Thursday, August 16, 2007

Leaving China

This morning I was reading an English language daily newspaper before I started yet another round of hand laundry when I came across an article about an American businessman being awarded honorary Chinese citizenship. He is 46 years old, the head of China Corning. He was educated at Oxford, and has lived in China since 1996. He was instrumental in working to remove the institutionalized children of Shanghai into foster care, and it was for this work that he was being honored. They had a photo of him in the paper; he is still youthful looking, with the unlined skin of a lifetime spent indoors.

The hotel we are staying in is filled with people traveling on international business. There are Thais, Koreans, Indians, Americans and South Americans here. I am not in business; I have spent fewer than two years of my whole life working for private enterprise. Seeing these people, I wonder if I’m sorry I did not try harder to gain fluency in a second language as a young adult and break into working overseas.

Most of the business travelers I see in this hotel are men. I learned quickly as a Rotary Scholar back in the early nineties that success as a woman in the international business community would not come as easily as for a man. I spent four years as a greatly outnumbered female in Navy avionics in the middle eighties, it was enough.

This Christmas we stayed with my first cousin in London. He is a geophysicist, and he and his family have lived in Venezuela, Pakistan, Malaysia, Canada, and now London. They live the corporate expatriate life, their children attend first class international schools, they have built a life where they move every few years. My cousin tells me that a few of his peers are now women, and their husbands the trailing spouse. It is a sea change from twenty years ago.

I have a good friend who changed careers from journalism to Wall Street in her thirties. She spent about five years flying back and forth to Hong Kong from New York every month, which sounds exciting, but actually became a grind over time, and as a single parent, she loathed the extended time away from her child.

It is all but impossible to analyze the path not taken. We leave tomorrow to spend two days traveling to pick up the threads of the lives we left behind when we came to China. The things I will miss are intangibles. I have loved living in the same room with the kids, loved having them physically close to me so much. I will miss teaching, although I have a tendency to try too hard to put old heads on young shoulders. I will miss the novelty of living in a place so unlike my home in Tallahassee. I will miss China as it was in this moment, for it is changing so quickly that every visit will be different.

Before we left home I read a children’s book about a family that makes a medical mission to Nepal. The book said that there was a saying in Nepal that, “You will not change Nepal, Nepal will change you.” I don’t know that China has changed us, we certainly have not changed China. We perhaps have a little more perspective; I think that Sarah particularly has gotten something from this trip.
Originally I made arrangements for this journey so that James could have a period of language immersion to help his speak better Chinese. It turned out to be an experiment in teaching for me, an opportunity for growing independence for Sarah, and incidentally language immersion for James. It has been well worth the journey. Thank you for sharing it with us.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Absolutely LOVELY!!

Many thanks Lisa, for bringing us all along on this most excellent adventure across the globe!
Surely, this is as close to visiting China as I will ever have, and you narrated the trip in a way that made me experience some of the same feelings and sensations you had!

Heartfelt thanks for this shared journey.

Now, will there be a web page FULL of pictures? Please say yes!
Bob O'Lary

tedhsu said...

I second Bob's question

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