Love

As I've posted on every social media site in the history of the world, I'm leaving China on July 17th. I'm flying to Denver to get the apartment in Boulder sorted out first, and as for what happens after that, your guess is as good as mine. 

That gets me thinking about all the people I'll be leaving behind. 

In everything that you do, you are sacrificing something else to do that thing. In every decision you make, you have to sacrifice one thing to do another. Ideally, you make decisions that give you the maximum amount of happiness and satisfaction in life. By reading late at night, I sacrifice an hour or two of sleep. By living in China, I sacrifice a part my life, my relationships, my friendships, and my family that I love in order to do what I need to do halfway across the world. By leaving China, I sacrifice the life that I have built and the relationships I have made to continue growing intellectually.

The same goes for relationships, both romantic and platonic. Being in a relationship means that you have to sacrifice a small (or sometimes big) part of yourself for someone else. And that is the beauty of a relationship. It is a selfless act to say to someone, “I care about you so much that I am willing to give up some of my own desires to make you happy.” And that is beautiful. But in some ways it is also sad, because you have to give up things you would normally do, or people you would normally meet, or hobbies you would normally enjoy for someone else. So what are the costs and what are the benefits of a relationship?

When you are in a relationship with someone else, as long as it is a healthy one, then hopefully they are changing you into a better person. I believe in the Buddhist philosophy that you are made up of a sum of all your parts, and every person you ever come into contact with is one of the parts that makes up who you are as a person. I think that when you are in a romantic relationship with someone, they become perhaps a bigger part than most platonic friendships, because you open yourself emotionally and physically to that person, an action of extreme vulnerability that requires an incredible amount of trust. 

The deeper you fall in love, however, the more you open yourself, the more you let yourself be vulnerable, and the more you invest yourself in someone, then the more pain you are going to feel later. I think it's worth it (unless you are in an abusive relationship). I think love is worth the suffering that will inevitably come later. I say it’s inevitable because there will always be either a break-up or divorce, a time when you fall out of love, or a period of long-distance love. Even if you are one of the lucky ones that end up in a happy marriage for life, you still have to endure the day-to-day emotional baggage of being responsible for someone and someone else being responsible for you. Just simply being vulnerable to someone else creates a lot of anxiety and insecurity when you could otherwise live alone in freedom of this emotional investment. There is no free pass in relationships. But, again, the pain and suffering, the anxiety and sacrifices that are inevitable in every relationship, are worth it because in the end, you become a better person because of your partner. The more you are vulnerable, then the more you will love. The more you care, then the more you will suffer but the happier you will be. And this has been my experience with relationships thus far in my life.

The pain I will experience on July 17th will be worth it, considering all of the wonderful human beings I have met and the new, better, healthier, happier person I have become because of them.

One of my favorite Ted Talks, a must-see: Brene Brown on Vulnerability

Chinese word of the day: 
易受伤的- yi4shou4shang1de- "easy to receive the hurt" aka vulnerable

Americans live such a colorful life

I said my first goodbye yesterday.

I met Liu Xinyi through my friend Sun Xiao in the fall of 2009 when I was studying at Nanjing University. Sun Xiao and I were language partners, and one day she brought Xinyi along because she and I were both international relations majors. Xinyi is possibly the most adorable girl I’ve ever met. First of all, her name is 欣怡, which means “Happy Harmony.” How awesome is that?

 We hung out frequently during my study abroad year and she helped me with my Chinese a lot. She showed me around the Nanjing University undergraduate campus, located in the suburbs. One Friday night we decided to do homework together in the library. It was packed. I’ve never seen a library so crowded in my life (and that’s saying something coming from GW—the king of crowded libraries). She said it was nothing compared to finals time.

When I said goodbye to her in July of 2010, I wasn’t sure whether or not we’d ever see each other again.

Xinyi and I for our goodbye picture two summers ago, in July 2010.

When we were both accepted into the Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center for graduate school last fall, we were so excited and wanted to be roommates. I ended up getting the Fulbright grant instead, but either way, we both ended up in Nanjing. This year has been really fun hanging out with her on the weekends, usually getting dinner or coffee together. The Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center (known as HNC in English and 中美中心 in Chinese) is kind of like a portal to the U.S., and the culture of the community of students is very similar to that of an American university. 

It’s been really fun for me to watch Xinyi enter into this world of creativity and freedom of expression and opinion. She asked me for help with one of her essays once. She didn’t know how to write an argumentative or opinionated thesis statement. She told me, “I’ve never had to think for myself before. We don’t write essays like this in Chinese. We usually just compile opinions from other scholars, but we don’t write our own opinion or argument.”

Letter to Myself

I'm working on an article about exercising in China and going through all my old notes looking for anecdotes about working out. I found a note that I'd written to myself in September. I strive for this everyday:

Be nice to people. Make the world a better place. Be disciplined. Be focused. Be efficient. Don't sleep too much. Contribute to society. Live life with a purpose. Your research is your first priority. Don't eat too much. Exercise everyday. Don't deprive yourself. Don't let the little things annoy you. Love life. Be happy. Be grateful for this opportunity [the Fulbright]- cherish it everyday. Cherish it everyday because it's going to over before you know it. Count your blessings. Be thankful. Don't put yourself down- it's manipulative. Don't stress out about other people's well-being. Be yourself. Know yourself. Be strong. Be independent. Be friendly. Devote yourself to your research. BE PRODUCTIVE. Don't spend too much time on the Internet. 

Express empathy for others, appreciate what you have, care about others, be committed to community service, and think about how your actions affect others and affect society. All you can do is think about whether your actions are making the world a better or worse place. Be humble and don't pretend or think or be deluded about the fact that you think you have all the answers. Stay away from people who think they have all the answers.

REMEMBER that feeling insignificant can be a great burden lifted off of your shoulders. Feeling numb is okay and necessary sometimes. Being physically healthy is a necessary and important part of life. Discipline is an extremely, extremely important skill to have, and an aspect of life that is not fun, but necessary. Everything is temporary- and remembering this will help you keep your expectations realistic. 

Love,

Me

 

Little Sister Xie Rui

This post was written when I was still living in Old Nanjing and I’m going to keep it written that way. In fact, I have a couple other posts on backlog that I will publish later in their original form. 

Little Sister Xie Rui* is my 18-year old roommate. I met her one afternoon in October. I was at Big Brother Guo’s house eating lunch on a Saturday and she was there being adorable. She didn’t say anything except that she was in her first year of veterinary school.

Xie Rui and I in our living room

Xie Rui is the type of girl who is so shy and quiet, she almost seems rude at the first impression. She’s too cool for school, but once you get below the surface, you find out that she’s just like every other shy, self-conscious 18-year old trying to make their way through the first year of college. 

In December, Big Brother Guo suggested that I move in to the house next door and be Xie Rui’s roommate. He called her Mom, and we all got together one night to talk everything out. The house belonged to Xie Rui’s now-deceased maternal grandparents. I moved in a couple weeks later and the rest is history.

The happiest memories I shared with her happened during her 5-week winter vacation over the Chinese New Year from January through February. We bonded over the freezing cold, love for The Big Bang Theory, boy gossip, and the fact that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in our house broke at least once (including blowing the electric fuse three times). If we weren’t eating with Big Brother Guo and his family, I’d make dinner (usually a meatball stew) and we’d eat it standing up because we only had one chair in the kitchen. I think I’ll make a good mother someday because there was some weird maternal instinct that gave me great pleasure in making dinner, feeding her, and cleaning up afterward. 

Sometimes we’d make midnight runs to the street vendors catering to the drunks, and we’d buy barbecued squid and fried rice to bring back and eat while we watched TV. One late night in January, I was sitting at the kitchen table emailing back and forth with the editors at The Tribune-Review (it was day time for them, and we were discussing edits and photos for my article), and she came downstairs to go out to the bathroom. She’d asked if I’d eaten and I said no. She came back with dinner for me.

Living with her is great. She is hilarious. She spends most of her time watching American TV shows while simultaneously Instant Messaging her friends. She will break out into fits of laughter every few minutes or so in response to one of both of these entertainments. One of the best things about it is that, at least towards me, she doesn’t use any of the normal Chinese habits, formalities, and niceties that sometimes drive me crazy. AKA: she gives me my space, doesn’t tell me what to do/how to feel/what to eat/when to eat/what to wear. She does what she wants and makes it clear that I can do what I want. In the process, some normal courtesies are overlooked, but that also means I have the freedom to do what I want. Since she is used to having 9 other roommates at school, she made it clear I could eat/do/read/play/listen/watch whatever I wanted whenever I wanted as long as she could do the same. The only rule: No boys allowed. It is a very relaxed and casual atmosphere. We share a bed. This shocks some people. It feels normal to me. Anyway, you do kind of bond with someone in a certain way when you sleep next to him or her every night. You don’t really need too many formalities after that. 

My favorite times above all, are the days when we go over to Big Brother Guo’s house together. Big Brother Guo makes us laugh through dinner, then retires to the bedroom to watch TV while Big Sister Chongyang, Xie Rui, and I read the newspaper and just have some female bonding time. There’s really no other way to describe it, except that we just chat about everything and anything, while Xie Rui and I look up to Big Sister Chongyang as the older, mature female role model every woman needs.

Xie Rui lives in the dorms at school and comes home just about every weekend. I got lonely when she didn’t come home for a couple weeks once—she had a test on Saturday morning and couldn’t come back. She is a good friend and I’ll miss her. 

Map of our second floor

Map of our first floor

Our bed. :-)

Home sweet home

Xie Rui with her glasses- at her desk on QQ and watching soap operas, her favorite activities. 

This is her story, told in her own words.

I didn’t grow up in Old Nanjing. I grew up in a different neighborhood, about a 15-minute walk from here. My paternal grandparents still live in that neighborhood. It hasn’t been demolished yet, but it probably will be soon.

While I was growing up, we lived in a small, two-story house. It wasn’t an apartment building, it was a house, but not like the style of the old house we live in now. It was just a regular, small, two-story house. I guess now it would be considered an old house, but when I was growing up it was normal. My family only lived on the first floor and we rented out the second floor to another family. We had a kitchen, a toilet, and a bedroom. I slept in the same bedroom with my parents. 

Going to the countryside

I built a close relationship with one of the migrant families living in Old Nanjing this semester. The Li family has been incredibly welcoming and friendly to me—sometimes overly so—since I moved to Old Nanjing. Every time I walk by her kabob cart, Auntie Li tries to give me food. I’ve long since given up on trying to give her money for the food she gives me. This has actually caused a major headache for me (I know, poor me, right?) because the neighbors told me I should not accept any food from her because she’s just being polite. The best excuse is to say I’ve already eaten and I’m so full that I can’t eat another bit (chi bu xia) or to say that I’m on a diet. The reason this is a problem is because I like to sit with Auntie Li by her cart to chat with her and collect some observations. But if I do this, she inevitably will fry up some food and give it to me, saying, “Well, I’ve already fried it, now you have to take it!” which I feel really bad about.

The Li family is one of the poorest families in the neighborhood. Auntie Li and her 16-year old daughter, Li Jun, live there permanently, and various cousins, aunts, and uncles on the mother’s side (the father is out of the picture), cycle through the home to help out with the kabobs at various parts of the year, according to how much agricultural work needs to be done back in the countryside at home. Auntie Li sells kabobs during the school year, from September to June, and then takes a break during the summer holiday.

Ever since January, they have been telling me that I should go back to their hometown in the countryside with Li Jun during the summer break. I thought that they were just being polite, but they were really excited and insistent about it, telling me how beautiful their hometown is and how good the air is. Li Jun ended up enrolling in a summer study abroad program to Korea through her school (the fact that this is a waste of money is talked about frequently in the family), and she is leaving right after her final exams in June, so we decided to go this past weekend. This was a very special trip for me for many reasons, one being that I'd never visited a friend in the countryside before. All of my other Chinese friends from the countryside are too embarrassed to take me back home, insisting that I would not be able to handle the "poor" conditions, so I was thrilled that the Li family was more than welcoming. I've been to the countryside in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu before, but each time was with a group of other American students and staying in hotels, so the experiences weren't nearly as authentic as the one I had this weekend (I love the fact that after two years in China, I still continue to have new and exciting experiences).

On Friday we took a bus to Northern Jiangsu Province (苏北), to the city of Sihong 泗洪, an agricultural town located in what is the poorest county of Jiangsu. I thought I was dressing appropriately by wearing my old tennis shoes with shorts and a T-shirt. 16-year old Little Sister Li Jun showed up in leopard print leggings, black high heels, blue contact lenses, fake eyelashes, and fake eyelids. Being that she is currently in beauty school, she applied the eyelids expertly and you can hardly tell that they are fake ones.

Side note: Chinese women (and, as I’ve heard, other East Asian women) think that having eyelids is the most beautiful thing ever. When I first heard of this phenomenon, I was confused. “Um, Chinese women have eyelids!” I thought. I never noticed a difference before in the eyelids. But they actually don’t have the same crease that most other races have around the world, the crease where you usually apply eye shadow. Chinese women call the creased eyelids "double eyelids" and the eyelids without a crease "monolids." They often get plastic surgery that reconstructs their eye such that they get the crease, but until then, they wear fake eyelids, a hard piece of adhesive that forces their eye to crease right above the eyelashes. I just did a quick Google search on "double eyelids" and came up with an Asian girl's blog on how to apply fake eyelids. Here are some images too, in case you're like me and having trouble imagining this.

This is what single eyelids look like

This is a double eyelid on an Asian woman

This is what an advertisement for fake eyelids looks like

This is an advertisement for fake eyelid surgery

 Common compliment: "AH, your double eyelids are so pretty." My response: "Uh, thanks, I grow them myself?" 

Oh, Chinese...

Chinese is a fascinating language. Actually, languages in general are just... awesome. I was thinking about language the other day when I was at the gym powerlifting. A foreign guy was drinking beer and eating dinner with one of the trainers that speaks a little bit of English. Nobody else there could speak English except for me, and the foreign guy didn’t speak Chinese. We all were able to carry on a rather pleasant conversation through translation, but at one point the foreigner and I broke off and started our own conversation in English. While we were chatting and laughing about Crossfit and foam rollers and the Fulbright and Brazilian Jiujitsu, I thought about how for everyone else the sounds that were coming out of our mouths sounded like gibberish. It was just sounds to them, very foreign sounds even (the myth that everyone speaks English in China is indeed a myth). Then when I would translate something from English into Chinese for the other dudes, the sounds that were coming out of my mouth were just gibberish to the foreigner. 

“ABOOM!” as my friend Evan would say when he indicates his brain exploding out of the back of his head. My brain just kind of exploded then with the idea that we move our lips and our mouths in certain patterns that make specific noises that only a select number of people can understand, and to everyone else it just sounds like noise.

Chinese continues to fascinate me as I continue to learn and as I’m realizing more and more how NOT fluent I am and how much more I have to learn. I haven’t studied that many languages (Spanish, French, and Japanese) before, but I gather that Chinese has to be one of the coolest languages in the world. I mean, their word for uterus, 子宫, literally means, “child palace”. How can you beat that? I talk about this often with my friends and it’s the whole point behind my “Chinese word of day” section at the end of every blog post. Chinese is a cool language. I often think about the fact that Chinese will sometimes have one word for something that we can separate into many meanings in English. My friend Lesley told me that since language functions as a type of scaffolding for the brain, if a culture doesn’t have a word for something, the brain can’t conceptualize it. For example:

鸽子: 1. dove 2. pigeon (To the Chinese, it’s the exact same bird, they don’t understand and can’t conceptualize why we would have two different words for the same bird)

流产: 1. miscarriage 2. abortion (Yup, the Chinese don’t distinguish intentional and unintentional deaths in the uterus)

关: 1. close 2. turn off

开: 1. open 2. turn on 3. boil 4. start a fire 5. start

房子: 1. house 2. apartment

电梯: 1. elevator 2. escalator

上: 1. get on 2. get in 3. go up

下: 2. get off 2. get out 3. go down
让: 1. allow 2. invite 3. compel or force

It’s the same if you reverse the concept. English will have one word that can the Chinese will use different words to describe:

can: 1. 可以 (to be allowed to do sth) 2. 能 (to be able to do sth) 3. 会 (to acquire a skill needed to do something, like speak a language or play an instrument)

hot: 1. 辣 (spicy) 2. 烫 (something that you are eating or drinking is too hot) 3. 热 (the weather or your body temperature is too hot). 

close: 1. 关 (to close a door or shop) 2. 闭 (to close eyes, mouth or a window)

open: 2. 开 (see above) 2. 张 (to open eyes or mouth) 3. 坦率 (frank)

massage: 1. 推拿 2. 按摩 (had a heated debate about this with my masseuse this morning. Another customer in the room said he always thought the first definition was for Chinese traditional medicinal deep tissue massage and the second was for relaxation massage, which is how I always understood it too, but my masseuse said that the two words are completely synonymous.

like: 1. 喜欢 (to enjoy or take pleasure in something) 2. 好像 (similar to, as though, as if) 3. 比如 (for example)

visa: 1. the credit card company 2. 签证 (what you have to get to go to another country)

dumpling: 1. 水饺 2. 汤包 3. 锅贴 4. 蒸饺 5. 混沌 6. 小笼包 (I could continue but there are too many different words for what we Americans lump together as dumplings. Chinese people find this hilarious and confusing)

hard: 1. 难以 (difficult) 2. 硬 (the opposite of soft)

share: 1. 分享 (to share in enjoyment, usually food) 2. 共同 (to collaborate) 3. 共用 (to use together or have something in common)