a familiar stranger

I bought my tickets to go home. I didn't expect the airlines to agree with my personal opinion that it's much more difficult to leave China than it is to come back. The only site that had tickets to Hawaii available was the gimmicky-sounding "cheapOairlines," and my airfare out of here was a good $500 more than the one coming back.

But whatever, I'll be back from July 29 to August 15, fahh real, yo.

I'm excited. Family, doggy, friends, Kam's wedding, the beach, tennis, spam musubi, toilets that flush down toilet paper, no spittle and baby shit on sidewalks...
At the same time though, I'm a little nervous.

I'm not going to belong. I won't understand the people I love. They won't understand me.
Like a 13,ooo year old Chinese migrant (see below), I'm an outsider everywhere I go.
Strangely, I don't feel lonely here, even though I'm more alone than ever (I prefer the term "independent," haha). But will the loneliness sink in once I'm in the company of a life that's no longer mine? The irony that rules my days is nodding is ugly head.

As the migrants in today's Dongguan know, losing your cell phone often means losing your friends. "The easiest thing in the world is to lose touch with someone," Leslie Change notes repeatedly in her book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. This quote knifed me every time because it kept reminding me of how my Verizon phone doesn't work this far up the Yangtze, and also of the fact that I've verbally spoken to only 4 friends in the whole time I've been here. Damn you, Facebook, for making "keeping in touch" far too easy to be taken for granted. But anyway, I wonder if "finding" your cell phone can also mean finding your friends? Or rather, if a working phone will translate into working friendships?


A vital wound made by Factory Girls:

"It is not a new story. The ache of the traveler returning home is a classic theme in Chinese literature. One of the first poem a school child learns, from the eighth century, is about a man who goes back to his village after a lifetime away, to find that he no longer belongs.

I left home as a youth, and as an old man returned,
My accent unchanged but my temples turned gray.
The children see me but don't know who I am,
Laughing, they ask where the stranger is from."



Shoot, if any little kid laughs and asks where I'm from, I will cry.