This is Jack, my Chinese teacher. Each day at lunchtime he determinedly teaches me Chinese and, in exchange, I teach him sardonic retorts.


Older women and a few men gather daily for some exercise. I don't know why they wear colorful, matching clothing, but it does make for a lovely sight. Live musicians stand aside and play the tunes to which they perform/exercise in synch. Something to still get excited over when I witness it.


Evidently Pepsi is in the business of covering up the naughty bits in China. I wonder if you buy them in aluminum or plastic.

Some of the girls after they embarrassed themselves singing a song about Beijing to teach me about their culture. A moving moment, for sure.


This is a proud papa of a Little Emperor. He and his family were just a few of the hundreds of people watching me and Daniel at the XingCheng train station as we tried to purchase train tickets and find a 25-yuan cab into Huludao. The entire train depot was watching us. Another time when you're not sure if you're an extra-terrestrial alien or a celebrity. After prolonged moments of this you start to feel like Sean Penn with paparazzi.

Little diddy about the girls

The Chinese are plagued with bad eyesight. So much so, in fact, that the government wants schools to implement daily eye exercises. Any teacher may estimate that half her or his students wear classes. (And many Westerners purchases glasses here because the frames and lenses are comparatively inexpensive.) The predominant need for eye glasses has caused them to be a favorite accoutrement. Not many boys male students do it but several females– despite their good vision– wear frames sans lenses. Then there lies a contradiction. It’s not clear whether they are too poor to procure them, too “busy” to procure them, or too reticent to admit the need for them, several students simply won’t change their prescriptions or even buy any glasses at all. It seems to make as much sense as going for a nude walk in the midst of a blizzard, yet it’s ubiquitously apparent.
“I can’t see it clearly,” several female students say about words they’re asked to pronounce from the board. Now, there are various angles from which to consider this act. You don’t ask why they don’t merely move to a spot from which they can see the board. You don’t ask why they sit in the very back of the class (the answer: they’re uncomfortable with the subject, their abilities or the teacher). You don’t ask anything. Instead, you wait. The class grows uncomfortable, shifting half-blind eyes from the teacher to the mute, defiant student. Quickly enough a nearby student prods her lazy counterpart with the answer, clandestinely slipping her dictionary or the answer on a torn piece of paper across the desk.
There are several similar tricks to try to force the teacher to proceed to the next student. Each time they’re used it begs the question: how dumb do they think we are?
“I didn’t bring my book,” is another common method of thwarting the teacher’s efforts. This is usually when a teacher will simply look at the student, laboring not to demonstrate how disgusted with boredom she is. “Then share with another,” is her response, loathe at the fact that these students wouldn’t have done this already after reading aloud for 25 minutes.
One personal favorite is the defense, “It’s too difficult”. Students frequently use this one when they can’t pronounce a word or don’t want to flex the grey matter between their skull bones. “Lots of things in life are though. But look at me, I’m still going.” It sounds like something your parents would have said when you’re learning to ride a bike or learn calculus. It’s not quite a “Go on, champ. You can do it!” It’s more like “The arrogance of youth is a privilege that you’ll eventually relinquish.”

Mental travels through a window

“A mental traveler hasn’t the need to eat or sleep... or entertain,” says Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. In more recent words, Frances Mayes wrote, “When we put ourselves down in a foreign place for a period of time, we begin to change, like it or not. We begin to see how the people who live there were shaped by the place, even as we feel ourselves being shaped.” Sometimes we do witness these changes in the process of being shaped by another one. Be it through a window, a camera lens, a pen, or an email we reflect on these changes and share them with the world.
I’m sitting in a college classroom, preparing to teach Chinese students about Earth Day, when I lose myself in the folds of a red flag fluttering in the spring wind. It’s one of those stolen, unstructured moments that transports you. It’s not one of daydreaming, per say. It’s one of mental travel.
I think back to the hours, the days, the weeks and months spent unemployed and alone in my Chicago apartment. In this state your mind has nothing but space and time to travel to places you wouldn’t likely visit in more lucrative conditions. Thanks to the nondimensional frontier of the Internet, a brief journey led to the rediscovery of a former flame. Suddenly I’m transported thousands of miles and 14 years into history. We are celebrating the fruits of our efforts on planning Earth Day 1995 at our university. Why was he so surprised when I called it quits? At that time in my life I guess I thought everyone knew what I thought by virtue of the fact that I thought it. (I’ve since learned that no, not everything I think or do is as common as I figured it to be. Neither is everything I feel obvious to everyone– or in many cases, to anyone. Verbal communication has since become my ally.) We grew apart when I began shaving again, using makeup, and wearing clothes less hippie, more young professional American girl. “He’s never going anywhere. I have big plans,” I thought to myself, already planning where I’d venture after college life. He left, going home first to New York, then out to California, and finally back to New York. There he practices massage therapy and related healing arts. The hippie side is still present, even if his long hair and dough boy physique aren’t. Here I’m teaching English. My hippie side is present, obviated by unshaven underarms and legs, though my 21-year-old physique isn’t.
Flying 30,000 miles high in the sky on a 26-hour flight between Chicago and Beijing, my thoughts sway from the new chapter of life awaiting me. The uninhabitable scenery below reveals nothing but small white mountains and icebergs upon icebergs. But like the red construction flags across from the university building, I don’t see it. I see myself on another international flight, this one to India from Miami. The 30,000-foot elevation offers views resplendent enough to bring tears to my eyes. Who knows where we were except to say the Middle East. Dirt roads wind around sandy mountains mentioned in the Bible and the Koran. I imagine horse-drawn carts carrying millet and various beans. Time seems to have stopped there and I get lost in it. A split second of sorrow flashes through me: everyone else on the flight is asleep and therefore missing this divine image. Time gets lost somewhere, and the next stop on the journey, a restroom or exercise break, shifts the scenery below to reveal water with heavenly brightness and clarity. This is the kind of beauty that inspires home-owners to laboriously beautify their multi-million-dollar houses in Florida, where I lived at the time and wrote about as a freelance journalist covering architecture and interior design. Little did I know when stealing these sublime sights of the beguiling sea that I would welcome a new kind of love, a love found only in the world’s spiritual center: India.
The university where I’m teaching is undergoing a facelift. Crews dressed like an army troop chip away the quarter-inch-thick brick tile facade off the administration buildings. A second group labors on the skeleton that will be the new gymnasium. Yet another group, dressed in what looks like more formal military gear, replaces the sand-eroded and wind-blown landscaping. Cranes rise on the neighboring, non-university property in a number seemingly large enough to be called a sedge. I cannot help but find myself a vantage point where I watch it, mentally traveling out of time and space. After who knows how long, something happens to jolt me from the bliss of watching development and change take place before my eyes and I’m turning, walking to catch the bus which will carry me to my temporary home– but not before I’m mentally journeying transported to another country and another time. For hours one day in India, watching the construction of another storey on the guest house where I’m staying, I become a self-imposed babysitter for a little girl and boy. They are evidently the children of the women who work with the precision of an automated assembly line on the construction site. How could anyone watch these women, sweating with the heat and humidity of a South Indian summer, with anything but awe and admiration? Fascinated with the precision at which they carry to each other plates of wet concrete on their heads, I begin to stealing the moment though my digital camera. These I show the children who in turn watch me with honestly sweet wonderment, a wonderment that grows when shown the photos I’m shooting. They begin monkeying around like the little ornery monkeys I’ve learned to steer clear of in this country. It’s a Virginia Woolfian circle of entertaining one another until the construction hours seem over and I relieve myself of my duties to check email.
I am in an Internet bar. Emails are flying in from all over America. Friends and coworkers are desperately concerned for my safety after they’d heard of the terrorist attacks in a train in Mumbai. Thinking that they haven’t bothered to check a map and see that where I am in Chennai is too far across the country to be shaken by a bomb, I chuckle. I cannot, however, claim to be coldly unaffected by their love and attention. The right thing to do is to send them some seconds-old shots of the children and the sari-adorned women. This is my way of answering their call. This is my way to tell them what I’ve learned: if I hadn’t made this journey halfway across the world alone, if I hadn’t been able to absolutely leave behind the career that had become my husband, I wouldn’t have been able to experience the love that palpably permeates India. I may never have found the love within myself to think emails like those of my friends were anything important at all. India marked the furthest I’d ever gotten away from my homeland. It also marked the closest I ever got to the home within myself.
On the sidewalks of many more countries I will travel, and through the windows of taxis and trains. Other buildings I will watch rise and fall. Other excursions into the past and future I will make on the Internet and books. More pictures will be taken, blog posts typed. Changes will come and I will get further from my American self as other places shape me. And forever will I be somewhere with a moment stolen to mentally travel somewhere else.