The Last Few Dips of the Roller Coaster

We're starting to wrap up our last few weeks as Peace Corps volunteers. We're quite excited to return home; looking forward to family, camping trips, fresh air and getting on with our lives. At the same time, there's a pang of sadness when my students look at me with that brutally vulnerable look and ask "You're leaving? When are you coming back?" Some of them tell us not to go. Some of them want to visit us someday - a prospect that makes me cringe, thinking about the last three Chinese friends who have tried for US travel visas (at great expense) and have been denied. Some of them just want my email address (and qq number - ha!) so we can stay in touch. It's hard leaving them. My students are really what has made my time here worthwhile. It's hard to imagine a future where all these ordinary cultural tidbits I share with my students everyday will not only be worthless to the people around me, but practically invisible. And, let's be honest, no one in America cares about China to the extent that I am going to want to talk about it.

There are side effects to having such an intense cultural immersion experience. For one, my spoken English has suffered. Really, it has. Not in that I have been speaking Chinese so much that I've forgotten how to speak my native tongue. [For the record: my Chinese has also suffered this term. No tutor, no time, no motivation. Sigh. My final LPI score in April was Intermediate - Mid, the same that I ended PST with. Double sigh. There was no test of my hanzi reading though, so I can leave feeling secure in knowing I can read Chinese as well as any small Chinese child.] The problem is that I have become accustomed to speaking with non-native speakers, who require that I slow down my pace and limit my vocabulary to words I know they have studied. Also, I pick up language cues from my students unintentionally. I start to forget to use my plurals, and Chinglish starts to sound normal to me. "Wow, that's so fashion!" I hear myself say, and try to add the ironic look to my face after the fact to hide my embarrassment. Another side affect is table manners. Yesterday, I caught myself about to spit a bone fragment from a piece of chicken I was eating ONTO THE FLOOR OF MY OWN KITCHEN. Chopsticks are not even a question. It doesn't feel normal to me to eat any kind of dish involving long noodles, diced vegetables, tofu or sliced meat with a fork. When I watch American TV shows, a feeling of horror wells up inside me when I see people with their shoes on in the house or, for chrissakes, ON THE FURNITURE! Do they not realize those are the same shoes that have been wandering the streets filled with human feces, expectoration, toxic dust, and pollution?

I am sure there are many more ways I have adapted to China, that I won't realize until I touch down back home. It's kind of like taking off some tinted glasses you've been wearing for two years. Everything, even the most familiar, mundane elements of life are going to look and feel different than they ever did before. And those are just the things that haven't changed drastically in the two years we've been gone. Richy has been reading Bill Bryson's, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, which he can't stop chuckling at, no doubt because it's full of all the peculiarities of American culture that we've forgotten while we were away.

We have been blessed with an unusually mild spring, temperature-wise. This time last year it was already in the 90's (F), while the past few weeks have only been in the 70's. The downside has been the torrential rain. The hillsides along our commute to work have started to show some long brown strips where there was once lush vegetation. The brick sidewalks are starting to sag into muddy sinkholes. There is a lot of worry about landslides in the countryside.  In the meantime I don my new red rain boots I scored from a friend liquidating her belongings for travel and look forward to ten months of much lighter and colder rain next year in the PNW.

Now, I'm off to spend some time seeing people and doing things that I may never see or do again. See you in July, America!

~ Katie

PS. We will officially transition from PCVs to RPCVs (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) on June 18th. On June 19th, we fly to Kashgar, Xinjiang Province and spend a few days there before we head to Urumqi for a few days, then back to Chongqing on June 30th, to make final preparations for our departure to the US on July 4th! I imagine I will post another blog about the Xinjiang adventure before heading home, provided I have time and internet access.