Dear Hello Potty,

Last week I traveled with my Filipino roommate Fely to Inner Mongolia. Last week was China’s National Week, during which the whole country has a week vacation to celebrate the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China. Probably half of the 3 days was spent on the bus, driving down alternatively smooth, bumpy, or nearly nonexistent roads. This was my very first guided tour, you know, the kind where you all travel together on a bus, and no one knows each other, and everyone has cameras hanging around their necks, and there are quick fifteen-minute potty stops and the tour guide harriedly yells “Fifteen minutes!! Only fifteen minutes!!” (Only in this case it was “Shiwu fenzhong! Nimen zhiyou shiwu fenzhong!!” Same difference).

And on one of these famed fast-forward potty stops, I met you, my dear Hello Potty! I walked into the restroom, and there you were! Five lovely squatty potties, with no stalls, no doors, no dividers. A Hello Potty! You squat down to do your business, and then turn to the squatter next to you and say “Hello!” So i just pretended that this was a normal everyday occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary, except perhaps a little breezier than usual…. Really, dear Hello Potty, you’re not that bad!

The first night, we slept in yurts, those round Mongolian tenty things, and just about froze our pattooties off. We ate extremely fresh lamb (maaa-maaa-dont eat me-maaa) and rode horses for several hours, which chafed our pattooties off. Poor pattooties. Anyway, we enjoyed some horse milk candy and milk wine, both Mongolian specialties. Then we drove several hours into the desert, where we rode camels and enjoyed insulated walls and drowned in sand (I think there is still some in my ears). The return trip was ten hours back to Beijing, which suddenly appeared to me the cleanest, best-smelling, most civilized city I had ever seen in my life. Beijing Beijing, I love Beijing!

So, that’s my trip to Inner Mongolia in a nutshell. Til we meet again, Hello Potty!

Bethany

Sunday, September 20, 2008

I’ve never read the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The first time I heard the title, when I was in high school, I couldn’t even comprehend the topic. My father sometimes speaks of feeling like he could just drift away, float away, from this life. Not that he’s unhappy at all. I listened when he spoke, but just now, just this past week, I think I understand. I feel that lightness, that sense of floating. I’m not high, not euphoric, not overdosing on benadryl - to explain, I’ll have to start with my dreams.

Most of my life, I’ve felt a longing for a place that I am not. It started when I was 5, and i lived in Vienna, and I dreamt of my home in Texas and woke up crying. My family did return to Texas, but part of me never left Vienna. There were memories, buried deep, spoken in a language I only knew for a short time then lost, these memories and feelings that had become intranslatable.

Later came a time when I lost almost everything, and almost lost everything. And I spent years, seven I think, longing to regain those things, which in my mind had taken the shape of Abilene Christian University. If I could just return there… if I could just return there…

And then I did. For some time, the longing was gone. Then I studied abroad in China, and after returning to ACU, I felt that familiar longing, but multiplied tenfold, so intense I could barely speak for months.

Maybe these longings, these dreams of return and reconciliation, have been gifts. I didn’t know it at the beginning, but my dream to return to China kept me alive and breathing for the hardest two years of my life. There were moments, snapshots in my mind I see so clearly, where I held a choice in my hand - die, or live. And there were only two coins in the Life hand, my love for my parents and my desire to return to China. In the almost four years from when I left China to when I finally returned, my dream and longing was my most vivid reality.

And yet, even before I came to Beijing, I suspected that my life here would be different from anything I had ever known. Not in terms of food, or language, or culture, or accommodation, but in terms of my internal reality, my inner landscape, which I began to suspect would be entirely uncharted territory. Because, for the first time in my adult life, I have nothing to long for. The year before Beijing I dedicated to myself, to finally finally stop running from the pain. A year to sit, and feel, and hurt, and cry, and breathe, and finally, finally, to heal. And then, I came to Beijing, fulfilling a dream that has been more real to me than life.

So here I am, this person who is present exactly where she is. Not longing for the Lost Golden Age, not an exile pining for her homeland, not a lover separated by long distances from lover. And the feeling that I cannot shake, the feeling that I am swimming in, maybe drowning in, is just… “at a loss.” I’m at a loss. For words? For purpose? For meaning, or direction, or groundedness? I don’t know. I’m not unhappy. Not depressed. Not elated. Not hopeful, not despairing. Just… floating. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I am no longer tied to - anything, I guess. I have no heavy weight holding me to the earth. No hopes, no dreams. Not that I don’t dream. I want to have a family, a career, I want to give meaning to life. But that’s just it. What has meaning? Fulfilling dreams? No. That results in a kind of lightness, that most people cannot bear, so they replace those old dreams with new ones. Is that the meaning of life? To wear dreams like clothes, a lifetime of buying, using, wearing out, replacing, over and over and over again, so that in fast forward each person’s life is just a succession of colors and styles flying by, appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye?

In C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, visitors from hell take a tour bus to heaven. They are even free to stay, if they wish. Most don’t really like it there, and return to the bus. One man, the entrepreneurial type, tries to take a few apples, a few Pieces of Heaven, back with him to sell in hell. But he can’t lift the apples, can’t even budge them. In fact, the visitors can’t even walk on the grass, because the blades are like steel knives. The tour guide explains to the sightseers (or really to the reader, since the sightseers aren’t of a mind to listen) that hell, a seemingly vast and endless and empty expanse, is really just right down there, in that tiny crevice in the soil, the size of a grain of sand. The long journey to heaven was really just the tour bus growing and growing in size. The visitors to heaven are almost without matter at all, almost nonexistent, so of course they could not move anything with real mass, like an apple or a blade of grass.

So maybe, I feel that way. I weigh nothing. I float around this world but can make no impression, for I am as good as matterless. And who, or what, really has matter? What really exists? I have no idea.

-Bethany

September 11th, 2008

Don’t worry, I’m not planning on describing in detail every single day I’m here (Day 137, Day 138, Day 139… yawn). But this first day has already been so fun. Last night I arrived at Beijing Capital airport. After saying goodbye to the fun friends I had made on the plane, I spotted a fairly uninterested Chinese man holding a red China Study Abroad sign. I approached him and gave a sort of affirmative nod which he returned (he was talking on his cell phone), then he took my luggage cart and I follwed him to the van. He spoke no english, so I immediately found myself babbling back in Chinese - wait, what? I speak Chinese? Oh right!! It came out so automatically, I didn’t even to think about what I was saying. Kinda neato. But I quickly reached my Chinese glass ceiling, and ran out of things to I knew how to say.

So we drove about half an hour on the highway through Beijing, and I think I pulled a muscle in my neck straining to look at every single little thing. It was so wonderful to see all the Chinese-y things that are so familiar to me. We also drove by the Birds Nest, which was stunning. I was delivered to a high-rise apartment building in the middle of Beijing Mining and Technology University Campus (which is close to Peking University, where I will be a student), where my poor unsuspecting suitcase was thoroughly ridiculed for its extremely high weight (it has a low metabolism!! It cant help being heavy!!!) by the night guards who helped me bring it up the stairs and into the elevator. The door to my apartment looks much more like the door to a bank safe than the door to an apartment. It’s a big flat metal slab with no door handle but several funny-looking keyholes.

I was so happy to see that my building and apartment are both of normal PRC quality. I was afraid I would be given a posh Western-style apartment, with carpet and matching furniture and Western kitchen and bathroom. But its delightfully proletariat, peeling paint and Chinese bathroom and stains everywhere. I’m so happy about it (not being sarcastic!!). This is what I wanted.

After a possibly perfect night’s sleep (11 pm to 9 am), I awoke to several realizations.
1) I was extremely thirsty.
2) there was no (drinkable) water anywhere in the apartment.
3) I had no idea what floor i was on (the 3rd? the 27th?).
4) I had no idea where any kind of store was located
5) Both of my suitemates were gone, so I was alone.

After panicking for about a minute, I took a deep breath, reminded myself that I was a big grown-up adult, then proceeded to get dressed, go exploring (I am, in fact, on the 2nd floor), find a
store, and buy some water (with a 5-yuan note that a friend in America randomly gave me 6 months ago - as of yet, I still haven’t changed any money). Much relieved, I decided to explore some more, so I wandered around for about an hour, only getting minorly lost once. Everything was very familiar and gave me happy jumpy feelings in my stomach, from the clothes people wore to the smells on the street. I’m also thinking of authoring a travelogue entitled “100 Ways to Use a Bicycle.” Chinese people are very creative! The only thing that surprised me was how much people stared at me. In smaller cities, I expect stares, but I thought that in Beijing, especially right after the Olympics with its influx of half of million foreigners, residents would be used to all us funny-looking funny-talking people. But no. Even though I swiftly realized my blonde hair and pale skin would stand out here - even though I knew that people were just curious, not critical - I started checking my skirt for indecencies, my butt for stickers reading “Kick Me,” and my nose for boogers. Being looked at so much just made me feel like I must be doing something wrong or embarrassing, or that I have 3 heads, or perhaps that I’m freakishly ugly. I’d forgotten how self-conscious it makes one to be gawked at.

This afternoon, we’re going to register for classes, and also register at the police station (all resident foreigners have to do that, not sure why).

In summation, so far I’m having a MARVELOUS TIME!!!!!

-Bethany