Three weeks to Beijing! We're hired -- contracts signed --tickets booked today!
Part of leaving is remembering to do what we haven't done in ages, before we can't do them -- Food came to mind. Our favorite Oaxacan and Salvy restuarants, lunch on the patio, the dock of the bay, with families, music, beer and freshly prepared fish with meat on the bones...Would we find the caramel filled churros again?
We've become isolated - separated by the distances of megapolis living and meager time on weekends, almost a hassle to rest and get together with friends. This will change when we reach our destination, only about 2 million people. In the meantime, we have goodbye invitations from the people that we'll miss... another week has come and gone and neither one of us brought up telling the folks... we're not too keen on either set lately.
I anticipate frantic preparations and little sleep, with relief and excitement arriving once we get on the usually tedious long overseas flight.
The Director of the company wrote to welcome my potential contributions to the staff, an arsenal of critical pedagogy and constructivist practice in the form of progressive materials I've collected from teaching, researching and training adults. Being wanted for one's knowledge is a fine thing. Does he realize what he's getting himself into? At least my accomplice and I can't argue about Mao and the Cultural Revolution when the apartment could be tapped. I'm thrilled.
Elena, always slightly ahead of me,much admired, was not one to miss a heartbeat, "Cool, you're going to China! You might want to go find some radical ESL sites, teach "How to speak to a cop," or "What not to say to the INS."
We browsed the travel section of our local megabookstore. I showed my accomplice that the U.S. was, indeed, one of "The Most Dangerous Places In the World" - a book bears a similar name. That author included a long erudite quote by H.L. Mencken about the "State of Siege" and anguish. (He speculated that most American publications would never carry such honest and polysyllabic descriptions.)
An affirmation of American culture's unending inventiveness in the areas of interpersonal madness and depravity. Not bad timing in recalling reasons to get out of an unhealthy universe of the psyche - although modern times do not lend themselves to alternatives.
China, with it's extraordinary historical particularities - undergoing economic and industrial development unprecedented in human history.
Quickly, from the imagination this young endeavor, barely a month old, seems a little strange, possibly uncomfortable and potentially fascinating, dare I say enjoyable?
For the reality, stay tuned and your Gal in the Middle Kingdom.
