I'm at this crossroads again where I have to decide on something. I said I was going back to California, but the moment I said it out loud I started thinking "Really? Am I done here?" I feel like I haven't been as happy this year, but next year could be different if I stay again. I don't seem to be burning strongly to go either way, and both have their problems. Perhaps it's no mistake then, that this image I first saw on JList's facebook page a while back has been circulating through my mind:

I like this picture a lot. It's very accessible and thought provoking to see the simple things that overlap and come together to create "ikigai", or life purpose. It makes the whole thing seem less new age-y than what I seem to hear about fate, destiny, and purpose when I talk about jobs with other people. There's something very sensible to remembering that while you need a job and a way to live in the world, there is a space too for what you are good at and what you love. I've had a hard time with red threads and true life's calling and the words everything happens for a reason for the past few years. Sometimes, I get up and see nothing at all. Or I get up and see chaos. Or I get up feeling that I've looked away from the road and found myself in open fields, it's liberating but comes with no ready path. Or maybe it's a forest since I can't seem to see the end of it, but that's to assume I move towards an end. But with this, it gives me some way to think about work in relation to the wider world while giving myself a fairer assessment. In my time here, I've learned that one of my strengths is accessibility and breaking things down so that everyone can understand. It's a great skill for a teacher. It's a great skill for a writer. It's not something I ever considered nor really considered to be a strength of mine until the final semester of college and my time here in China. Sometimes I wish someone along the way had told me that was a real skill that people valued much sooner, but I got the message eventually so maybe it doesn't matter. But I think knowing this now, it should be taken into consideration as I try to figure out where my needs can meet the world's needs. I remember too at the end of college that as I asked for resume help I was told repeatedly that what I needed to remember was that I was a good person too, I just tended to forget sometimes. And I needed to learn to give myself more credit. I guess it still holds true.

Other words have been haunting me too. When I was 15, I attended my first writers conference outside of the Jack London writers camp for kids that I went to a few times. It's an intimidating thing to be 15 at a community college writers conference. One of my first sessions was with a man who talked about how creative writing out of all the arts is one that can never have child prodigies (which was such a relief after being surrounded by 12 year olds who wrote rather mature short stories that had been published already and often made me feel I actually didn't have it in me to write after all). I remember him saying "You need experience to be a writer. You need to know what it's like when someone dies, to spend time saying to yourself 'If only I'd spoken to them, if only I'd made love to them, if only I'd done things differently'". Being young myself, I laughed because some of it seemed absurd. "Ah, see. You don't believe me. That's the point." The writers conference is gone, that man passed away a few years ago, and now I do know about the crazy things you will think after someone dies and all the things that you could have done differently and the multiple universes you tell yourself about where it doesn't happen that way. I have not been the active writer I should be, I ask myself if I still wish to write, what for, and how. I find myself asking questions about experience, about the weird moment I live in where teaching English isn't only a job but a valued enough skill for people to sign up as volunteers to teach overseas. What will they say of this in the future, will they write about the time when lots of young people went abroad to teach and include some quote in a textbook? One of the weirdest things I ever read about travel writing was to stay away from the cliche of teaching in China for a year unless you had something new to bring to the table. I had to wonder when exactly it became a cliche, what drew so many to teaching in China for a year, and what could be made of that trend. The social scientist in me never really dies I guess.

Is China part of my personal ikigai? I don't know, I was certainly drawn to it because there was much that was ideal about coming here and exercising the skills I learned. I would read about it off and on in what seemed to be a side hobby for someone largely familiar with Western classics and romance languages but I wasn't sure I'd ever go as something other than a tourist. I think I should leave because it sounds like the responsible thing to do, but then I can't articulate what I'd do if I did. Perhaps it's because I'm in this place right now too that I can't help noticing how many books about China have been written by young adults. Peter Hessler was 27 when he went to work in Sichuan with the Peace Corps. Jen Lin-Liu had just been married and was trying to figure out what the future held when she planned her trip to look into the history of noodles. Michael Meyer not only used Manchuria to think about changes in China, he was thinking about his own state of limbo with family and career while he spent time in the Northeast. I know better than to romanticize or make too much of China in transition attracting young people who are themselves in transition, but I have no doubt someone could make a paper out of China memoirs related to that pattern. It is a good place for me I guess, because having spent so much time in school being on the other side of the classroom is a new experience but not so new that I feel completely out of my depth. I just fear that I'll find I've become a teacher less from thoughtful and engaged process and more out of complacency. I get enough free time to just chill out with my Crunchyroll account catching up on anime on a lot of days instead of looking at other work or grad schools like I probably should. There's a part of me that says this is a job and if I'm not unhappy, I should just keep going. And there's another part of me that says it really isn't a job and I can't fool myself about financial independence on 3000RMB/500 USD a month (though I never spend all my month's earnings anyway since I'm not a big shopper, food and travel tends to take it).

When I think about how I feel at this moment, I can't help thinking of Hunan's own writer, Shen Congwen during a particular passage of "Border Town" when he writes, "He may never come back or he may come back tomorrow!" I'm sure he knew his fair share of change, but it is a little scary how such a simple sentence could apply to me so well right now.

Hello from the new laptop! My school gave me 1000RMB to put towards a new computer so I decided to just go for it and get a small one for 3500RMB. Somehow, I'd always assumed that "Computer City"  as it's called in Chinese would be far away but I've walked past it before on a long day when I just wandered through the city. For as much as I've growled and let things get to me that I shouldn't have, getting a birthday party invite out of the blue from the kind computer staff (who can't have been much older than me, or younger) reminded me of some of the wonderful things that come your way as a foreigner in Zhuzhou.

I've basically given away my weekends. I do an extra bit of teaching on Saturday mornings in exchange for lunch and cooking lessons here and there and on Saturday afternoon I also do an English Corner with primary schoolers. On Sundays, my one consolation is that I'm not teaching tai chi. I just get to be the student as shifu walks me through each step and teaches me a new warm up with each class. Then it's back to the work week. I love getting the last minute news that I have a day off on Monday or Friday. A day to sleep in and be tied to no one. Getting involved in something through clubs or volunteering is one way I try to work with my reclusive and introverted tendencies, but I still value a day of nothing at all. Maybe 4 years of living in a country where everything is closed on Sunday has influenced me too. I still find a small voice in my head that tells me that I have to get everything done on Saturdays despite being in China. It's funny to think of the things that stay with you when you've lived in another country for a while.

I've been stuck. In a lot of ways, I feel like I've lost sight of things and forgot how important it is to just focus on what's in your hands when things become less than ideal. A part of me knows it's a natural part of living in another country over time and that watching the novelty and the honeymoon period of adjustment fade is both frustrating and an opportunity to put things in perspective. Some might say the frustrations are just part of developing a more realistic/fuller understanding of the place I live in right now. I find myself getting a little vicious at times about things that are so small. Like when I go shopping for electronics and people try to find me something "more fashionable" or tell me I actually want this in red, not black, because I'm a young girl (but I'm a young girl almost always in dark jeans and something black). Or tired of last minute changes (though it's mostly OK, if I go to school and my class is cleaning, I had nothing else planned anyway so I may as well relax). I feel like I've never quite hit the high and fulfilling feeling that pushed me along last year, not to the same level or with the same frequency. On the other hand, Zhuzhou is constantly changing and I find new friends and people who fill my life and expand my understanding of life in China. There's P, the Uyghur man I wrote about last time who sells nan (at times, still looking for something romantic while I'm not sure). There's my neighbor who used to live in Dubai for work and now makes dumplings while creating spaces for people to practice speaking English. There's the Hui family from Lanzhou who greet me from their pulled noodle shop every time I pass. My "mom" and "dad" who run the tea shop where I get my caffeine fix and a lot of practice in speaking Chinese. Actually, I'm sure everyone on my street says hi to me now since I frequent their shops. It's kind of on purpose. One of my most rewarding travel experiences while I was in college was the summer I did an internship in Dublin, Ireland but found myself pulled into the songwriters and poetry community after joining a writers group. Since then, I've made an effort to frequent a place and be known or join something while I'm abroad.

It feels like there are things opening up to me only now, though I wonder if I should continue given all the swings and cycles I went through this time. A part of me says if I leave and try something else and find I want to be here teaching after all, then it's better to come back with purpose having other experiences with me. A part of me wonders about my chances of coming back if I leave. At times, I love this city and its surprises. At times, I'm anxious because I haven't been in the US for more than 3 months at a time for the past 6 years and there are times when I feel like an anthropologist rather than a local (to be fair, I think back on everything I learned about intercultural communications when I'm here in China too: high context vs low context culture, long term vs short term, Edward T. Hall's Silent Languages...). I also know how much I still haven't seen and keep finding. I feel like I've accomplished a lot of what I had in mind when I first signed up. I tried teaching, I grew in public speaking, I exercised a lot of what I learned about myself and intellectually while here, I've been finding my way in the Chinese language, I've made friends, and I've looked at one of my biggest anxieties (that I really was so sorely out of touch and spent so much time with books in some ivory tower that I had no real skills to offer to anyone anywhere) and seen it was nothing. I saw Xi'An and the terra cotta warriors, I fulfilled someone's prophecy that I would climb the Great Wall, I saw Guangzhou and Zhongshan, I started taijiquan, and after 4 years in Switzerland thinking hard about where I come from and where I've been, I found my way to a position where my own interests and education fit neatly with someone else's questions. I still have a ways to grow, but I've found confidence in my time here as I learned to trust myself and value things about myself I never considered to be real skills or talents. I know one of the most difficult things in going back to America when I was in college was coming back with the person I found while away, and occasionally feeling that with everyone's expectations from the past I couldn't always find room for that person. But that's also a comfort. To know that whichever direction I take from here on out, I take that person I found with me and all she's capable of. For all of its frustrations, I'll always be grateful to China for helping me find that person.