At first I was planning on writing this in Chinese. I think about the things I could tell you—about the weird sort of nostalgia I get walking past street vendors selling ripe honey-peaches and the mom-and-pop baozi shops with their steaming baskets of meat buns and brown sugar mantou, worn tin pots bobbing with tea eggs. About night markets I think I may known from a hazy childhood summer, filled with lights and red meats and smoke from men gathered together to have skewered lamb and beer. I try to ward against this sort of romanticism, because the thing about this particular nostalgia is it is not really mine. I do not miss it, nor do I yearn for it—simply these images are in front of me in Jishou, and I simply walk past them on the street.
This summer has been different and is different, expectedly so. I’m sorry I have not been very good with replying to you two. Sometimes I do not know what to say, and part of me is still insecure that you will ask why I chose to come to a random part of China to teach English when I live in New York City, home to a dozen publishing companies and a world I know. Because I do not know. I have never been a teacher, nor have I thought of being one since first grade when I discovered liking to write on the chalkboard. New places and circumstances are interesting in that I have many faults: I cry easily; I complain too much; I am most often too concerned with control and control and control, something nobody can afford to always have.
Yet despite all this, I’m here and I’m almost surprised at how okay I’ve been. I am not in Jishou as a writer, nor as a daughter wanting to leave home, not even as the foreign language teacher I am supposed to be. At the end of the day, I put on jasmine scented bug spray and all I feel is just me—an “I.” Like simultaneously with identity and without, a ubiquitous “I” that is common in perspective, just like how you are an “I,” how the 13 year-old daughter of the stationery shop lady is an “I,” how some old toothless man I have unknowingly passed in the supermarket is an “I.” Yet it’s so lonely in its particularities. I wake up and go to sleep as Joy, wake up and go to sleep as Joy, as Joy in Jishou, as a name and something I struggle to figure out.
A disclaimer. This is not a letter about identity. At least I do not think it is.
That is as broad and as narrow as I can get. Each passing day comes with its small distinctions—lotus for dinner instead of Chinese spinach, going to the gym or not going to gym, feeling guilty or feeling okay about it. Sometimes I eat too much sugar and get angry. Pointless things that seem to form the threads of a new narrative I do not yet know. I am not saying that this narrative will be amazing or terrible or life-changing, or if so, to what extent, but—
When I run at the gym the open windows look across into apartment buildings with gridded windows, clothes hung up to dry. Spices float up from the street below and make me sneeze. Whose clothes are they? Who is cooking what and for whom? Realistically, these things do not matter to me, or to the family to which the clothes belong or dinner is being cooked for.
Yet despite how much these details do not matter, I am still looking out the window and wondering.
