shamash says...

Expat Life: The Honeymoon Is Over

I expected my move to China to be an easy transition. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

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I have reinvented my life many times. Packed my belongings into cars and suitcases, locked my possessions in storage units, and taken off on yearlong road trips and planes bound for many foreign lands. I’ve lived as an expatriate for over 12 years on four different continents.  Because of this, I expected my move to China to be an easy transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Image: an art exhibition poster I found at the Hangzhou Academy of Art. I want to go, but first I need to find a translator.

China is not a place for a Westerner with a low tolerance for uncertainty. If you want to avoid ambiguity, it’s best to stay home. Hibernate. Find a cave and stay there. Believe me: it’s tempting. I’d probably stay home more than I do, but I avoid hanging out in my apartment with its mismatched furniture, florescent lights, and white, undecorated walls. I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the temperature of the water heater because the controls are written in Chinese. Most of the showers I take are cold.  My tiny kitchen is always hot and stuffy, so cooking is like taking a sauna. I eat out a lot.

I’ve moved halfway around the world to a country whose citizens speak a language I do not understand. I work at a new school at a job that is a brand new profession.  From my city apartment, I look out my living room window to a view of six high-rises that are over 40 stories high. I have traveled on a bullet train at 220 mph towards the most populated city in the world.

I’ve lost my frame of reference. Where’s my country, my house, my friends, my mountain, my language? I feel myself changing: shifting into an urban creature directed more by instinct than intellect. Minus language or cultural reference, I use my intuition to guide me. I am the city survivalist, trying not to crash her e-bike into the bus barreling around the corner. I communicate with non-verbal cues, expressions and gestures. I am the chimpanzee in an unmanaged zoo, trying to speak and write and talk. I’d rather be home in my forest, gently picking fleas off my cousins.

Someone once told me “We are the same people we were last year except for the books we have read, the films we have seen, the people we’ve met, and the places we’ve been.” I am not the same person I was two months ago. I am finding beauty in concrete and steel. I have learned to meditate while moving. Even though so much of New China is urban and contemporary, I am tapping into something ancient. I'm enamoured with traditional Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese massage, and the Way of Tea.

I think less about horoscopes and astrology and more about the design of buildings, the fabric of society, and how my choices and behavior affect the design of my own life.

Before living here, I swallowed the stereotypes about China hook, line, and sinker. I actually believed that everything made in China was inferior merchandise and that the Chinese were, in general, an unhappy people. Now I realize how the western media distorted my view, and how threatened the U.S. government is by the power of the Chinese economy.  The U.S. press reflects this fear. Living here has opened me up to a new way of seeing China and rest of the world.

Two months of living here, and I feel as if I have shifted on a cellular level. I’m more aware of mass consciousness. I light my nam champa incense with a slightly different prayer. The sacred tobacco seeds from women’s lodge still aren’t planted in the pots on my windowsill, but soon they will be. Only the moon makes me feel rooted – a strong and powerful connection to my former life and my community back home. I’m searching for something that’s just beyond my reach- the sound of a gong in the night air, an unexpected scent of jasmine, yellowed maps from the Old Silk Road.  I am still looking for a city tribe that understands soul matters: a group of poets, a community of artists. In my dreams, I go to the place of the mountains. I want to stay there.

I am torn between the old me and the new me, shadow boxing the questions and trying to accept the tears that come with confronting my own identity.  I am fragile. Vulnerable. They said this would happen, those experts in the psychology of expatriate living and culture shock. That the honeymoon high would wear off around the second or third month, and the oh-my-god-what-have-I-done phase would set in.

I’m at the oh-my-god-what-have-I-done phase, but I’m not quitting. I’m not running home. I’m staying, because the greatest growth is not an external process: it’s internal. The fortitude it takes to stay, when living here is so hard, has something to do with perseverance and a lot to do with hope. One day, I will call China home. I will have art on the walls, and warm lamps and showers, and a group of friends to invite home for dinner.

Until then: it isn’t easy, people.

Facebook doesn’t tell the whole story.

Ever.

The Way of Tea

"Water can quench your thirst and wine can drown your sorrows, but only tea can refresh your spirit."

- Lu Yu, Tang Dynasty, "The Classic of Tea", 760 CE - 780 CE

While contemporary cosmopolitan coffee shops are known for 24-hour wifi/caffeine and jolts of espresso for high-energy boosts for a better and faster life, tea houses celebrate the slowing down of things: a stepping away from sidewalk traffic into a ritual that honors that which is timeless.

 

Gov. Bill Richardson, New Mexico, and the 7th Hill of Rome

Dusk has fallen, and we’re at the foot of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill. MB, G., and I are freezing in the damp Roman air, so we button up our jackets and prepare to head off to the celebratory street dancing and music promised for the 150^th anniversary of the Unification of Italy.

Rome: Prosecco, Espresso, Caffe Greco

We are not Caesar, and we avoided the Forum, so I can say with confidence that The Ides of March was by far our best day in Rome. After days of clouds and rain, the sun and the moon both showed their faces. We couldn’t seem to tear ourselves away from the Piazza de España and by dusk, we were still there, drinking prosecco at a café under moon clouds.

“How do we rearrange our lives to live in this magnificent city?” we ask ourselves. There’s something about Rome at night, especially under a waxing moon, that causes me to think that reinventing my life and steering it against all the plans that drive me forward is the most natural thing in the world to do. Here, in this city of fallen empires and lovers on Vespas, going against the current of one’s well-planned life seems possible, even wise. The words of Keats, once an expatriate in Rome,

Steps of Broken Stones and Temples

Here in Rome, tsunamis and earthquakes seem as distant as the dated letters of the 18th century Grand  Tourists- the young British noblemen who came to Rome to study Italian art and to carry marble busts and statues back home to England. 

Here in Rome's historical district there are no skyscrapers, no billboards, and no high-speed expressways.  Instead, we walk over streets and sidewalks of cobblestone polished smooth by centuries of moving carriage wheels and the shuffle of pedestrians’ feet. One, red geranium peaks over a windowsill high above the street. There is more marble here than tarmac, and more cafes and patisseries than fast food. Our hotel has ornate, brass handrails and well-worn, marble steps leading all the way up to the 6th floor. In this neighborhood, there is no evidence, thank Artemis, of America: no McDonald's, no Starbucks, no strip malls, no Hummers. Instead: family-run ristourantes, cafes, small specialty shops, and Vespas.

As I walk on the very stones on which Julius Caesar walked on his way to the Forum, 

On Love of Great Journeys and Small Beauties

  You journey to foreign lands for the big things- stores of oil, piles of gold, barrels of spices, land for colonies, wars to win, people to conquer. Spaniards and Brits, Portuguese and Greeks, your history revolves on moving constellations and the spinning needles of compasses.

 

photo by shamash: Moyingyi Bird Park, B*urma (2008)

Oh, the ship charts drawn under a whirling sky; you are guided there through all your mistakes. So many night journeys, Odysseus, through sea storms. So many months without green food, so many miles of salt water, so many lives measured out in the movement of oars, the shifting of sails. It is the quest- the dream- that gets you there.

But once your feet touch ground, it is the tiny things that keep you. The small beauty of a brown-skinned wrist as it weighs the saffron, the lemon grass that grows tall along your fence, the call to prayer, the bittersweet scent of the market, the face of a woman at a window.

It’s your tired feet against the cool tiles of Morocco, the lapping waves, the waters of the Bosphorus against Istanbul on a new moon that reel you in. It’s the wafting scent of sandalwood, the way your knees kneel in those silent cathedrals so alive you can hear them breathe. It’s the cobblestone you trip over each morning on your way to the shipyard, and the broken finger from the door jam, and the way that finger always bothers you when it rains.

It’s the gecko that lives on the bedroom wall, the tarantula that dwells in the drain, that keeps you from buying that one-way ticket back to your homeland.

Of course you still sing the songs from the old country, the hymns from your childhood. But the exquisite words of a new tongue begin to form in your soul. You learn a new love language. You join the fraying fabric of your life with sacred offerings, tiny gestures, small sacrifices.

You become a whirling dervish.

You honor where you are.

With each footstep inland, with each heel dance, you stitch yourself to the land. You sew yourself onto the continent. In the same way your toes hug the earth, you surrender yourself to the weight of gravity. The tide doesn’t pull you out; the land pulls you in.

The quest brought you here.

The beauty keeps you.

Diving in Bali: Breathing with the Fishes

Three days of diving is not enough time to see it all: wreck diving above the submerged 350-foot long, WWII Liberty Ship, mermaiding your way along an immense drop-off reef on the other side, and establishing neutral buoyancy above the coral garden and dramatic sand slopes in between.

Tulamben Bay in Bali is worth a return trip.

Ubud: the Taos of Bali

  If I had to pick a favorite town in the world next to Taos, New Mexico, I’d have to go with Ubud, Bali, one of the foremost artist colonies of Indonesia. Full of art galleries, antique dealers, temples, coffee shops, bookshops, and stores selling religious and ceremonial stone statues, the town is buzzing with a delightful mix of foreign expats, European tourists, and local Balinese nationals still adhering to local customs.

Alam Sari Keliki Hotel: The Ultimate Balinese Get-Away

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What do you get when you combine mountainous terrain, views of rice fields, palm trees, great service, and a clear pool for dipping? Alam Sari Keliki Hotel, the boutique, eco-hotel in the hills in Keliki, north of Ubud, Bali.

-massage room at Spa Alam Sari.

(photos by shamash)

All Things Green and Beautiful

You might think this is a Windows Desktop, but you would be mistaken. It's a pic I took of a rice paddy not far from the city where I live. I've been out and about, visiting villages on the weekends. What you see here is a photo journal of the past three weeks: my tribute to this country's people and the beauty of this land.