The End

[Picture 1: 4th graders Lilly, Abby, and Alice.  Picture 2: my hero Greg and his wife Amy Cole]

I am back.  Back to the land of houses and cheese.  The land of english, church shopping, individualism, ordered roadways, family, friends, med-school, Lake Michigan, sandwiches, and ultimate frisbee.  I know America is not perfect -- but it is home.  For those of you who prayed for and supported me, thanks.  And I commend anyone who read this whole blog. It got sporadic at times… this last post for instance.  Now that I'm around, I hope to share stories and pictures in person -- that is, if you're not trotting the globe yourself.  In the mean time, I'll be making new stories.

More Than Fine

[Picture 1: Stan, Candy. Picture 2: Edward]

 

Hi Everyone! For the past two months, my life in China has been a whirlwind. And as far as whirlwinds go, it's been pretty good. Better than good -- it's been amazing! Sure, there have been a few bumps now and then. Like when I broke my arm while mountain-biking (it is healed already). Or when my city was at the epicenter of a small 4.7 earthquake (no one was hurt). And there's the stress of trying to beat med school deadlines with limited internet access. Overall, though, things are great. The bumps have been overshadowed by heaps of new friends and memories. Since I last wrote (a long long time ago, in a country far far away) I've traveled in Southern China, ran a week long English camp (by far the highlight of my time here), started teaching summer classes, and done a million other things. Don't worry, it is well documented. I can't wait to share pictures and video clips with everyone when I get back -- in 2 weeks! What!

 

Double time

[Picture 1: Stan, Alysia, Chinese friend who's house I stayed at.  Picture 2: Stan, Hanna]

 

I haven't posted in a while, I know.  The internet was down, then travel, then things got busy.  But I'm back :)  Things have picked up.  I'm teaching some more English classes, doing three times as much orphanage work, going to the clinic more, and I've added a couple guitar students.  This just means less time for studying Mandarin.  Last week was good.  I went to Yu Ci (a city about 1 hour south of Yangqu and 10 times its size).  It mostly consisted of shadowing doctors and sitting in on public health lectures given by Evergreen.  I stayed with a Chinese family the whole time, which forced me to use my shaky Mandarin.  They had three turtles, a bird (who woke up early) and a garden right outside their apartment.  They were poor and extremely generous.  Very faithful Christians.  I liked riding my bike alone late at night -- it was a neat city to explore.

 

I have some new friends, Alysia and Hanna.  They'll be with Evergreen for six weeks.  Both are from Canada, but their families are originally from China and Hong Kong.  Since we're doing a lot of the same stuff, we see each other a lot and they've been fun to get to know.

 

And back again

 

Noises began to merge and shrink.  I was sinking into a muffled underwater world where sounds melt into vague blobs.  You could hardly distinguish the sudden cry of a cell phone from the din of Mandarin and the crinkle of stubborn newspaper pages refusing to turn.  An epic decrescendo engulfed me.  At the same time, my ears began aching.  First it was faint, then violent.  How could I end this madness?  Swallow.  Equalize.  At once, hazy hearing became crisp and my world realigned.  I was traveling through the longest tunnel in China (23 km) on a high-speed train coming back from Beijing.  We were nearing the tunnel's end, thus the changing pressure.

 

I looked at the window.  The window looked at me, wearing a 4 day beard on a 23-year-old face.  This reflection was abruptly erased by a thick rush of light.  We had exited, and were now hurrying past mountains tinged amber in the sunset.  The falling shadows cast each fold, each turn of terrain into running gradients that collided now and then, forming sharp contrasts. Every shade of green played upon the hills.  There were deep gorges where the ground sunk unexpectedly, making rows of earth stretch like giants' fingers from the heights.  And all around, the land was dug into terraces, planted with trees and garnished with an odd hut or two.  What a breathtaking finale to my travels in Beijing.

 

Then we ducked into another tunnel, and the face reappeared.  Reflections make lonely companions.  A familiar pang of homesickness punched me in the stomach and I had the distinct feeling of riding a tandem bike alone.  This train was taking me where I lived, but not home.

 

Our train made the station.  The city was so... small!  Honey, I shrunk Taiyuan.  And had they coated it in a fresh layer of dust since I left?  After my trips to Hong Kong and Beijing, the difference was jarring.  This was not cosmopolitan or modern, it seemed backward.  Yet I loved it.  I knew it better somehow.  You really gain perspective after getting away for a while, and sometimes you have to shed something for it to grow on you.  Sometimes distance brings people closer.  Sometimes leaving home helps you find it.

 

Palaces and parks

 

A few decades ago Beijing was rather flat. Two-storied buildings crowded an urban ocean that touched the horizons. It was a two-ply city. Then it modernized. They launched skyscrapers, spread out highways and built McDonalds. The Great Mall supplanted the Great Wall. But, not wanting historical landmarks to become history (or go unexploited), they preserved the old sites. And so I visited some yesterday: the Forbidden City and The Summer Palace. The Forbidden City was aptly named -- I forbid anyone to waste money on it. I think it's like the Mystery Spot. You only go to say that you've gone. So unless you're a history buff, you'll enjoy the exterior as much as the interior. Do see the Summer Palace.

 

There are parks too, like the one beside my hotel. A large sign welcomes visitors with a complete list of 20 banned activities. Keep this up, and they'll soon be prohibiting prohibitions! They would have done better to list what you CAN do in the park. Once inside, though, it is green, breezy and calm. The wind sets the weeping willows swinging and blows waves through the hairs of grass. It sails over the pond, causing it to bob. This is ideal for writing, so I am. At least I was. Now I am done.

 

To Hong Kong... O visas...

Any trip starts at the beginning, and my beginning was Evergreen's office in Taiyuan.  I flagged a cabby and got a fair fare to the airport (These days I'm harder to dupe).  Not far out we pasted a construction site -- a sure sign I was still in China -- and I was rereminded that this country is development crazy.  I mean it, they're really going to town.  Before me were 7 skyscrapers emerging from the earth.  These bones of  an embryonic city were swaddled in green tarps encrusted with mud, suggestive of a kudzu infested wood.  There were cranes bending over their work, too.  They formed inverted Ls on the horizon.  Then it was gone, and I was at the airport.

 

Plane travel is plane travel.

 

2000 miles (and 100 pages of Mark Twain) later, we landed in Guangzhou.  None of the signs were in English.  Wait, not true, one was.  The sign that said STAN, that was in English.  Mia held it.  She is a Chinese girl studying for her masters in interpreting and was a friend of a friend.  Now she is a friend.  If I had a sweetest-girls-I've-ever-met list, Mia would be near the top.  So gentle, so generous.  She acted as guide while we bus-hopped across town to her university.  We had dinner together, then for a haircut (you're welcome Mom), then into a Christian bookstore, then to the hotel where Mia had booked me a room.  The next morning we bus-hopped again.

 

These busses are something else.  I feel like I'm back in middle-school and getting stuffed into a locker... with 50 other people.  Or imagine a moshpit, but with 80-year-old ladies.  Funny story: I was slouching on the bus when this woman with the face of a happy raisin says "Stand up straight!  The best doctor is yourself.  I'm 80 years old.  When my mother was pregnant with me, she was sick.  That's why I have this black spot on my neck."  I got this secondhand via Mia, my personal translator.  My posture has improved dramatically since then.

 

Next up I took a subway to the train station.  Then a speed train from Guangzhou into Hong Kong.  There must have been 20 countries represented in our car.  My favorite was this cute little Arabic-babbling girl, maybe 6 years old.  For two straight hours she laughed and danced up and down the aisle.  I didn't laugh and dance up and down the aisle.  No, boring me, I just read another 100 pages of Mark Twain.

 

Then the end.  We were there.

Door to door health salesman

Hop on a bike, and five minutes of downhill coasting brings you out of Yangqu and into Shanxi countryside. Everything is dry, yet somehow they coax crops from this chalky soil. It is also hilly, so the fields inhabit quaint terraces rising like amphitheaters above the road. I feel like I'm riding through a topographical map.

 

Last week I went on a house call with Dr. Kurt Elliot past the farms and up into the mountains. Kurt is about my Dad's age and looks identical to John Piper. We met downtown, and after stowing some medical supplies in a black and turquoise fanny-pack that a middle-schooler wouldn't be caught dead in, we set off. Did I mention we were biking up a mountain? Soon Kurt was out of sight. Luckily for me we planned to rendezvous at a Catholic church near the top, a big one. You couldn't miss it. So I pedaled on, glad for the stiff wind blowing in the right direction. Gusts would lift dust into eerie curtains and let them play in the air before dashing them to the ground. The snow (yes, it is still below freezing... I don't want to talk about it) glided silently by. Eventually I arrived. Be still my beating heart.

 

Kurt let me peek into the church, then we rode to visit his patient. He lived in a traditional Chinese home -- courtyard with raised garden, pig pit and outhouse next to a modest brick structure with cement flooring. There were three rooms arranged like a row of jumbo-sized mailboxes. Inside, a TV squawked in the corner. Above this hung two pictures, one of Jesus and one of Mary. There was a naked light bulb strung from the ceiling.

 

Kurt broke out his stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff -- merely a routine checkup. Things looked good. The patient laughed and talked nonstop, not hiding his sole upper tooth. Every smile swallowed his face in wrinkles and exposed a youth at odds with his real age. Only his shuffled step revealed the truth (or maybe it simply reflected the slow pace of life). But he was not afraid to die. "When God says it's time, it's time." We finished the house-call with a prayer. Then it was back down the mountain. Going downhill is glorious. I highly recommend it.