One of my favorite aspects of my life:
It happens in two ways.
1. You come across something, anything, while riding the bus or turning a corner or taking a different aisle through the supermarket. Sometimes it's a store that you've passed a dozen times that suddenly catches your eye and comes into focus. Sometimes it's when you are looking for an item and find something else instead. Sometimes you just get a feeling that you should keep wandering down that street...just a little bit further...and see what's there... And boom!, it happens.
2. You put something together--in the 2+2=everything kind of way. Meanings lodge themselves into the foreground of your thought that you can't quite shake until you realize that they explain so much, all at once, a new color or shade of comprehension of all of China becomes yours.
It's exulting and triumphant when it happens. We have so few victories of understanding as foreigners in a complex and constantly changing land, we are always so constantly behind the curve, so dependent on our gracious Chinese hosts for their acquiescence to our bumbling attempts at assimilation. So whether it's by luck or by Grace or by the sheer tenacious flexing of our own brain muscles, it all adds up to moments of discovery that we experience here, day by day, over and over again.
We're like children learning to walk, or add, or read, or drive an automatic all at the same time. We figure out the basic bus routes and the skeletal layout of our sprawling city, we memorize the fundamental Mandarin phrases necessary for survival, we learn where to buy Coke, vegetables, condiments, soap, wine, chocolate and junk food...and at first, we just get around. At first, it's all we can do to make it to a friends house and back without 5 cell conversations reconfirming the directions. At first, it is a victory just to choose bus over taxi. But then, the pioneering joy of foreign living begins.
Last year, I found a store that sells jelly beans and gummy bears. I found which supermarket and which aisle to go to for liquid drain cleaner. There is a store along my bus route that has really great camping and outdoor gear. I discovered how to tell sugar packaging from salt packaging if you can't see inside the bag.
Within months or weeks of moving here last year, I knew that dadao must mean 'highway' or 'street' or 'avenue,' because on street signs it was one of the common words. So...sure, I learned that. Separately, I learned to order my cokes "da da," or "big big" from McDonald's or KFC or describe things as "tai da da" or "too big." And also separately, I learned that Taoism is known as Daoism in China, with the Dao being "the way." It was only last week, 1.25 years into living in China, that I figured out that dadao means "big way." It makes complete sense--and putting it together, with my own brain doing the work, the figuring, the discovery, made me really excited and really proud and really in love with life.
In a another scenario, I began the process of shopping for a couch last week. I'm not looking for anything fancy or special, just a two-seater that is more comfortable than the shellacked wooden chairs that currently occupy the living room. I began the search in the area of town called Furniture City--complete with all sorts of housewares stores. When I realized that all of the stores nearby were out of my price range, I walked towards a bus stop. From a distance, I noticed that a side street had smaller shops with lamps and vases--so I turned down the alley.
Wandering a little farther, on the right there was a nearly deserted alley lined with art studios and antique shops. Ancient looking Chinese wood carvings and ornate decorative wood planks filled shop after shop, covered in dust and unaffordable but fabulous. The street was as silent as China gets, until out of the back of one stall, the achy mellow strains of an accordion filled the air. Like the antique wooden panels and dusty books and rusted, brassy coins filling the shops, everything felt incredibly abandoned in this tiny pocket of Wuhan. Wrinkled old men with fingers stained black looked up from 7 ft yellow scrolls that they were filling with oversized calligraphy characters as I walked by. Bored looking men in their dingy undershirts and striped pants sat around a mahjong table in one corner. Decayed and tattered red lanterns hung askew from awnings. It smelled like ink and turpentine and mold.
And here I was. China. A tiny corner street that I happened upon by chance--there sat the antique district of Wuhan. It was so unforeseen and beautiful and completely Chinese that I had to stop and stand still there on the street--inviting even more curiosity and attention than I already had--but I had to stop there, because this was a moment. I had found something new and this was a moment in my life that very few people will ever understand. It was a discovery.
I write this post longer than it should be, because I fear that there is absolutely no way to really describe the little, minute, incredible acts of discovery that brighten our days here. If I were in the US reading this, I would probably think, "So what? It's liquid drain cleaner, of course it's at the supermarket. Big Way? Duh. It's a highway--of course the word would mean that."
But what so many don't understand is that it's not like I can read the items that are at the supermarket. It's all a bunch of bottles with Chinese characters--and the idea of using chemicals to clear a clogged drain still doesn't occur to alot of people here. When my drain clogged last year, I called 5 different people to ask if they could help me find a bottle. Every single one of them said I would just have to call a worker to come and repair my sink. It took a search to come across a bottle with a picture of a clogged pipe and a muscular arm punching through the clog on it. Even then, when I showed the bottle to my school liaison, who was waiting to call the 'plumber,' she said she had never seen it before. Unclogging a sink became a quest!
There are some things that we learn because others teach us, either our Chinese friends or those who were here before. They tell us where we can find most things, and what certain phrases mean, and they teach us so much. But another whole element of life here must be discovered in order to exist for us. Last year, liquid plumber did not exist for me, until it did. Gummy bears were not in my world, until they were. The word dadao had no significance, until it did. And there were no side alleys filled with fascinating antiques and calligraphy shops perfumed with ink and turpentine, until there were.
These things appear into our lives, and the moment that we discover them...well, it's just a rush, a joy and an experience that I can't imagine living without.
