One year ago I rushed around uplugging appliances and zipping suitcases, making sure everything was ready for our vacation. We bundled up in down coats against the frigid January morning. I took one last look around, and we left our apartment. We left Yinchuan. We left China. And it was no big deal.
Never in a million years would we have imagined that a year later we would still not be back, we might never be back. We kept thinking we could return later in February, in March, in April, later in the spring, at the end of summer, the beginning of 2021, maybe briefly next summer...never.
I miss so many things about China.
We had such a close community, a small group of friends we saw multiple times a week for shared meals, play-dates, meetings, walks, and home school co-op. We had the kind of friends that shared their left-overs and library cards and watched your kids at the last minute.
We had a sweet ayi (house helper/babysitter) who had been with us since Adalyn was a baby. She was used to our weird foreign ways: our kids who wouldn’t wear socks on cold tile floors and the amount of peanut butter we consumed. She knew far too much about us and loved us anyway.
I miss bumping down the road in our san lun che, bundled against the cold (in a mask, because we were doing that long before the virus). I miss driving past the steaming baozi (breaded dumplings), old women dancing in the park, and the local mosque. I miss driving the “wrong way” down the bike lane, because is there really a wrong way? (No.)
Obviously I’m not fully accustomed to living in a detached house, because I still hear phantom chopping noises. In a Chinese apartment, it seems you hear someone whacking away with a cleaver at any given time of day. I imagine the scratch of straw brooms on pavement, the calls of students walking by outside our window, and the loudspeakers at the fruit stalls croaking out, “San jin shi kuai! San jin shi kuai! (3lb for $1.50). My past self would find it strange, but I actually miss knowing there are people all around.
I miss the feeling of safety. I could walk down a dark street at night, take the bus across the city, or leave my kids in an open vehicle on the side of the road while I ran into a store. I have to continually remind myself I’m not allowed to do that here. Schools had earthquake drills, yes, but never ever mass shooter drills.
I could send my kids down to the nearby shop to pick up some vinegar. It was on our campus, only about 3 minutes away, but I literally sent an 8, 5, and 3 year old off to run an errand alone. And that was fine. Everyone around knew who they were, and anyone around would help them if they needed it.
I miss Chinese food. The hand-pulled Hui noodles, preferably eaten at a rickety metal table in a crowded restaurant. Our ayi’s jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) which everyone agreed were the best ever. Anything our ayi cooked. Our favorite restaurants, like the one by the mosque with the good eggplant, the one with the excellent tofu that we’ve gone to for 6 years, and the one with my favorite onion dish that is truly 90% cooked onion. Oh, and north-eastern food! And Xingjiang food! So many good things you just can’t find here.
Every time I go shopping, I think wistfully of China prices. Vegetables were the least expensive food you could buy – 30c/lb, maybe 70c/lb for the pricier things. Apples, oranges, and seasonal fruits were traditionally 3lbs for $1.50. I miss Taobao, a sort of Chinese Amazon that has everything, including $15 winter coats, $6 knock-off Lego sets, and the weirdest things you’ve ever seen.
I mostly avoided the supermarkets, but I still miss the vats of oil and giant bags of rice and the whole aisle of instant noodles. A walk through the market would show half a dozen types of tofu, slabs of hanging meat, buckets of live fish, and beautiful assortments of vegetables.
I miss the seasons in China – the flowering trees of spring, the giant trucks full of watermelon in summer, the baked sweet potato sellers on the side of the road in fall, the frozen lake in winter.
I miss students and friends coming to our house, bringing giant bags of fruit as gifts. We would talk or play games and the girls would go crazy. The students took lots of pictures with the girls, admired all their toys, and inevitably got roped into a game of hide-and-seek. You had to make sure every single part of the house was clean before someone came over!
One of my friends used to come to my office hours, then to my book club. She was my Chinese tutor for a while. Last year we started going on walk around campus once a week, arm in arm. She was smart and deep and we had many good talks.
I can picture every room in our apartment: my faded IKEA chair on the laundry porch, where I would sit under wet laundry catching the sun; the living room rug and bedspread and kitchen curtains I carefully picked out; the view from the large kitchen window where each morning I craned my neck to get a glimpse of the mountains. I know how the light fell at different times of the day. I rarely turned on overhead lights, as our 5th floor apartment was bright enough without them.
Some things were so familiar – carried through half a dozen moves or passed on from other foreigners who had moved on. Others were new – the curtains we gave Adalyn for when we moved her into the office, still folded and waiting; the electric train set Nadia got for her birthday two days before we left.
It hurts to think about all the things we will never see and hear and taste again. It also stings a little to realize how hard it would be to go back to that, after settling here.
I enjoy pulling into the garage (in my enclosed, temperature controlled van) instead of carting loads of groceries up all those stairs. It would be hard to go back to Saturday morning Skype calls with my family in place of in-person visits. I love sitting on my quiet porch in the summer and by the cozy fire in the winter. We have adjusted to living in a house twice the size of our apartment – with two bathrooms – and closets – and a dishwasher.
There are so many things I miss about our lives in China, but I know it was far from rosy. It was a much harder place to live. Harder practically - making every meal from scratch, enduring the many smoggy days, and oh my word, the medical stress!
Harder culturally - all the attention we drew, all the interactions we decoded, all the language we learned and forgot, all of the tiny things that wore you out even after 15 years.
Harder in more nebulous ways - the unseen weightiness, the self-expectations, feeling so visible yet so unseen, a constant feeling of instability. Really we could have seen this coming. Not a pandemic, of course, but something that unexpectedly ripped us away.
I had considered what were the most important things I would pack if we had to leave suddenly. I had a three day plan and a few hour plan (as did most of the foreign families). I just didn’t have a plan for unknowingly leaving everything behind forever without a chance to look back.
I have no resolution or closure for this post, just like there was none for our leaving. I have just been thinking, especially today, about all the things I miss.
One year ago we left that whole life behind. Just. Like. That.
