Fine! Nyah! :P One more for the road...

At the trumpeting of my legions of obedient pawns, I shall grace thee once more with my manifestation before I embark upon my much-heralded return to the fabled land of my genesis.

These final tidings come to you at a time of great tribulation for me. I have been beset on many sides by all manner of tests and projects. Though I have already vanquished a great deal of them, yet a few more would seek to destroy me, choosing to disregard my inevitable triumph. I have no fear of them and will sweep them aside with a terrible joy.

I think it is appropriate to describe the various ways that I feel I have succeeded and failed in study abroad. Actually in terms of failures, from my perspective I don't think I can technically say I have failed my own expectations, because when I came here I had no expectations except that my previous life - the life at Northwestern - was going to become inaccessible, and so it was with a kind of grim resignedness that I both got onto the plane to Nanjing and got off of it. For quite some time after arriving, I think more than a month, I was extremely frustrated with myself, because I did not have good reasons for coming to China. I came to China because I had heard that study abroad is a good experience, and I mentally included myself among those brave types who claim to enjoy traveling. Well, traveling is one thing, and living in another country for a prolonged period of time very far from the people you care about it entirely another.

Of course, I can't say that I came to specifically China because I heard that study abroad is a good experience. To get at the root of it, I had decided to study Chinese for fun when I entered Northwestern - I was not in the College of Arts and Sciences when I entered (I was an engineer), so language was not a requirement for me. I picked Chinese because I knew I enjoyed learning languages, I didn't want to study another romance language (had already studied French), and Chinese was about as different as I could think of, and useful to boot, since China's development was pretty well known then - it was only two years ago, after all. Afterwards, I joined MultiEthnic InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (MEIV), and as any MEIV'er knows, half of my friends from thence onwards were Chinese. Between that and my language studies, China became an obvious choice for study abroad. And as for study abroad itself, I always knew I wanted to do it because of my family's experience in Kazakhstan (which I won't go into now). I wanted to live in another country again and I knew it would be good overall for me.

Flash forward again to this August. When I got off the plane, I was still thinking, "This could be fun," and I managed to hang onto that for a few days as I went through the adjustment process. But it really wasn't very long before the truth started to set in - I had come to China without doing much research on the country or even the city I was staying in, and I had just chosen to study abroad because "studying abroad is a good experience"! I had excelled in Chinese classes for two years but had never made much effort to actually learn to speak the language with people, and for the longest time the idea of people only using Chinese to communicate seemed simply ridiculous to me. Even a lot of my Chinese friends back home speak Chinglish to their parents. Yes, you know who you are.

I will illustrate my feelings on coming here by quoting a bit from my journal on my 10th day here, minus "spice" here and there that helped me express my frustration:
"Four months minus one day. Actually, in 3.5 months I will be back in Chicago. Today is my 10th day in China."
...
"Honestly, now that I'm here, I'm not that interested in learning Chinese. When am I ever going to really need this?"
...
"Maybe I should try a drinking game."
[several pages of frustration]
"At some other time there existed a Tom who wanted to do this. This Tom had not settled in anywhere, had not committed himself to anyone or anything, was free to travel and explore anywhere.
This is not me.
China is a prison for my soul."
So I'm a little melodramatic in my journal.

In the end, I somehow finished that journal entry on a positive note. And every time that I felt in despair about the pointlessness of my coming to China, I ended up coming back to a bit of hope: I could learn something from being here - and eventually, somehow, China would be good for me.

And here in the last week, I feel that China has been very good for me. My point, I suppose, if I am to stay at least vaguely on topic with my original intent when I set out to write this, is that I feel that I got a great deal more than I imagined I would from coming here. I will provide a few examples, though I won't explain my understanding of how I got from point A to point B because this blog is already too long: I feel that overall, my outlook on my existence is much more hopeful than it was this past summer (and for much of the past year), I feel that I have a deeper understanding of my (our?) identity as a community (perhaps because I left my community behind), and I feel that I recognize the importance of events and things in a broader way - perhaps because I am seeing the effects of leaving things behind and recognizing that I'm going to leave everything behind again! And also, I think that having your passport stolen in a foreign country will either make you very cross or build a bit of character - both, really.

But! besides those things, I think I will leave this blog entry open-ended, so that I may return and discover how I am different in America now compared to before I left. Having looked at life from the other side of the world for the past 4-ish months, I think my perspective on many things has changed.

I am sad to be leaving China, and I am glad to be returning to you all.

See you soon...