Russian trip, Part 1

I was really nervous the night before I flew to Moscow. My stomach was tied in knots at the thought of going to a country where I didn’t speak the language. And not only that, but I also don’t know the Cyrillic alphabet.

Chinese people kept insisting that I would be fine because “just speak English and you’ll be fine.” But I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be like that. Maybe it was because my couch surfing host told me that the cab drivers wouldn’t speak English, that the subway stops were only in Cyrillic, and had sent me the directions to her house in Russian, knowing full well that if I needed to ask for directions, they should be in Russian.  

I also had a feeling. Maybe it’s from my years in China. Of course they’re completely different countries. BUT the fact that they are both huge in land and population, relatively ethnocentrist, with a history of isolationist communism, gave me an inkling—the Russians were not going be fluent in English in the same way the Chinese can barely introduce themselves let alone help an illiterate foreigner navigate the subway.

My anxiety coursed through my veins as I imagined getting lost, abducted, and deported. But there was nothing I could do. After announcements in Chinese, Uyghur, Russian, and English, my plane was finally taking off and there was nothing I could do but plunge in head first. 

After a sleep-deprived and frantic week of proposal and conference paper writing, I slept almost the entire flight. I woke up disoriented and confused. Where was I? It would be good if I could keep sleeping forever and I’m pretty sure my legs don’t work anymore, I thought to myself.

I shook off the cobwebs of drowsiness and realized we had arrived in Moscow. My first impression of Russia and the Russian language was a nice plunge into the ice cold waters of a type of “we’re not in Kansas anymore” culture shock. We arrived at customs and there were signs in Russian and English over some of the lines: “Russian Citizens” and “Diplomats.” But there were no signs in English for “foreigners.” There was a petite Russian girl directing people in Russian to go to which line. She said something to me in Russian and pointed aggressively. I showed her my passport and my visa. She stared at me like I was the stupidest person in the world and pointed again, this time pointing more vigorously and with a raised voice and a nodding head. I had no idea what she was saying, but I lined up in one of the corridors without any English on it.

I’m sorry, but I just have to ask. If there is one place in the airport where you would need to have something in English, it would be the corridor at customs where the foreigners are supposed to go. Just saying.

So I walked up to the counter and the lady looked at me from above her reading glasses. “From?” She asked in English. “America!” I responded with a big smile, perhaps too cheerfully for her. She glared at me. “NO. Urumqi. NOT America,” she said looking at my plane ticket. She scoffed and rolled her eyes.

Oh. She meant which city I was flying in from. I thought she meant, where are you from. Sorrrrryyyyy.

My couch surfer had told me that the taxi should cost about 1200-1500 rubles. I got out of customs and was wondering around looking slightly confused and lost, when a group of men with official-looking name badges offer a taxi. I ask how much and they said, 8,750 rubles!!!!!!!! 8 times what it was supposed to cost. So I told them I only had 2000 rubles on me, and they said they’ll give me the special price of 7,000 rubles. WHAAAAAAAAT?

So I started walking towards the signs that say “public transportation” and one of the taxi drivers followed after me at a slight jog. “Wait, wait wait. How about 3,000 rubles?”

“I told you I only have 2000 rubles on me.”

“OK, then 2000 and 10 euros,” he says. I bet he gets a lot of foreigners that way.  

“No, I don’t have euros on me.”

“Ok, then 10 dollars.”

“No, I don’t have dollars on me.”

I had Chinese yuan on me though. I didn’t tell him this, however.

So finally he relented and I got the ride for 2000 rubles. The driver said something to me in Russian, but all I could do was respond and say, “Sorry, I don’t speak Russian.” He nodded and grunted in response when I show him the address my couchsurfer had sent me. He takes me straight there, and I listen to the audio version of “Brave New World” as we pass the city lights, gas stations, billboards, and hotels that line the highway we speed down.

After some wandering around the neighborhood and showing a couple people her address, I arrive at my host’s home. She is a very petite and cute girl with a short, curly dirty blond hair, and a warm, comfortable, clean 1-bedroom apartment. She pulls out her sofa bed in the couch, and shows me the bathroom and the kitchen. A luxury space for the next 3 nights. Her name is Tatiana.  

I ask her if she lived in the US, since her English is quite fluent. It turns out that after getting her MA in computer science, she did a 1-year internship in San Jose in California at a tech company and she is currently working from home with a cushy paycheck as a coder for a US tech company. She would be moving to Ukraine next month with her boyfriend and getting a cat.

How old are you?

24.

I nearly fell off my chair. 24??? I practically screamed. YOU’RE SO YOUNG.

She laughed. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, she chuckled.

Indeed, youth is SO wasted on the young. (I say with sarcasm).

I was just totally floored of this total put together bilingual computer scientist with international experience, an MA, a live-in boyfriend, and a salaried job by 24. I’m still shocked as I’m writing this.

It was 2 am for me at that point, so I quickly went to sleep and slept for 8 hours. I pretty much died of comfort and happiness that night, I thought I would die with the luxury and comfort of a full night’s sleep with nothing on the agenda the next day.

The next morning, I woke up at 11 am my time (8 am Moscow time) and had fruit for breakfast, and like the workaholic that I am (You can trust that I would never let you down in that respect, my friends), I worked on my conference paper for the next 6 hours. Tatiana got up and also did work and made me amazing green tea from China. At 2 pm, we went on a walk in the park. It was cold, but I was prepared coming from Xinjiang: long underwear, hat and gloves, and I was set. She lives nearby an absolutely beautiful park with trees with the leaves changing, which we don’t really have in Urumqi (First because there aren’t that many trees and second, the leaves just turn brown and fall down in the course of one week because the weather changes so drastically).

We talked about stereotypes: she told me that Russians stereotype Americans as always fat and always smiling. And I said that Russians were always drinking vodka and always hating American capitalist democracy.

We walked along a huge lake, talking about politics: the crisis in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia, the US presidential election, gender inequality, and homophobia in our respective countries.

I relaxed the rest of the evening and I felt gluttonous with all the free time I had.

The next day, I worked on my paper a bit more, and I went out on a walk by myself in the afternoon, listening to Brave New World. On my way back, I stopped at what looked to be a somewhat high-end grocery store.

I’m not saying I live in poverty in Xinjiang, but the kind of lifestyle I choose to live in the neighborhood I choose to live in, I do not frequent super stores like Wal-Mart, and as a result, I only frequent the butchers and the fruit and vegetable markets where they sell nothing but meat, fruit and vegetables. You know, the essentials, the things that the doctors in the US tell us that we’re supposed to eat more of to avoid obesity and linked diseases… So when I walked into that grocery store, it was not a super store mind you, it was a small neighborhood grocery store, but its contents threw me into a shocked and mesmerized trance. Cheese, wine, beer, salmon, chips, crackers, sliced bread, lined the store in neat little packages. My mind was overwhelmed with choices, and also a desire to BUY ALL OF THE THINGS. It was this consumerist, deep instinctual desire to consume all of the pretty little packages, the luxuries I have not had access to in Xinjiang. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was a mixture of a deep desire, a deep longing, and self-pity to have denied myself these luxuries. The desire to consume was almost instinctual, and yet there was a confusion, my brain was overwhelmed by all of the choices, I could barely handle it and wanted to run screaming from the place. And it was also depressing, to think of consumerism and materialism as feeding on our human instincts, our insecurities, and our deep desire for luxurious and yet unnecessary goods that are only perpetuating our cycle of misery as humans to want, want, want, more, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger is better. Why can’t we be happy with just fruit, vegetables, and meat? This is still mind boggling to me as I write.

So I left that store, and I went to the slightly cheaper and standard grocery store recommended by Tatiana. I was waiting in line when a guy started talking to me in Russian, but I had no idea what to say, and more embarrassingly, I didn’t know how to say, “sorry I don’t speak Russian.” The cashiers were also talking to me in Russian and I could barely muster out a “sposibo.” (thank you). So I went back to Tatiana’s and declared that I needed to learn Russian. And so began my adventure with learning Russian, the Cyrillic alphabet and a few necessary phrases, the one being the most important and the most used: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand, I don’t speak Russian.”

Never before had so many people approached me to ask for directions on the subway. I’m so used to be the obvious foreigner in China, that it was strange to me to have people look at me and not know that I wasn’t Russian. Three different people approached me asking for directions. And I could do nothing but stare back at them wide-eyed. It was time: I needed to memorize a few phrases. Here is a screenshot of the phrases I was practicing:

The next day, Tatiana and I went out to eat at a Ukrainian restaurant. We had dumplings with cabbage in them that were TO DIE FOR. I also had borscht (TO DIE FOR) and some chicken thing. I had no idea that beets and cabbage could be so amazing. 

I’m ashamed to admit that I never dared try borscht before because it looked and sounded weird. But it was heavenly. Lesson learned: never judge a soup by its name.  

We walked around the outside of the Kremlin and through Red Square, where Lenin’s body still rests, and the square was amazingly beautiful. Moscow as a whole is absolutely stunning and Tatiana took me on a walking tour of downtown Moscow: libraries, coffee shops, luxury brand shops, golden domed churches, Dunkin Donuts: Moscow had it all. Also, Russians are beautiful (though most of the girls were stick thin). I walked around staring with my jaw scraping the sidewalk.

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The next day, I headed to the conference, still struggling through the few Russian phrases I had memorized. I navigated my way through the subway and only got lost once. The subway was gorgeous: ornately decorated chandeliers and Christian-themed paintings lined many of the stations around the city center. 

(Not my photo, found this along with others on Google Images of "Moscow subway") 

My Tattoo Story, Part 3: Getting the tattoo

In the end, I decided to get the tattoo on the left side of my rib cage. People kept telling me that the ribs are one of the most painful places to get tattooed. I kept thinking, but isn’t the pain kind of the point? If I didn't want to feel pain, getting tattooed was not something I should be doing. 

When I prepared that morning, I felt like an animal going in to sacrifice (LH told me later she feels like a butcher everyday, putting people in such physical pain and then having to hear them cry out about it). I posted pictures of me and my grandpa with an essay written in Uyghur about him along with the calligraphy design on my WeChat (the Chinese version of Facebook/Whatsapp). I wanted other people in my social circle here to know the lessons about being a burden I had learned from him. It's an abridged version of the "how I experienced my grandfather's death" post. Here’s a screen shot of my post:

I meditated.

I wrote down more quotes from Pema Chodrun’s Places That Scare You about pain:

Pain

“Bodhichitta (open heart) is the soft spot, a place as tender as an open wound. It is our ability to love. 

Compassion is our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. 

We are scared of the pain that we share with others. We put up barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are fortified by anger, jealousy, craving and pride. The soft spot- the wound- is our innate ability to live and care, it's is a crack in these walls we create when we're afraid of pain. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment of love or loneliness or inadequacy or embarrassment to awaken bodhichitta, our link to all those who have felt pain. Bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. In that pain, there is our link to all those who have loved. This can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we are arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing. When you accept it, you can share that compassion with everyone. This sense of deep connection, of belonging to the same family is bodhichitta. It's the ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down. 

It means being a warrior willing to enter challenging situations.”

The tattoo was my Bodhichitta. At least for the time being.

AJ tagged along with me, despite leaving on a three week trip to Tibet the next day. I translated the essay I wrote in Uyghur into Chinese for her while we were riding the subway. She got tears in her eyes and told me she too was moved by it.

When we got there, LH was waiting for us. She looked happy and excited.

When she first started, I told myself, “Ok, breathe through the pain,” as any good meditator would have encouraged me. But I was getting tattooed on my ribs, and LH was not thrilled with this idea. I tried to control my breathing as best I could, but still I was breathing a lot apparently. AJ held my hand.

After a little while, the tattoo artist decided that I should lay down. I lay down and decided to start tonglen practice by making a list of all the people I love and who are important to me. After each person, I would imagine them, their face, and how I feel when I’m around them, and think about what I like about them and why they bring joy to my life. Then I would practice tonglen, repeating the phrases ten times each for each person: May they be safe, may they be healthy, may they be at peace, may they accept themselves as they are, may they accept their lives as they are, may they live with ease.” I did this over and over again, pulling my hair as a gritted my teeth with pain. But as LH suggested, you need to think about anything but the pain itself. And with this my breathing slowed, and LH said she could now work with ease.

In typical tonglen practice, you start with the people closest to you, and move out towards the people who you don’t know as well, or even people who have hurt you or people you are struggling with. So as I moved down the list, she worked from the bottom to the top of my ribs, and the pain became more and more intense, especially after she started filling in the color. I could feel the pain radiating through my ribs and through my entire left side. It was at this time that I got to the people on my list who have hurt me. And as the pain seared through my body, I thought about those people, those people who only hurt me because they meant so much to me, they only hurt me so much because I had loved them so much, and over and over again, I wished them peace, health, safety, acceptance, and a life of ease.

It was a truly spiritual experience.

After about 2 hours, I thought we were almost done. But it turned out I still had an hour to go. At this point I sat up, and Miao talked with me about Chinese New Year, and told me stories about her friends. I concentrated my whole being on her words and on her face, and the pain was bearable. I laid down again then, and this time, I looked at Facebook for the first time in 2 months, a luxury that I knew would take my mind off of things.

After 3 and a half hours, the tattoo was over and suddenly I understood why people loved getting tattoos and why they are addictive.

It’s a whole day devoted to yourself, being selfish and doing something you like for yourself; it feels like your birthday.

I was high. On the endorphins, certainly. But also on the feeling of accomplishment, like you get during drinks at a Friday happy hour after a stressful week at work, or at the summit after climbing a tall mountain. It was the happiest I’ve felt in a long time.

Taking care of the tattoo was also an important lesson in self-care. As we are wounded, so we must heal, and with healing must come time, rest, and attention to the wound, and listening to our bodies for what we need. First it was an open wound, and for that I applied antibiotics and washed it twice a day. Then came the tortuous itchiness, and for that I applied lotion. In two weeks, it was completely healed, and now it will be a part of me for the rest of my life.

My Tattoo Story, Part 2

I decided to get the tattoo right before the Muslim Qurban Heyt (holiday of sacrifice), which is 60 days after the end of Ramadan. Muslim holidays are official holidays in Xinjiang, so a lot of my friends go home and official government offices close. Then I could spend a lot of time at home letting it heal and the gym would be closed for training anyway.

I went the week before Qurban Heyt to check out the place first and make sure it was clean, comfortable, and professional. I wanted to make sure I felt comfortable there, that the artist was friendly and open to my ideas, and to make sure they used one-time needles and ink.

The place was far away, in the north (read: Chinese) part of the city. I took two busses to get there, studying Uyghur during the 1.5 hour trip. I found my way there, going through security checks to get to her office on the 17^th floor of an office building. I walked in and she immediately knew who I was, since how often does a white blonde girl come into a Chinese tattoo studio? It turned out that I was her first foreign client.

She was sitting on the couches in the front lobby, and stood up and greeted me with a smile when I walked in, complimenting me on my Chinese. She was very petite, her arms and legs like sticks poking out from under her baggy black t-shirt and long cargo shorts. She was shorter than me, probably around 5’4” with long, straight, black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail in the middle of her head. I noticed she had a couple colorful tattoos on her shins and calves. 

A girl with a mini skirt and both legs almost completely covered in tattoos lounged on the couch inside the tattoo studio with her legs propped up on the legs of the couch, playing on her phone. A guy with tattoos covering his entire neck was working on a shin tattoo of another guy watching videos on his phone with his teeth clenched and a grimace on his face. He got a call. “I’m getting a tattoo right now, what are you up to?” he answered into it. I chuckled to myself. How often do you get to say that?

LH and I talked easily. She understood my accent and I felt at ease communicating with her. We discussed how big I wanted it and where I wanted it. 

I told her I wanted to get it in the middle of my back, and she told me, “I think you should get it somewhere you can see it. If you get it on your back, your entire life you won’t see it with your own eyes. You’ll see it in pictures and you’ll see it in the mirror, but you won’t see it yourself. I think you should get it somewhere you can see it yourself, then it can serve as a reminder and memorabilia for you.”

She was right. I agreed and told her I would think about it, and would probably get it on the inside of the bicep, or on my ribs. I would think about it and let her know by the time I came back to get the tattoo. 

She told me she would outline the calligraphy in a pen, and then paste that to the place I wanted to tattoo like a temporary tattoo. That way, even though she doesn’t speak a word of Uyghur, she would be able to re-construct the tattoo 100% directly as it had been designed.

I asked her about using one-time use needles and ink, and she put me at ease. 

All check boxes were clear, and I was ready to go on Saturday, September 10th, coincidentally the 3^rd month anniversary of my grandfather’s death.

PAIN

There was something else about getting the tattoo that was key for me. I wanted to feel the pain.

I could have printed out the logo and taped it to the wall above my bed. I could have made it the background of my phone. I could have put it on Facebook and made it my profile picture. But it wasn’t just about a logo or a saying for me. It was about a scar. I had a scar and I wanted to feel the physical pain of that scar. I knew that scar would stay with me for the rest of my life, and I wanted a physical manifestation of that scar.

I wanted to feel the pain for my grandpa. I knew he bore a lot of pain with his mental illnesses—not just Alzhiemer’s but depression too. It wasn’t just for my grandpa though. I wanted to feel the pain of all humanity, as pain is part of the human condition. I wanted to feel the pain, acknowledge the pain, and accept the pain, and in that way link to all other humans feeling that pain—the pain of being a burden—and know their pain and see their pain. I wanted to accept the pain as a way of saying, Pain, I embrace you as a part of the human condition. It was also an opportunity in practicing the philosophy of "This Too Shall Pass." It would hurt, but only temporarily. 

There was a note I had written to myself on my phone a few months earlier, during my transition in April from taking comps to moving from the US to China. Meditation had saved me during that time, and I had been reading a lot of Pema Chodrun. I wrote a note to myself with quotes from her book, “The Places that Scare You.”

It was a note I had looked at several times in the last few months. From leaving the US, from taking comps, from moving back to China, from practicing two challenging foreign languages in a place far from home with few friends, these were my words of comfort:

“Let's move toward difficulties rather than backing away. 

Let’s use poison as medicine, as fuel for waking up, as seeds of compassion, to breathe it in for everybody, as part of the human condition, to use difficult situations to awaken our genuine caring for other people who, just like us, often find themselves in pain. 

To what do we really commit ourselves? Is it to playing it safe and manipulating our life so that it will give us security and confirmation? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones?”

This is what I told myself as I struggled through comps, struggled through Uyghur during my first four months of being back in Xinjiang, and this is what I told myself when my Grandpa died. Life is not about avoiding suffering. The death of a loved one tells us that. How lucky we are to have known someone to have meant so much to us.

Living in Urumqi, Xinjiang is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. That tattoo is a reminder of that, of the struggles I faced, and how those were valuable lessons—not burdens, but gifts in opening my eyes to the pain of inequality, the discrimination of race and gender, and the loneliness of the human condition.  

And that is what I would tell myself when I got my tattoo and that is what my tattoo symbolized to me in that moment.