as our terror spread here, to the borderlands of China and Central Asia, to the homes and families that had welcomed me, fed me, opened my mind.

And now I'm back. And in the time that has lapsed I've taken action against the transgressions of my own nation in my own small way. I learned enough of the Uyghur language to say "thank you for your kindness" and "I'm sorry". I've learned enough to go out to dinner with a Uyghur friend and express my admiration and awe of the history and culture of his people. In taking the time and putting forth the effort to learn a small amount of the words and the culture and the sense of context that comes from language learning, I have gained a better understanding of this land and an appetite for further learning.

As my Uyghur friend and I left the restaurant I asked him how to say friend in Uyghur slang. As he pronounced the word I jotted it down in my smudgy Arabic hand in my notebook. He looked at me and said that this was the first time he had ever seen a Uyghur word written by a foreign hand. He said that he felt honored and proud. I felt weepy and grateful and hopefully. We smiled at each other. That was the evening of November 5th. On the walk home I bought a Uyghur language newspaper. On the front page a picture of a beaming Obama glowed above a single Uyghur word; "Finally".

9 Items

Looking around the kitchen of my home stay family in the Miao mountain village of Bai Bi Cun, I counted 9 items. 1) A wood-fired cook stove consisting of two large cast iron woks (resting in one lay an oversized spatula for stirring) recessed into a tile unit with a chimney rising up from the middle. 2) A two-basin tile sink fed by a hose running up from outside through the window. 3) A tea kettle. 4) A broom made from twigs lashed together with with twine. 5) A six-inch deep cross-section of tree that was used for a cutting board. 6) A set of three cleavers that ranged in size from large to daunting. 7) A half a wooden barrel punctured by a hole in the side with a cork stuck in it- which I later learned was  still from which rice moonshine was produced. 8) A shovel-cum-dustpan used for loading sawdust, wood shavings, and floor sweepings into the fire. And 9) a stack of small bowls and chopsticks. Nine items in that kitchen. 

Thinking back to Lukin's and my tiny kitchen in Missoula, there were nine items in every drawer, on every surface, crammed into every cabinet. Two of us and twenty forks. The ceramic pot that lived on the stove alone held nine items- spoons of various materials and uses, a spatula for scraping, one for flipping, a plastic one for the non-stick pans and a wider metal one for the cast iron... yet another for the wok. I found myself making a lot of lists and doing a lot of comparisons over the four days we spent in the village. I compared my lengthy showers to the typical Bai Bi Cun method of washing- standing on the road in front of the house and sudzing from a plastic bucket, using a rag to rinse off, and dumping the water in the gutter of the dirt road. 

I compared the meal times and foods with the schedule and variety with which I am accustomed. In Bai Bi Cun, breakfast, usually around 9:00 or 10:00, was served after morning chores and farm work were completed. Family members eat together. Every meal. Lunch was served around 3:00 after another round of chores and farm work, and then, after yet another round of chores and farm work, dinner at 8:00. Every every meal consisted of rice and potatoes. Once or twice we, as guests, we were treated to spicy bowls of fried lettuce and a pile of scrambled eggs- and one very special evening, to fish caught from the rice paddy and served with scales and innards (all but the gall bladder which is called "bitter ball" in Chinese, and removed prior to cooking). Everything we ate was grown or raised or laid within a hundred steps of the kitchen and everything we ate was the same every day. Even the moonshine. I thought about the movements in Missoula and elsewhere to eat locally grown food- how eating can be a significant political and economic act, to the point that weekly columns in the Sunday paper are dedicated to influencing or critiquing the food choices of Missoulians. I thought about the extravaganza that is the Saturday morning Farmers Market and the endless wall of imported spices at The Good Food Store. And I thought about Bai Bi Cun and eating those six or seven things, especially to two main staples, potatoes and rice, everyday for my entire life. Eating locally as a choice versus eating locally without choice are two very different things. As I write this, here in my Kunming apartment, I am finishing off a plate papaya and banana salad, which follows a dinner two hours ago that consisted of several Chinese dishes involving more ingredients than I can list; nothing I ate grew or was raised or laid within 20 miles of me, and I eat something different everyday.  Zero chores- save washing way more than 9 dishes using running hot water and soap- and zero farm work did I contribute to my meal. I eat whenever I'm hungry, regardless of what work I have or have not done. More often than not I eat alone. I continue to mull the comparisons in my mind.

We've been out of the mountains and back in the city for a week and a half now. Half a week more and we hit the road again. Our students are hard at work putting together presentations on the topics they've researched for the last 6 weeks. Their topics range from China's environmental woes to the history and future of tea in Chinese society. Following their presentations on Friday and a weekend celebration with their home stay families, we will find our way by train or bus or air, or some combination of them all, to China's north west- where the Uyghurs are, and where my heart is. I can hardly wait. The province of Xinjiang, where the role of rice will be played by nan bread, and potatoes... well they're still potatoes. I wonder what 9 items I'll find in kitchens there. 

A new return to GuiZhou

I'm sitting here enjoying a rare moment of stillness while the students are in Chinese class. We have fallen into a routine of early morning meetings and language classes, afternoons of independent study classes and optional lessons around Kunming. The students are learning the ins and outs of daily life in a Chinese family, and how to navigate the web of bus routes between the Program House, their home stay houses and the University district. The students are working hard on their independent projects, the instructors are working hard on contacting mentors and arranging guest lectures and the weeks spin by. We are somewhere between a groove and a rut. It's time for us to get out again. (the photo is XiJiang, a village in GuiZhou)

This Sunday Lear and Mark and I will pile the dozen of us onto an overnight train to GuiZhou- the provence due East of Yunnan. We will ride the rails to KaiLi, a city three hours East of the capital city GuiYang, and then find our way into the hills in search of a village to call home for the week and families willing to host our horde. Our aim in this adventure is to break away from the day to day we have come to know and to provide some alternative perspectives on what day to day life means in China. As Lear Mark and I have never been to GuiZhou, nor do we have contacts there, this is an opportunity for the three of us to break away from our own routines and push ourselves to risk a bit and encourage inclusion of the students in the prep and planning, transit-tracking, village-visiting, house-hunting, food-finding, and lesson-learning. I can't wait to get on that train.

We chose GuiZhou, in part for its unfamiliarity and, conversely, in part for my familiarity with planning adventures there. During my studies in Missoula my IYFD cohort wrote a proposal for a Fulbright Hayes group study grant. We proposed to take UM professors and Missoula K-12 teachers on an educational tour through areas of China (GuiZhou) and Laos that are the ancestral and current home of many tribes of the Miao or Hmong people. Missoula is home to nearly 300 Hmong families and we found the idea of helping area teachers understand the ancestral home of the Hmong people an exciting idea. The Fulbright Hayes committee, however, did not. So I have found my own way here and am in the process of reviewing our proposal and recycling parts that have relevance to my students. Funny how life works.

On a different note, yesterday marked the one-month anniversary of our students arrival in China. Time is funny here; though the days seem to crawl to completion, the weeks fly by.  It won't be long now at all until we leave Kunming for good to begin our circuitous travels towards Beijing and then fling away towards new and old homes in the States, Korea, England and India. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, GuiZhou...

National Day

Today is the 59th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. 59 years ago Mao Zi Dong announced from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking the tens of thousands of people who packed Tian An Men Square that the Communist Party had defeated the nationalists and a new nation had been born. We will discuss the magnitude of this event with our students when they return to class. Many of them have left Kunming to travel with their host families. One is in a village near the border of Myanmar, another is in the ancient city of Dali, and two others are in the villages bordering the city at the weddings of relatives. I am in Kunming, enjoying a day to myself. 

I woke up late this morning and lay around drinking cups of instant Nescafe and figuring out if I should spend my day organizing the office in the instructor house or preparing my lessons for next week. I was flipping through my educator's resource guide when Lear came into the living room and told me that I should put down my book, forget about doing any work today and get out and spend this day of celebration out in the city. It was a good kick in the pants. I was hiding in the house and not really being in China, hibernating in a bit of culture shock.

So often we tell our students to challenge themselves- to get on a random bus and ride it until you have no idea where you are, get off, and find your way home. We tell them to do something everyday that pushes the limits of their comfort zone. I need to be better at telling myself those same things. Luckily, today, Lear did it for me. 

I wandered out my door and found myself at Yuan Tong Si, a Tang dynasty Buddhist temple. I paid my 4元 entrance fee ($.60) and entered an oasis. Bamboo groves line the walls of the temple grounds and porous rock pillars tower above ponds teeming with koi fish and turtles. Inscribed sutras gleam red from cliff faces pocked with small caverns, homes to golden Buddhas and porcelain Guan yin Bodhisattva's. Walking the slate paths, incense smoke swirls out from giant urns and curls around ankles and calves. I got lost here for several hours, listening to the drone of chanting and the shrieks of children trying to reach the turtles that sun themselves on pond edges- just out of arms reach. 

The brilliance of the red pillars and the greens and blues and fuchsias of the sweeping temple roofs would seem gaudy in Montana or Minnesota, but here they compliment the gold and orange flash of the koi fish, the vivid yellow-green of the bamboo groves and the grey-blue of the rock pillars. I watched families buy incense and burn candles, bow their heads at the feet of the meters tall golden Sakyamuni Buddha. Nuns in grey and monks in saffron swept the incense papers from the ground and tended pots of marigolds and petunias. 

Outside of the temple entrance, yi-ching fortune tellers shook their mugs of yin and yang sticks shouting their prowess and beggars displaying missing or misshapen limbs shook their mugs of coins, murmuring blessings. I took a left and walked until I didn't recognize my surroundings. I began taking rights and lefts depending on which blinking walk sign was in favor. Around one corner I found myself at the elementary school down the street from the program house where we have class. The school was empty of its throngs of uniformed children, now dispersed around the province spending the holiday with family. I walked up the street to the program house, eager to share my adventure with my home far away and my family overseas.  

Nu Jiang Valley

The Nu Jiang Valley is spectacular. Designated as a UNESCO world heritage site, it is home to Lisu, Druong, Nu, and Tibetan villagers and herders who farm and build seasonal camps far up the mountain slopes of the Gao Li Gong Shan and Bi Luo ranges. The fields of corn are almost vertical in slope and are tended by farmers who haul buckets on shoulder poles of water up seemingly endless switch-backs. Perched on plateaued peaks are centuries old wooden homes circling around Tibetan Christian churches. These clusters of homes comprise villages consisting of forty or so mostly Nu and Tibetan families. 

We had the privilege of taking a three-day trek in the spectacular country surrounding the Nu Jiang village of DiMaLuo. Our guide A-Luo, a resident of DiMaLuo and an avid conservationist, navigated our way from DiMaLuo (1,800 meters above sea level) up through the remote village of BaiHanLuo to our summit point at 3,400 meters above sea level. While the students and I plodded our way upwards, A-Luo chatted on his cell phone, pointed out species of flora and fauna unique to the Nu Jiang valley, and made spry sprints up the slopes to point out some of the better valley views. On segments of the trail when it was all that the rest of us could do to wheeze breaths and struggle to put one foot in front of the other, A-Luo would belt out Tibetan balads, holding notes for ages while taking long strides up the path. We all stared at him in amazement. 

Our second night we camped just below the summit. As the afternoon wore on, herders brought their animals down from the summit for the night. One of my students headed off to the ladies room behind a bush to the west of camp- as she readied herself to return to camp she found that her path was blocked by a large and very curious cak (the name we came up with for an animal that is the offspring of a cow and a yak). She was delayed for several minutes, dancing with the cak before it tired of her and headed towards the stream. In the night the caks wandered between our tents snuffling at our packs and boots. 

The final day of our trek Zoe, Emily, Kyuri and I woke before dawn to hike to the summit for sunrise. Though the clouds hung low and prevented us from viewing the east, the reflection of the morning light on Gao Li Gong Shan range to the west was in and of itself enough reward for our pre-dawn scramble. It was amazing. The valley consists of three separate biomes, warmed through the winter by winds that follow the valley up from the Indian subcontinent. Frothy lichen hang from the limbs of 30 foot tall rhododendron bushes and in the morning sun the lichen shines like silver. I could have stayed for a month.

The hike down and out wound through the last of the villages we visited before returning to DiMaLuo. We had lunch with A-Luo's great aunt in the house she was born in 70 years before. The one-loom wooden structure was built on stilts, the inside polished black from the smoke of the fire pit in the center. Through a hole in one corner of the floor we dropped scraps from our lunch of noodles and corn to the pigs who lived in the sty under the house. A-Luo's great aunt lived here alone since her husband died four years earlier. She crossed herself when she spoke of him. Life was harder now, she said.

Down again and back into DiMaLuo. A-Luo's cell phone calls on the mountain had been to relatives to arrange housing for us upon our return to the village. Lear and I stayed with A-Luo's uncle. He welcomed us into his home and fed us beans and cak and a bowl of the spiciest peppers I have ever eaten in my life. He laughed as I drank bowl after bowl of broth trying to douse the burn. After dinner I dodged right and set a pick off the center pole of the house to get to the basin before A-Luo's auntie could reach me and snatch the bowl and wash rag out of my hand. Defeated, Lear and I headed off to the sleeping deck. 

Before bed I headed to the outhouse. The outhouse consisted of wooden shed with a foundation of a concrete slab basin spanned by two wooden planks. The floor of the foundation moved. Upon closer inspection with the beam of my headlamp I found that it was alive with maggots.  As I left, I thought of two of my students who had, the two nights previous, had spent their first-ever overnights in the outdoors. I imagined that this night would hold their first experience with an outhouse as well. Back on the sleeping deck, I climbed under my mosquito netting and was out cold, to tired to let the maggots interfere with my dreams.  

The trip was incredible. It gave the instructors and the students the chance to form a unit under circumstances that none of us had experienced before in settings we could not have imagined. They showed strength and compassion and empathy towards one another and built solid bonds with one another over 57 hours of bus rides and gained perspective on the world that they have left behind and the world we now call home. 

Whew!! A whirlwind! I am here in the NuJiang valley on the border between Myanmar and China. In tow are 9 incredible students and my wonderful co-leaders Mark and Lear. It is a week to the day since the students arrived in Kunming where we held a brief 3 day orientation before piling them onto sleeper-buses (loaded with itsy bitsy bunk beds) and headed up to the 3,500 meter mountain town of Shangri-la. This town, formerly known as Zhong Dian) was a center of the Yunnan lumber industry for ages until early this century when the timber trade was sharply curtailed. In an effort to drum up a tourist industry, Zhong Dian was renamed after the mystical hamlet of Shangri-La... and it worked! This largely Tibetan town has seen a dramatic rise in tourism- and rightly so. It is ringed by sky-scraping peaks crowned by mountain-top temples and at the far end of the Valley lies South Western China's largest monastery- home to 600 Buddhist monks.
Down from Shangri-La. Many sleeper buses later and the dozen of us find ourselves here. The crumbling roads that led us here are carved out of the walls of deep and stunning river gorges. The rubble and residue of landslides presented surmountable obstacles - though slightly terrifying. Our chain-smoking team of drivers encouraged each other as the bus lurched and chugged its way over muddy gashes and around newly-tumbled boulders. I sat on my bunk and focused all of my energy and safety-vibes onto their white-knuckled hands. And it worked! Here we are in the town of Fu Gong. We will hop a van up to Gong Shan and then hike a couple of miles in to the village of Di Ma Luo where we will outfit with a local guide, gather a couple of pack horses, buy a goat to slaughter along the way, and trek off into the mountains for 4 days of intense challenge, stunning scenery, small village visits, and intense group bonding. I can't wait!!

Welcoming

I'm sitting in my hammock looking out over a tree-lined street and the posh courtyard of the gated compound I call home. I have a nice little bedroom with five houseplants that live in a bumped out window- the hammock swings in front of that window. How I found my way in here was kind of funny, and set a nice tone for the semester. 

I was able to get a partial address that Sophie (the Kunming program assistant) sent me which I read from the boosted internet provider "miss pablo" that I picked up from Amie's couch. 26 hours after leaving Amie's couch (my plane arrived an hour early to Kunming) I gave that address to a cab driver outside of the Kunming airport and 20 minutes after that he dropped me off in front of a large gate entering into and apartment complex. Sophie told me she would wait for me inside the house, but her phone number was trapped inside another email she sent after my departure. There was no guard booth at the gate so I sat down on my backpack and thought. 

Thinking did no good, so I put my backpack on and started to wander the midnight streets. I wandered up to an internet cafe, but this particular place only served member card-holders. So I wandered on again and came across a police officer reading a book on a bench next to his scooter- which he had parked with it's lights flashing. I showed the address to the police officer and asked him if he recognized the place. He pointed with his chin towards the direction I had come from and told me to head back down that way and holler for the guard to come let me in. So I did. There was no guard. I hollered again and then heard the sirens of a police scooter pull in behind me. It was the same police officer. He told me I was hollering at the wrong gate. Somewhere in the process a second police officer, this one on foot, had joined the first and I showed him the address and he thought he knew where the building was. He helped me with one of my bags and the three of us headed down the street, two on foot and one on scooter. 

Blocks later we ran into a third police officer who looked at the address and said that he would show us the way. The four of us wound through an alley and around a corner until we found another big gate leading into another apartment complex, but this one had a guard. The guard looked at the address and said that we were at the right place, but the address didn't indicate which of the sixteen buildings in the complex contained my apartment, nor did my address contain an apartment number. The five of us sighed. It was now close to one o'clock in the morning. The guard asked if I had a phone number I could call. I told him I had a telephone number in my email and about the members only internet cafe I had been to. "I'm a member there," said police officer number two, "I'll take you." We thanked and said goodbye to the guard and to police officers one and three and police officer number two and I headed back up the street to the internet cafe. 

We drank cups of tea (a perk of membership) as I wrote down the complete address and the phone numbers Sophie and Lear (my co-instructor) had emailed me. Out on the street police officer number two, who told me his name was Da Xiao Shen, let me use his cell phone to call Lear... who was at the Kunming airport waiting for my plane to arrive. More sighs. With Lear on his way to the apartment in a cab, and Da Xiao Shen and I on our way back to the building on foot, I realized that I was nearing exhaustion. We arrived at the same guard booth and handed the same guard the complete address and he told us we were in the right place and that he would call somebody down to let me in. I thanked Da Xiao Shen and he headed back up the street towards the internet cafe. 

Guard number two came down to the gate to let me in and showed me the way through the courtyard to my building and up to the third floor, number 302. He rang the doorbell. An old, sleepy woman in her bathrobe told us we had the wrong apartment. She shut the door and I told guard number two that Lear was on his way and that if he could just take me to some place where I could sit down and wait for him, that I would really appreciate it. He took me to the security office and guard number three showed me to a big leather couch and brought me a cup of tea. Moments later Lear arrived and all was well. He took me up to 301 and after more tea and some fruit that Sophie had left for me, I went to bed. So within my first hour in the city I, however inadvertently, arranged for myself multiple police escorts, entrance to a VIP internet lounge, and a tour of the security station of my building. 

And I noticed some things about Kunming during my adventure: The city still smells of night blooming jasmine, as I remember it did. When I was sitting on my backpack on an unlit street in the middle of the night, I didn't feel afraid. The balconies above me dripped with ivy and pothos vines ornamented with pots of brilliant pink bougainvillea bushes. In the middle of the night old women were out sweeping the sidewalks and old men in tank tops and slippers gathered on stoops in groups to smoke and play dice. Big iron pots bubbled up noodle-scented steam. The sights and smells were welcoming, and already I'm feeling at home.

It Starts...

Well here I go again. I'm sitting on the big green couch in Dover Rest looking out on Lake Temagami and trying to wrap my head around the fact that in 17 days I will be winging it over the Atlantic and landing in China once more. For the next few months I will be based in Kunming- a city famous for its diversity, weather (the name means eternal Spring), and crossing-the-bridge-noodles, a delicious soup slick with oil and served steaming in lacquered bowls. I was in Kunming once when I was 21 and the memories that float when I recall the city include lots of mist, a temple wall covered by a carved fresco depicting bodhisattvas emerging from waves on the backs of sea creatures, Uyghur raisin vendors stationed on either side of the city's numerous bridges, a colorful swirl of a weekly event called the bird and flower market, and the smell of jasmine blossoms that open at night in moonlit courtyards. 

These images are far from my current reality of Temgami's red and white pine, miles of sparking water, and an island full of childhood and family. My heart is in both places at once, absorbing every minute of time here in this place it calls home, and leaping forward in anticipation of that post-take-off moment when you can feel the familiar being left behind with the old horizon line as you hurl into newness. Times of transition offer an opportunity for me to hit pause on my life and hover somewhere between past and future that isn't quite the present. I feel like a time traveler. 

In the coming couple of weeks I will be making the rounds in Canada and the US to visit loved ones and say some goodbyes. Quebec and Chicago and Boston are home to friends and family I will drive for hours to hug. Some of these places are also home to some of my 12 students I will meet in Kunming. It's neat to think about them in their homes saying their goodbyes and preparing to meet me and build an adventure together- maybe in a few years we'll be making the rounds to hug each other. 

At any rate, off I go and it feels like it is certainly time to be moving again. These past few years in the States have been full of such growth and learning- I'm excited to head back to Asia and view it through these new lenses tinted by study and change. I look forward to jotting down bits of what I take in and mull about for your consideration. It's nice, this little blog, as a space to transmit my thoughts to all of you who might be interested in what I'm seeing of our world. I hope to receive your thoughts as well- and so I'll be posting my contact information as soon as I find out what it is!! My love to you-

xj