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It would have been pitch dark if it weren’t for the full moon. We sat outside, shooing away the chickens and small children, trying out a few words in each other’s languages. Mostly, I just said “zikomo,” the all-purpose Chichewa word for thank you, you’re welcome, I’m-embarrassed-that-I-don’t-know-any-more-of-your-language. And then our host asked, “Do you know any songs?” We would have said no, declined to sing, except that our hosts has been so generous, so gracious, even though it was painfully obvious that we had so much and they had so little. And so we sang. Badly. The Star Spangled Banner, though I’m not sure Mr. Keyes would have recognized it. And then we asked our friends to sing. They had clearly been waiting for this moment. They rearranged themselves, climbing over tangled legs so that they were sitting together on one side of the large straw mat we all shared. They hummed a few bars, paused, and then the joys and sorrows and daily struggles of life in rural Malawi were given voice. There were high, keening notes and mellow, patient refrains, and we didn’t need to speak Chichewa to know that we were being told of death and birth and survival, and of the centrality of community and faith in the small villages of rural Malawi.
I feel like Alice in Wonderland; I wasn’t invited, but I’m here.
Here, where the sun doesn’t shine, vegetarians can’t survive and taxi drivers think the streets are Formula 1 racetracks. Michael Jordan graces the labels on Gatorade bottles, Saddam smiles at you on playing cards and pop stars pose for Wahaha water. A four course meal at an upscale restaurant costs less than a sandwich at Panera.
But that's not all. Spanking new condominiums stand tall next to dilapidated huts. Expatriates guzzle Tsingtao inside a bar while children beg for change outside it. Corn and cantaloupe come on a stick, as a snack. Women hide from the sun under umbrellas. Tea is ubiquitous, mosquitoes notorious. Everything is negotiable and nothing is what it seems.
During my eight weeks of summer in Beijing, I see the UK’s Go!Team perform at the Starlive, listen to Jack Johnson sing about banana pancakes at California Pizza Kitchen and hear the director of Crossing the Line discuss his documentary about the last surviving American military defector from the Korean War. I go to China Doll on Wednesday nights, where ladies get unlimited free drinks until the break of dawn, and hike up the Great Wall on Saturday, where the poncho vendors get feisty when it starts to rain. I drink my yogurt with a straw and burn incense at the temples. I more often than not get ripped off at the markets because I am a terrible bargainer.
Beijing is non-stop eye-candy for a girl from the other side of the world. It takes several weeks of thumbing through Chinese-English dictionaries, popping Pepto-Bismols and converting dollars to RMB for me to (barely) scrape by in Beijing. Who am I kidding, I never really adjust. But although I am always sick, tired, confused or misunderstood, I am never apathetic - you just can’t be. This city is emblematic of a country blossoming with contradictions, from the details of every day life to the inconsistencies of government and society. History is alive in China. It’s happening, whether you like it or not.
Drinking my cup of ginger tea, I soak it in. Welcome to the party.
“Not Your Typical Physiotherapist”
He held up a leathery, calloused hand so I could inspect the stub where his index finger used to be. It had been shot off with a machine gun. I tried to utter something appropriate. He returned to kneading his thumbs into my sore legs, speaking softly and recollecting his sister’s rape and his brother’s murder, while I listened, thinking of my own sheltered adolescence. Thirty minutes became three hours as we discussed politics, war, love, and soccer in his one-room wooden shack.
My afternoon with this Pa-Oo healer was one of the most sobering during my time in Burma. Others were deeply tranquil, fascinating, and at times positively gleeful. A few events, including a twenty-hour bus ride spent sitting in the aisle, were simply hell.
Other than what I knew of its troubled history, I’d had no idea what to expect from Burma, and so was richly rewarded. I pedaled a rusted bicycle from stupa to stupa, climbed their terraces, and watched days descend into dusk. “Myanmar coffee”—twenty parts condensed milk and sugar to one part coffee—sipped from roadside stalls quenched my thirst, and bites of mammoth, buttery avocados melted on my tongue. I hopped a steamship up the Irrawady, trekked to a Nepalese family’s home, read in the silence of a monastery, and crossed the famed Amarapura bridge. Tiptoeing barefoot along the cool tile of the Shwedagon Pagoda, I felt an unexpected calm from a country so fractured by corruption and brutal oppression.
What moved me most were the people. In spite of the junta’s legacy of cruelty, I saw and felt the resilience of goodness. I shared intimate conversations with strangers, savored poignant encounters not written in any guidebooks, and had a massage which I’ll never forget.
“A Change of Pace”
Exhausted from seven months of planning, I sank into my airplane seat. Then, halfway through my journey to Taiwan, I needed to kill time. When flipping through some Asian magazines, these words immediately caught my eye: “If we want to live deeply, we have to live slowly.” I wrote this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh in my journal before finally arriving in Taipei.
My university dorm was anything but welcoming. I felt trapped between my mildewed room and Taipei’s bustling streets. Things got better when I went to my first Mandarin class. I asked a few classmates, who were from the Solomon Islands, where I could buy a pillow. They were very apologetic for their “broken English”, and proceeded to take me shopping and out to lunch. I was dumbfounded by their friendliness -- they would not even let me carry my new purchases. As if I didn’t stand out enough already in Taipei, now I was strolling down the streets with ten Pacific Islanders. We became best friends after that day, although they never joined me on any of my frequent day trips. They were not interested in keeping up with Taipei’s fast pace. I, on the other hand, was determined to squeeze as many sights into a day as possible.
Before I knew it, my semester was completed and we were saying our goodbyes. In Taipei‘s airport, I opened my journal and came across Hanh’s words scribbled on the first page. I had forgotten about that quote. I have since thought about it often, and am gradually imitating the Solomon Islander’s slow pace in hopes of living more deeply. In five years when they finish their studies and finally return home, I intend to visit the Solomon Islands. By then, my pace should match theirs, and we will all be conversing in Mandarin.
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