TONIGHT

Tonight (12/5) I love China like no other. The heating in my apartment, as in all the rooms and buildings in my complex is WAY too hot. Consequently, we have all turned our heat down and opened our windows, despite the teeny tiny digits of the desert air on a December night.

This evening, my Brazilian Angel made me dinner. I think she had a turning point this weekend after spending time at the impoverished school we donated all the money to. She saw our West Egg friends amongst the impoverished Chinese children. She saw the company wives clad in Louis Vuitton and the company men vulgarly plastered in their companies’ logos contrasted with the children who came from families barely able to afford the yarn to make mittens. She seems to have drawn a line in the sand between those of us here, oblivious of anything outside our ghetto and those of us here to embrace the challenges (slight though they may be) that help us grow. We talked of the fun of frivolity and indulgence and the importance of recognizing it as such. She even spoke of her alienation and disillusionment in some of the members of West Egg and her fear of returning to the life she lived in the small town in China.

We talked about her moment of clarity and our relationship seems to have returned to what it once was. I’m beyond the moon at such a lovely resurrection.

And now I sit, the winter air blowing in as my feet roast on the heated marble floors and the strains of an ancient Chinese string instrument playing its melancholy tune echoing throughout the canyons of my compound. Often at night, I hear the instrument being played and have, on occasion, tried to locate the source of the music, to no avail. After a while, I decided to think of the instrument as my "Chinese Ghost."

A friend once told me about the "Ghost Stories" in Chinese fairytales. By and large, the ghosts of Chinese stories are perfect women. They are the women that the writer concocts as the ideal woman. She is a mere apparition and only through the love of her creator’s alter ego can she be made whole. It is a romantic notion, in the pre-feminist sense, and I think of my string instrument as such. I love the sound of "melancholy" in China because everyone is so publicly about the pursuit of "happy" that melancholy feels distinctly mine, even though I know better. I love the sound of an anonymous string instrument at night almost as much as I love the steady sound of a lover’s breath as he sleeps.

The sound of a solitary string instrument harkens me back to my freshman year of college. In the middle of the night, I was often awakened by one of my dorm mates playing his cello on the deck outside my dorm room. The sound echoed off the canyon beyond the dorm where we lived and the world had fallen quiet. There was a palpable sense of potential as we had yet to see how short we would fall and how only a fraction of us would be left by graduation. In those moments, we were still golden children filled with hope. Every day was a new discovery of the breadth of talent surrounding you and every night was an in depth discussion of the talent you were studying. It was chronically Christmas Eve.

The precision of his playing indicated a recently abandoned passion in the pursuit of higher education. Many of us at Reed had forfeit a god-given gift in the pursuit of a classical education. My dorm mate had given up being a concert cellist and I had given up being a career athlete.
However, in that sound, in that moment, the cost and sacrifice of our forfeiting had yet to settle in. No doors had closed yet and while others were flying open before us. I had yet to know what it felt like to ever be faced with a physical feat I could not conquer effortlessly and his fingers had yet to falter for notes. The great potential we so casually discarded had yet to leave, not yet fully understanding our shunning.

And I revisit that notion now with the echoing sound of my Chinese ghost. I have not yet had to face the cost of what I have forfeit in my pursuit of China. I have not yet fully realized the wonder of the life I will gain from having made a firm decision. I have been here a matter of months; I could not possibly see it all fully. The dream of someday conquering Mandarin and marrying my two worlds is still alive and bright. I don’t know all the ways in which I will compromise to make a small piece of what I dream a reality.

All I do know is that in this moment, I am cozy, content and arrogant in my full belly. I love China like no other.