China was a story about travel, cross-cultural friendships, alcohol, and the beginnings of an intellectual love affair with the globalization. But in my memory, what holds together are the sensations. For example: the first thing I felt was stickiness everywhere. A numbing, early summer moisture passed through my skin and my spirit as we walked out of the terminal after that awful first flight, while some lower-order function in my brain’s software guided my body while the real me was spinning in blackness like debris from a space explosion. It stayed with me for months, indoors and out, the warm moisture, oddly muffling the alarms blaring in my amygdala that all was not OK.
Because I really didn’t want to move to China. It’s hard to explain, given how much I now look back on the preceding years with such sobbing pity, but at the time: it didn’t matter that I was in the friend zone with every girl that knew my name, that my erstwhile best friend had never stuck up for me once. It didn’t matter that among my greatest personal points of pride was anticipatory, in having my name painted in gold on the walls of the cafeteria, with all the other graduates, of a school so literally holier-than-thou that it called this cafeteria a “refectory.”
What mattered was that at the time these things were incomprehensible treasures, compared to the dim, grueling procession that had been my school and peer life for most of what I could remember to that point. And that on the other side of a move to China lay an ocean of unreality. The total loss of familiarity and control, which I could only anticipate with total fear.
In the beginning and the end, the unreality of China was made real by sensations I could feel in my body, which taught me things about life I’ll never forget. After humidity, there were smells. There was a signature of urine in the aroma of the moisture that first night at the airport, and in China there were always odors. It would be trash overflowing from a receptacle, or steaming pork in white wrinkled dough, or gray eggs in grotesquely cracked shells, soaking insipidly in bubbling brown liquid by the cash register of every convenience store. Always a rank sweetness in the air which could be revolting or enticing or very bizarrely both.
Some of the most special memories are audiovisual scenes of people and buildings. I’d be standing on the terrace of a favorite Thai restaurant. Before me, glowing tables, then a line, across which was grass, and then trees, all dark but discernible. At the edges of my vision, rounded, twirling gray features of the old colonial building. Behind me, a high-ceilinged room with a square bar big enough to play pickup basketball in, serving brightly colored drinks that were cold to hold on a hot, moist night. All around, people’s laughter warming like fire, rising like smoke up above the treetops to the skyscrapers, a crop of four to six of them, modest by China standards, but downright gaudy for a Nashville or a Miami, the tops of a few bathed in light. Necessarily both wasteful and decorative.
Wasteful and decorative, rank or fragrant, were new sensations. In Washington, everything disruptive, good or bad, was managed, curated, looked after, handled. No sensations were permitted that could knock you over. Sometimes the curation is good, like regular trash pickup. Sometimes it’s disappointing, like never smelling new foods when you walk down a strange street. And sometimes it’s infuriating, like permitting leaf blowers to moo at the sky all afternoon, signaling that what’s important in life is something so clean and routine as green grass unblemished by material from any other plants, discounting all possibilities of beauty or disgust.
China was many things, and it was not this. The skyscrapers were orbs, beacons, signaling to me that life never needed to be dark or boring ever again. I had been chosen to play in a wider playground.
People ask me what it was like to move to China; these are just a few of the things.