turtling away

Last week I got two small, baby turtles from a street vendor. Their names have alternated from “Emeril and Dolce” to “Elmo and Remington” to “Bebop and Rocksteady” (follow the link if you are not of my generation/are Chinese) and are currently “red turtle” and “green turtle.” They are sleepy things, usually sitting in their box with their eyes shut and snoozing. Or maybe I am killing them already.

Anyway, I brought them up because not only are they cute new roommates, but I can crassly use ‘em as a metaphor here. Like, “Andrew has not posted for such a long time – perhaps he has withdrawn into his hermit shell again.” I had previously been averaging a good rate of posting 5 days out of the week, and this is the first time I haven’t for an entire week – I did better when I wasn’t even here.

The reason for this is that I’ve finally settled into a good solid routine aimed at achieving all those goals and enjoying all those hobbies that I wanted to try for here. During the school days when I’m not teaching, I sit in the English Department office and study Chinese and write my book. After class I go for a run on the school track and to the gym a few blocks north to lift weights, and next week I’ll probably start going to that hip hop dance class that they offer just to see what it’s like. I’m also practicing erhu and guitar, and when I can manage to get into the music room, piano too.

I think I’m doing all these things to forestall a future midlife crisis (hello, hip hop dance) and also to fully enjoy all these hobbies that I wanted to explore and appreciate before I shelve them for medical school next year. I also want it to be time well-spent in a useful way, with hopefully a finished book, good health, better Chinese and better musical skill being tangible results of the year (of course I am also hoping for an elusive answer to questions like “why am I here” and “who am I,” but those are slightly less tangible, especially when I am unsure how to phrase those questions anyway). After all, even though this is a “year off,” it’s still real time spent and a real year of my life.

But these self-improvement and self-fulfillment activities do take up a lot of time, which is why I’ve posted less frequently here. More worrying, though, is that they’ve also been distracting me from being here in China. Other Chinese teachers who I had earlier met on promising terms have recently been saying “Oh, where have you been? We haven’t seen you for some time, you must be very busy.” I should probably work harder to integrate myself with the school teachers more, and that means among other things playing basketball with them after class (even though I hate basketball because I suck at it, plus the childhood fear of jammed fingers – try playing the piano sometime with jammed fingers). So far I’ve had a good cover; many of the teachers here are too busy preparing for a rigorous professional test that, if they pass, would bump them up on the income bracket with better pay, better benefits and something like tenure, I think (it seems like the graduates of certain universities get this automatically, but others have to work for it). That test is tomorrow (加油!) so I better get back into the social groove quickly. Maybe I’ll make some cookies for people with my toaster oven…at a pokey rate of six cookies a batch….

Talking to the teachers here and opening up to them more would take some additional effort on top of the nice schedule I’ve lined up for myself, but it would be worth it for the Mandarin practice and the sense of inclusion into the community here. But no matter how integrated I become here, I am starting to realize that my little life here in the Shekou neighborhood of Nanshan District in Shenzhen – read, the most westernized neighborhood of a particularly new and affluent district in a special city experiment with capitalism – is probably not going to give me a good answer for the question “what is China like,” although of course there is no discounting that Shenzhen’s situation is to be uniquely appreciated as part of that answer. Even harder to grasp is a general answer to the question “what is my place here in China, and who am I when I am here and who am I when I am not” – because so far it seems like there isn’t too much of a difference, and not to the credit of whatever erudition of self I might have. My parents are coming to visit in two weeks, and I can just imagine the look on my dad’s face when he gets here: looking quizzically around for signs of the poignantly complicated China he remembers leaving, for the smell of nightsoil and the yells of roadside cart vendors, and warily thinking of all the things that a father knows and would rather his son not. He will look around at the Nanshan suburbia with some puzzlement and then might laugh: “Well Andrew, it seems China came to you instead.”