It’s June 30th, 2017. This means I’ve lived in Philadelphia for nine months to the day. But I grew up in Florida, so today feels a lot more familiar than my new home: It’s in the middle 90s, Fahrenheit, and the streets are wrapped in fat, hazy air. Going outside is just about swimming.
But I don’t think it’s in the 90s: I think it’s over 30 Celsius. And I think in Celsius because my head isn’t in Philadelphia. My head’s half a globe away. It’s 9:30am here, which means it’s 9:30pm there. And it’s June 30th, so my mind isn’t on my anniversary in Philly. It’s on the anniversary of my last working day in Shanghai. It’s been exactly one year.
I swipe my phone open and scroll past Google apps and WhatsApp and Facebook and find the only social media portal I really needed – or could use – in China: WeChat. I remember trying to make friends back home download it. Mostly, they didn’t seem to believe me when I told them WhatsApp wouldn’t really work – and that was if I could get them to try WhatsApp. Mostly, I just stopped talking with most people.
But I still have the app myself, because I left one friend behind. Now it’s his last working day in Shanghai. And it’s evening there; he’ll be around, probably back at the housing compound packing up. I ask him if he hears the sweet sound of freedom. I set down the phone. It buzzes a minute later.
“I’m sorta freaking out,” says Trinidad Sour. “And I don’t know why.”
I know why. I remember.
He says, “I was having a panic attack biking back from tutoring. I kept thinking I was going to die. Legit die.”
(Here I have to smile, despite the dire message: there’s a phrasing here that’s particular to T.S.)
Another text: “I just want out.”
I know he does. I mostly didn’t think I was going to die, but I did spend a few months halfway assuming that I would be detained, or something – something vague, cloudy, and implacable was swallowing me whole, and I couldn’t outrun it. I know he wants out: when he says it, I can feel the menace again.
And I tell him that. I write: “Yeah, I remember feeling like the sky was falling for a week before I got out. And I remember not feeling safe until the van left. But I got out.”
We’re talking about a job for which we were reasonably compensated, located in a city that regularly ranks among the busiest and most cosmopolitan in the world, for people who care to rank those things. Food was cheap. Transportation was cheap. I had over a month of vacation. Now, I hurtle toward a financially unstable future in a dirty, half-forgotten American city; rooming with three other people and scraping together part-time work. And I couldn’t be happier that I’m here and not there. That I got out.
Nobody here expects that. When I tell them where I spent a year in China, faces brighten: “Wow! What was it like?” When I tell them I’m happy to be gone, they don’t understand. Some people fight me: they tell me I was supposed to have an experience I’m telling them I didn’t have; they argue like I’ve crossed their religion: I had an adventure! I was enlightened by my travels! I saw the world! How dare I say I didn’t?
“You just need to like experience the culture,” a friend told me, without waiting for me to articulate my experience of the culture. “I know I had to adjust when I lived in London.” (He does not add: “Where I was a fucking undergrad at an American-run school in the Western country that invented English.”)
“Maybe,” advised another softly, “It’s just because you were there recently, and you will think differently later.”
“Did you even make any Chinese friends?” scolded a roommate.
No one expects me to be happy I left.
And I didn’t expect that, either. When I made the move to China, I expected I would still be living there, possibly into the next decade. I expected to speak fluent Mandarin, and probably have a globe-trotting girlfriend. When I signed my contract and booked my flight, I celebrated with my friends. It was going to be the adventure of my life.
The thing is, it was: It was dark, lonely, boring, thrilling, boring again, genuine, plastic, bizarre, and regimented. It mostly wasn’t very fun, and it was both much safer and much more dangerous, in different ways, than I expected. Not all adventures are entertaining. Not all of them feel good, all of the time. But it really was an adventure.
Three days later, Trinidad Sour gets out. He had to pay half a month’s salary to board a near-empty flight after his original flight was cancelled – due to bad weather, they said, when the skies were calm. He’s furious, but I have to laugh: something bad was bound to happen. And I laugh harder when he says only a few white people made it on this particular flight – when he suggests that he was delayed as a kind of informal departure surcharge.
But he’s out. When we finally have a beer together after a year, we’ll laugh and shake our heads and ask each other the same question: What the hell even was that? What happened out there?
As near as I can remember, and as near as I can understand, I’ve tried to write it down. This what happened out there.