Category: Reflections

3 & 30

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I was twelve when my mother turned thirty.

We went to O’Charley’s for her birthday dinner. I had the same thing I always got back then: chicken tenders with extra honey mustard. Someone in our dysfunctional entourage told the hostess it was my mother’s birthday, and at the end of dinner all the waiters and waitresses came marching up with a small cake, clapping and singing Happy Birthday. My mother’s face turned red.

Get ready for the slide, my grandfather told her, making downhill motions with his hand. My mother believed him, back then, in 1998.

Right side of thirty, wrong side, what do they use nowadays, as a measure of terminated youth? But numbers don’t matter; events do.

Whether you like it or not, your youth ends the day your children are born. The downcycle of your life begins and no song is sweeter.

…their replacement. The day was coming (sooner than either of them realized or wanted to admit) when Julia would be a grown woman and both of them would be old, on the wrong wrong side of thirty, what hisgrandfather had called the top of the slide. How Julia acted, what she did, it all depended on how they raised her. Like it or not, the moment your child is born, the downcycle of your life begins, whether you’re high school sweethearts or early thirties professionals.

I like what I see

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I haven’t been to Knoxville in four years, and I don’t think last weekend’s drive through on I-40 counts as a visit.

Last time I was there was not just four years ago, but the weekend before I left for China. August, 2008. Just four months prior, I knew where I was headed: to France, for the assistant d’anglais program. From there? To a good graduate program, a tenured professorship coupled with a solid writing career. I was twenty-two years old, in my last year of college, taking the best class I’ve ever had with the best teacher I’ve ever had, with the best friends I’ve ever had, and all that good shit.

I’ve written two articles, one a column for the Daily Beacon, the other an article for Lost Laowai. The Lost Laowai article is a “sequel” to the Daily Beacon article, and it deals with how you change when you go abroad. When I wrote the Daily Beacon column, I had told people I was going for nine months. They asked. They asked, How long are you going to be over there?, and I had to answer them. My contract was for nine months, so that’s the answer I gave. Nine months.

Well, friends and neighbors, we all know the rest of the story, don’t we? As I was driving through Knoxville, old memories and feelings returned to me. I felt a sense of longing, for those old times, a life that has vanished.

You aren’t him anymore, that guy. Two and a half years in China, and it’s come true. What you said would happen in that initial column.

In some ways I’m still him. We like the same things, and we still like studying foreign languages. But on a larger level, it works; I’m not him anymore — I’m a better writer than him, more focused on what really matters. And though the times come when I miss the days I had to hunt change just to buy a coffee, those days when I had nothing in the fridge but some carrots and a few scraps of meat, you have to put aside the nostalgia. Look where you are now.

I do. I look where I am now, and you know what?

I like what I see.

Birthdays

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The big Two-One

At midnight on October 19, 2006, I turned 21 and went to Buffalo Wild Wings. I ran up to the bar, ordered a beer, awaiting the moment where I could finally show my ID, without a thumb over my date of birth.

The bartender set my bottle down. “That’ll be a buck fifty.”

A classic moment that never was. Thanks a lot. Asshole.

Downhill

My 25th birthday was my third, and as of this writing, last birthday in China. I spent the day playing Starcraft 2.

The previous birthday (24), we went out to Papa John’s. It is to be expected that Papa John’s in Wuhan, China, is somewhat different than Papa John’s in, say, Jackson TN. Truth is, it’s different from every Tennessee Papa John’s I’ve ever been to. Gone is the standing room only front room where you pick up your order and the bored woman manning the register asks if you want something to drink with your order.

The place is a real restaurant. Hostesses greet you at the door. They have beer and wine, as well as different sorts of ice cream and what highclass restaurant in China would be complete without exhorbinantly-priced coffee in small sizes? They got it. Say what you want about the coffee selection, when you’ve been living on Nescafe Instant Coffee, this shit is gourmet.

So how’s the pizza? Not good, compared to what I have here in the States. They say Old School down by Wuhan University is the real place to go for pizza. I wouldn’t know — the night I went, their oven was broke. I had chicken alfredo.

Birthday 23 was my first birthday in China. We went to KTV. It was one of those 100 RMB an hour KTVs. Before I went, I had all sorts of ideas about what KTV would be like. I had the weird idea that it might be fun, or at least, remotely comfortable.

It was neither.

I’m a terrible singer, and according to some of the girls there, I did not sing passionately enough. It’s hard to feel passionate about Yesterday Once More. If you don’t already hate that song, trust me, after a few KTV trips, you will. And the trip  wasn’t even special for me; when we got there, people were already there, and more showed up after we left. I paid 300 RMB, and I even had to leave some money for the others who showed up later.

I went to two of my brother-in-law’s birthdays. Both began at Jiulong with plenty of cigarettes and booze, and shifted over to a KTV with plenty of cigarettes and booze. Yeah, I know, it’s KTV, but hey, at least they keep things consistent.

Birthday 26 was celebrated here in the States with a cake and pizza. I’m inching closer to thirty. People in my life have told me that after thirty it’s all downhill. That’s complete bullshit.

And besides, if sixty is the new forty, then what does that make thirty?

Cultural Readjustment

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“–you have too good a mind to throw away. I don’t quite know what we’re doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his light and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”

She is right. I will say yes. I will say yes even though I do not really know what she is talking about. – Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

I try to shut off the nostalgia lens when thinking of my two and a half years in China. Coming back to the States was something I felt obligated to do; if it were up to me, I’d still be in Wuhan, breathing in the poisonous air, drinking crates of beer, with my neverending head cold, forty pounds heavier than I am now, if not more. I can see why coming here was a good idea, and I can make myself understand this is all temporary; there will come a time when the benefits of returning begin to manifest. There may even be a time when I look back on my time in China with a slight shred of regret. There might come such a time.

But not now.

The slow eroding of any hope you had for your future is a process best endured among kindred spirits — at the office, bagging groceries, or pissing away time and money and bits of your sanity to earn a PhD, only to find yourself an overworked adjunct with no benefits. Those people are better off because they’re together.

When you endure it in isolation, there is no hiding from the truth. It’s there, staring you in the face every single day. Your failures. Where you’re going, where you’ve been, not to mention where you’ve fallen on your ass along the way.

A side effect of this is that you long for a better, simpler time. A chance to take a left instead of a right, and see if that lands you in your fabled dreamworld of the “good life”. What you left behind wasn’t so bad — hell, compared to your current situation, it was heaven. Why the fuck did you ever leave in the first place?

The point is: I’m romanticizing my life in China.

I have to take the time to remind myself that it wasn’t all dancing in the sun and shitting rainbows. For starters, what sun? Unless our fearless leaders seed the atmosphere. And as for rainbows…good luck.

I try to forge a conviction that my reasons for returning home were sound, and that since my wife worked hard to get her visa, even if we fail, it was worth a shot. Right?

And if we fail? What are the consequences for failure?

A few weeks ago I did something I have not done in a long time: I went through all my old China photos, remembering things I had forgotten about my arrival, going back down that tired road of what-could-have-been. And sometimes, right before I fall asleep, I can draw myself back to that first day, when an entire new land awaited me. That first dreary jetlagged dinner, that first cigarette, first rice wine, first rice wine hangover, and I can still see her. She is standing at the heater by the window. She is offering me a cup of tea, and she pronounces tea with a slight rhotacization, something close to tear. She looks nice. I can’t take my eyes off her.

Then I wake up to…my current life. Everything that has gone before, and everything yet to come. Where am I headed, and I have to wonder if the consequences of failure might not be consequences after all.

But a kind of reprieve.