5 Days in the Western World

Suddenly found myself on a plane last Wednesday, leaving Hong Kong for Toronto. I decided about two days beforehand to fly home for my brother's wedding. Within 15 hours I was back in the land of maple syrup, Tim Horton's coffee and Hockey Night. Talk about culture shock! My 4 1/2 days back in my homeland were filled up family celebrations, from my brother's marriage to the birth of Ethan, my other brother's new son (I have gained a nephew and a sister-in-law!!), to my aunt's and cousin's arrival from Scotland (the OTHER Motherland), to the return of yours truly. I'm so happy I was home to share in all of these things, if only for a very short while. Then I hopped on another 15-hour flight to Hong Kong and was back to teaching in Shenzhen the very next day. I'm exhausted but elated. It all happened so fast that I don't even know how to reconcile everything.

The first question out of everyone's mouth over here is how did I manage to come back to China?? As you probably can tell, we are missing our homelands and growing weary of, well, the realities of life in China. Maybe some of us are sick of Chinese food - as many varieties of it as there are, certain prevailing tendencies like using copious amounts of oil or fatty cuts with more bone than meat present or disturbing amounts of MSG can grow tiresome. Perhaps it's the differences in cultural mentality, like the penchant for spitting - LOUDLY - everywhere, even indoors at times, or their free-for-all methods of driving. It could be the level of theft in this city of which many of us have, unfortunately, been victims (me from the very school at which I teach). Perhaps we're homesick. Or maybe some of us are just sick of teaching. The true reason most likely rests on all of these things to some extent, and possibly others.

Of course when we first headed into this program most of us understood that it would not be easy. One of my most basic reasons for choosing to travel and live and work abroad in a country as foreign as China is the fact that it is challenging, on many levels. I wanted to set aside all the comfortable and familiar ways of life I lead at home and venture into places unfamiliar and unrefined, places which remind you that the world isn't how it is at home, nor how you see it in a textbook or on TV or hear other people talk about it. You have to travel to understand this. Likewise, these places remind you that sometimes you're not as open-minded or as worldly as you once thought you were. And so you start to realize that you have things to work on, better questions to ask and ultimately more places to go. And you are reminded, everyday, that it is not supposed to be easy, whether you're trying to overcome a sometimes massively-steep language barrier simply so you can find your way to the bathroom or trying to organize a life you still technically lead back in your homeland whilst being almost 8000 miles away. Travel is, in large part, about hardship - about facing it and learning from it, shaking yourself out of complacency and getting the job done, and then looking back over all you've seen and felt and learned and saying, "man, that was fun." Travel is, as Paul Theroux so aptly puts it, "only glamorous in retrospect."

I could go on and on but I'll just end with George Santayana who says it better and more concisely than I just did:

"There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humour."