Patience and Gratitude

I’ve managed to let myself get really far behind on my blog. 20 days isn’t an incredibly long time, but when you’re in a foreign country, there are so many things happening every day that you could be talking about.

So rather than spend this time trying to write about all of the events that have happened between my last post and now, I want to talk about what’s been on my mind lately. Every day, China teaches me that life doesn’t need to go as fast as I’ve gotten used to in the States. Things don’t need to work perfectly all the time; the world doesn’t owe me flawless conveniences. In fact, it doesn’t really owe me anything. Every bit of technology we have is a blessing, not something we’re just inherently entitled to.

-The wifi in my apartment constantly disconnects. It makes trying to have an online conversation with anyone very mafan, very inconvenient/troublesome. On top of this, we have “The Great Firewall of China”, the block on pretty much all of the sites I like to use on a daily basis. The first VPN we all discovered and used was Hotspot Shield, but in the past month it started having a lot of problems connecting, and then in the last week it just stopped connecting at all. So my friend told me about the VPN she uses called proXPN, so I was the first in the BYUI group to switch to that one. But you gotta pay it forward. So I told Josh and Abby about it, and helped Ben get set up with it. And now they’re telling everyone and it’s spreading around the group. We help each other stay on top of the firewall. I used to get incredibly frustrated whenever the internet would disconnect. But I’ve learned to just wait it out, because it always comes back on either within a few seconds or within 10 to 20 minutes. Rather than a misfortune when it does go out, it’s more of a treat when it decides to work.
-My room key stops working a lot, too. So does Abby’s. It wasn’t like that at first, but now it stops working several times a week and we have to go get a fuwuyuan, a worker, to come reset our keys and let us into the room. It was one of the biggest mafans in our daily lives. But like all of these other inconveniences have turned out to be, rather than feel like the world is being unfair to me every time it breaks, I sigh a breath of relief and gratitude every time my key does let me into my room.

-I don’t have a cell phone, and I’ve made a few good

friends here who it would be nice to be in contact with. Our class usually goes out to dinner on Fridays, and Rungui always has to call my room phone in order to tell me the time and details. He often complains about how I need to get a cell phone because I have to be in my room in order for him to contact me, and sometimes I miss it. But at least I have a room phone, which is a lot better than nothing.

-It’s getting really cold here, and our heaters don’t get turned on until January, when we’ll be gone anyway. Also, our beds only come with a single comforter (no sheet). Our window isn’t sealed properly, so even when it’s closed, the frigid air still leaks in. In other words, it’s cold. All the time. It’s just a good excuse to go buy a new coat though, or find a cute new blanket.

-Our beds are hard as rock. Or wood, I guess. They may look comfortable, but don’t fall onto it with all your weight or you might bruise something. The first few nights were pretty difficult, after growing up on soft, cushiony, form to your body American beds. But now I sleep so well, and nothing is more welcoming than being able to crawl into my hard Chinese bed after dealing with a day of inconveniences. 

-The air is so polluted. Looking out our windo

w, you can barely see the tall buildings that are just outside of our campus. The water is so polluted, we can’t drink our tap water. We’ve been warned several times to not drink from our sinks. Everyone has to buy bottled water or boil their water before they can drink it. When we brush our teeth at night, we have to have a water bottle close by. You will never walk down a street without hearing and/or seeing a Chinese person hack a loogie and spit it onto the street or sidewalk. And after being here so long, you begin to understand why. The pollution gets in you. You know you’ve been inside too long if you can blow your nose and have it be clear and not brown or black. Speaking of loogies, the streets are utterly disgusting. I only wear the shoes I like indoors. I don’t dare step outside in my favorite boots or anything new. The sidewalks are covered in dirt, trash, barf, spit, food, pretty much anything you can think of. It’s impossible to keep shoes clean. And every now and then you’ll be walking down the street and you’ll get a big whiff of rancid, rotting something. Never sure what exactly it is. Just a mixture of trash and rotting food and sewage all sent on a mission to attack your nostrils.

You have to hold your breath because otherwise you might lose your lunch and add even more to the smell. But I’ve come to recognize it as the smell of Beijing. Who knows, I may even miss it when I leave. Maybe I’ll go back to America and complain about how clean the air is and how well I can breathe, and how I can actually see the sky. Who wants that??

-There’s a very big, very noticeable language barrier. Of course, how couldn’t there be? We’re American English speakers in the capitol of China. Street vendors yell out advertisements at us in Chinese, and at first I couldn’t help but think they were yelling some profanity or something at us. But you get used to all the yelling. Everyone here just speaks several decibels higher than they do in America. With so many people around, you have to find a way to be heard somehow. Our first experience trying to buy groceries at Wumei, our local grocery store, was terrifying for me. I put my food on the checkout stand, and the cashier asked me “ni yao bu yao daizi?” I completely panicked, like I had just showed up to a test in my underwear and was being asked incredibly difficult questions to which I hadn’t the slightest idea how to answer. But in reality, all she asked was “do you need a bag?” I have since learned the survival Chinese to get me through a checkout stand, or restaurant, or market. Sometimes the best way to teach someone to swim is to throw them into the water and let them flounder around until they figure it out on their own.

-Our neighbors smoke like chimneys. All of them. We’re surrounded on all sides by Koreans who smoke like the world is ending tomorrow and they have to get through as many packs as they can before it’s taken away from them forever. The smell seeps into our room through our bathroom and through our windows. Recently, Abby taped up our vent and a few cracks in our bathroom ceiling. It helped a little. But then we discovered that the only way to keep the smoke out would be to tape up basically the entire ceiling, because nothing here is really sealed properly. I’m not too bothered by it, but it really grates on Abby. She’s gone over to their apartment several times to ask them to stop smoking in their room, but to no avail. Some things you just have to live with, I guess.

-Have issues with personal space? Not anymore you don’t. Don’t like being touched? Now you don’t mind. China cares more about being efficient than it does being comfortable. People are packed onto public transportation like a pack of sardines. During busy hours, you have to push your way through a river of people in order to shang, board, or xia, get off a ditie or gongongqiche, subway or bus. You soon learn to stop being uncomfortable with being smooshed right up flat against a number of complete strangers.

-I’m in the first relationship of my life. I finally found someone I can truly be myself around, and who likes me for who I am. I’ve never felt so strongly about someone before. But he’s in America, and so I have to settle for msn conversations and the occasional Skype chat. More than anything, I’d like to talk to him in person, to be with my best friend. This trumps all other Chinese inconveniences, and has taught me so much more about patience than all of the others combined.

But I’m in China. How many people get an opportunity like this? Not only was this trip incredibly cheap compared to other study abroad programs, but it worked out so perfectly. We’re able to attend this amazing school full of liuxuesheng, travel abroad students, from all over the world. My three best friends here are Korean, English and Portuguese. And there are so many Italians. Even in America, the melting pot of the world, you don’t get this much exposure to pure culture from all around the globe. I feel so unbelievably lucky to be here, interacting with these people, with this culture. It’s like a different world completely, and I wonder how we can go our entire lives living in one country, never experiencing what lies beyond its borders. We like to judge everything based on what we know. And if what we know is limited to one small area of the world, we judge everything so critically, and so unfairly. It’s time to stop judging and start simply living. Be grateful for the opportunities that present themselves every day. When something doesn’t work, that’s normal. When it does work, it’s a blessing to be thankful for.