October 4th, 2004
Nanjing, China.



It's Monday, looking down from the 17th floor of an international student hotel at a foggy, decaying skyline. An elm-lined avenue down to the right coughs along at a slow, weekday pace. In the narrow spaces between apartments, laundry aires in the listless mid-afternoon sun. Lots of bicycles are parked against buildings. Straight ahead, over the microcosmic neighborhoods, downtown Nanjing hangs in the smog.

Later in the day, down in the narrow neighborhood streets around Nanjing University, I'll get thoroughly lost. Disoriented in China isn't exactly a novel experience. Walking past shop displays and past restaurants I simply have no clue what I'm looking at. Even having lived in Korea for the better part of a year leaves me no less baffled half the time. I wasn't expecting culture shock for a two day trip to visit my sister.

Chuseok, the Korean "equivalent" of an American Thanksgiving, let me a few days to travel. During the holiday, people go home to visit family and friends. On the harvest moon, a ceremonial meal is dedicated to the family's ancestors. Like the Lunar New Year, the family goes to their grave site and bows before it. Gifts are exchanged and everyone eats a lot. The same thing, the Golden Harvest Festival, happens in China, too, but not at the same time for some reason I couldn't really understand. (Regardless of the moon's phase, my sister had to continue with her courses.)



In the hazy morning, I go ahead and pour more orange drink into my mug and squint out the window to see if I missed anything. Far below students are headed into the university campus. I'm staying in a hotel that also doubles as dormitories for foreign students. My furnished room has all the amenities I'd expect, plus some extra Asian accouterments: Shower shoes and a pot for hot water. I turn on the TV and settle into a fierce ping-pong match.

The day before, I flew into Nanjing to visit my sister who's studying here. The airport was quiet. Large windows filled the concourse with a muted late-summer sunlight. I'd thought ahead and not bothered with checked baggage, so I just wandered out through Nothing To Declare and into the taxi line. Several minutes later I was zipping down a nicely manicured Airport Expressway towards the city.

The airport and the city are about 40km distant. Flying in, fields and old, crumbling houses stretched out into the distance. On a burm separating the runway from the closest field, a group of well-dressed business people watched us roar past.

It took some negotiation between the taxi driver and I before I actually got to where I was going. I was saying words wrong, he was impatient. Earlier in the week, my sister had told me over the phone what to say, which I'd written in phonetic English, but there were nuances I wasn't able to pick up over the static-choked international line. Needless to say, that complicated matters. Finally, after 40 minutes and innumerable alleyways and huge boulevards, I hopped out in front of the hotel. Outside, some students lolled on the steps leading to the lobby, in a small courtyard filled with bicycles.

Across from the hotel where my sister lives is a little row of shops that sell juice, beer and cigarettes. Down the street is a bar, then campus begins proper. In the other direction are shops and restaurants.

I found my sister in her room, with her other western roommate. Both were lying around in the early afternoon watching a movie.



That night, a group of my sister's classmates and I had a light dinner blissfully absent of kimchi then went to see "Dynamic Yunnan," a dance performance at a local auditorium. Having long ago become fairly hardened to the arts I wasn't expecting to find something like this in a dreary city on a short vacation to see my sister. I certainly wasn't expecting to find it hard to breathe after the lead dancer's initial performance. It was one of the most moving and amazing performances I've ever seen.

Afterward, instead of taking a cab home, four of us walked back. It was a mild evening. The moon was a day away from being full, food vendors lined the streets roasting "meats on sticks," as popular a dish there as it is in Seoul. We walked along busy streets then through the Nanjing University campus. The campus streets are broad and canopied by tall elm trees. The square buildings and sodium lights, as well as kiosks with papers about upcoming registration deadlines and notices about events made it seem like a campus anywhere.





Tuesday, over a soup, my sister sat studying her flashcards and I watched people go past the restaurant. Back at home we could have been doing the same thing, I guess. The Arizona sun burning off of passing traffic and the hot flush of escaping air conditioning whenever someone left the cafe. The people outside, busy leading their own lives would have been a common story; A few minutes of conversation and you'd have a pretty clear picture of their lives.

Since we both left, though, an opaque veil has fallen between us and the world rushing past outside. In Seoul, I'd try to imagine what the day had in store for the Seoul National University students all lined up at the bus stop outside Starbucks. Or try to imagine a dinner in a Korean apartment, after everyone has come home from work and afternoon cram schools.

Slowly, I've pried apart some of that mystery. Days and weeks and months and I can guess, badly, at what might be going on behind the barred windows of the apartment across the street. What the old woman on the subway might be thinking as she stares at the punks headed out for a night on the town. Possibly what the middle school students might be planning on doing Sunday, clustered in tiny groups walking home for dinner. Here, though, the complete mystery was back in full effect in the sunny Tuesday afternoon.

People on scooters and bicycles passed by going someplace; Coming from someplace. An old woman crossed the busy street shouldering two baskets of vegetables over her stooped shoulders. Across the street, a guy selling plants on the sidewalk, slept peacefully in a reclining lawn chair. I had, have, no idea what goes on here. Traveling, I've found, means a delight in whatever kind of contact you can have that teases even a bit of that impenetrable barrier between you and the world apart.



Living in Asia, though, means that you become a part of that. Living and working there you become wrapped in your own life, but being so foreign means that as you idle over dinner people are doing the same that you are; wondering what the hell your life is constructed around. As curious as I am, more often than not in conversation it turns around to what I do; what it is that I plan on the weekend, what I think about as I wait for the bus. It's bizarre to be in a place where the most mundane moments of your daily life become more than small talk.

I'm in Korea, my sister in China both of us trying to regain that place where some kind of balance can be struck between who we are and our worlds here.



At night, walking with my sister's two roommates and another western guy, we head over to a glitzy night-life area. After being surrounded by fairly dreary communist architecture this place perks me up a little. Over dinner at an Indian place, I watch the three of them try to bridge the same connections that I've been writing about. It's an evening, a drop in the bucket of experience, but for all of us trying to grasp at common ideas of place and identity it's a fairly lively conversation. Later at night, on the steps of the hotel's courtyard, the conversation continues over cheat Tsing Taos.

The following day, I got into a cab to head back to the airport when I realized that I had no idea how to say, 'airport' in Chinese. Sighing, realizing it was time to play charades, I made airplane noises and made the universal five year-old hand motion for "taking off." In the international terminal, terribly hungry with no restaurants in sight, I ordered a jasmine tea that came in a water glass. My last fling with culture shock before I boarded left me flustered: How are you supposed to drink the tea when the glass is too hot to touch? I was happy to leave those experiences behind for my sister.

Back to Seoul, back to a place where the unfamiliar has simply been repeated so many times that although I'm far from understanding, the appropriate behaviors are like rote. I smile, walking out of the airport. I've returned to a place where I know I can last through the day unencumbered by the impenetrable mystery; I am the impenetrable mystery and on Wednesday I can walk into the classroom and have a fine discussion with sixth graders about what they did over the long vacation. In an environment that I control; where I can call the shots. It's a sanctuary and, after the last few days, one I'm happy to come back to.