Category Archives: China and Chinese

Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas (and Cedar City)

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JQLV2019Last week, I went to a conference in a small city best reached by an international flight to Las Vegas. It wasn’t a big conference, wasn’t particularly relevant to my current research, and in the end, I made my presentation to six other people, mostly conference organizers attending out of the kindness of their hearts. But that’s what conferences are really about anyway, right—the friends we make along the way?  An important point of the trip was its function as a test-flight for my upcoming big conference trip across the Atlantic, to London. Air travel with a chronic illness—can I do it?

The test-flight was a quick one, booked on ultra discount airline Swoop. What’s it like to fly Swoop from anywhere to Las Vegas at the beginning of the May long weekend? Remember that 1990s dance song “The Venga Bus,” the one about the “inter-city disco”? Disappointed there isn’t more beer spilled on your flight? Fly Swoop.

It was my first time in Las Vegas but it had a familiar energy. Strangely, unexpectedly, it felt a bit like China—fat, English China, where what made me stand out in a crowd was nothing but the fact that I was there, in Vegas, alone.

In the dark, I drove north, into mountains which probably have a name, up to Cedar City. In a dormitory with no China-energy at all—mattress on the bed, potable water–I went to bed exhausted and keenly aware of something I hadn’t thought about for at least two weeks: the illness deep in my guts. It was there when I woke up, mounting through the day. Ignorable enough to leave me a clear head for making a comment on the presentation of the one woman who spoke during the morning. In the afternoon, I accidentally went to a talk on water management in Utah but got through it, even the question and answer section where someone asked what changed between the state’s early communal religious settler days when it was a model of responsible water use to now when it’s a complete mess. I did not jump up to yell, “Capitalism! Are you kidding me? It’s capitalism!”

Dinner was fabulous. USA, USA. The keynote address began at a little after six, in a room decorated like Hogwart’s dining hall. By 7:55, the Q&A was still in full swing. I had good will for the man speaking but realized I would be walking out at 8pm whether he was finished or not. And anyways, like most of the speakers I’d heard that day, it was more twentieth century Western theory for 2019 global issues and it was wearing away at me. The trip, the T.S. Eliot quotes, the May weather that would have been bad even in Canada—it was over for me, the conference’s queen of chronic malaise.

I needed drugs and a bathtub. Back at the dorm, damp and freezing, I looked at the raised lip of the shower stall and didn’t wonder for very long about whether I could stop up its drain and rig a tub out of it. No, drugs alone would have to do. And they did. In my own homage to the twentieth century, I laid in bed watching clips of Wayne’s World, lingering on the parts where white people speak Chinese. That’s the joke. That’s the whole joke.

In the morning, the symptoms that had me fantasizing about getting back to Canada and going straight to the emergency room had vanished. I went to just one more talk before rolling out. The conference had been fruitful. I met smart and good people, two of whom invited me to submit the paper I presented to their publications. I left right before another all-girl panel like mine began. Before heading down the mountain, I went up, to the tip top where my church has built a temple. It was a beauty, new but built after the style of the nineteenth century. The parking lot was full, the front plaza lined with people in Sunday clothes—wedding guests. Congratulations, y’all. Share your water now.

Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Vegas on a Saturday afternoon. My big backpack and the sweater I put on in Cedar City were making me look like a lone gunman, parking her rental car one block north of Mandalay Bay. Not the look I wanted, so I went into Ross Dress for Less and bought a summer dress—a red one with an elastic neckline. I wore it over my jeans.

Down at the Bellagio fountain, music came up with the water—bongos and an acoustic bass. How had I not known the soundtrack was “Viva Las Vegas”, the Elvis Presley version, the voice of the ghost of this city, heard half hourly, turning day into nighttime, turning night into daytime?

It was almost time to report back to Venga Airways. I needed to sit and gather strength somewhere out of the sun. I sat down in front of a slot machine, fed it a dollar bill, and pulled the lever, the rent for the seat. When I told a colleague of mine about it, back home, he was shocked. “Capitalism got our star student!” I heard his voice in my head as I read the text, his Shanghaiese accent.

Travel is part of this long, difficult, costly education of mine. That is actually what conferences are all about. The friends are nice but the learning also comes in being alone, unprepared, surprised, suffering a little as we take the schemes we dream up in our offices out into the world, into other people’s worlds, to see if there’s any truth to them. In Vegas and Cedar City, the work I’d done on an obscure problem of East-West ontological and epistemological theory hit the road and found some traction.

Still, when I go to London, it will be as we.

Writing in and about Edmonton: Capital City Press Book Festival with Edmonton Public Library

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This weekend the whole fam will be participating in our city’s annual food drive.

Next weekend I’ll be at two separate, very different writing events.

The first is an event at the University of Alberta where I’ll be sharing some translation I’ve done of Lu Xun’s early modern Chinese writing. Yeah, it’s not everyone’s idea of a fun Friday night.

However, the second event of the weekend is a panel at the Capital City Press Book Festival with the Edmonton Public Library. The library’s downtown branch plays a part in the story and the sense of my latest novel so I’m very excited to be working with them in real life. Always wanted to write something set in an unusual city? Come let a panel of authors, including me, talk you into it.

Details here

No PhDread Today

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notebook2018I am not going to post a photo of someone else’s writing today.

This will be the first non-Sunday in about three weeks that no pictures of big, difficult texts written by the historians, philosophers, and theorists who founded the fields I study will appear on my Instagram and Facebook feeds. I was inspired to begin posting daily titles from my PhD comprehensive exam reading list thanks in part to the encouragement of a friend and colleague, and also by seeing my athlete sisters using social networks to stay involved and accountable for their own crazy goals as long-distance runners. I am not burnt out, and tomorrow, I’ll be posting my PhD reading titles again.

But for today, here is a picture of my writing—notes I began keeping over the Bering Strait on my way back from China last year summer. I turned to them again, late last night. This notebook may never amount to anything publishable, but I see now–weeks into the list of 61 texts I will be examined on this November to prove to the university that I ought to be allowed to continue in my doctoral studies, now that only-book-lovers-will-understand Tumblr memes have me growling “So you think reading is for fun, do you? DO YOU?”–that I need to send something out of my mind and into the universe before the universe can send anything more into my mind through the stack of books in my office. All of this expansion must be answered with a contraction.

Maybe that’s just my Classical Chinese philosophy readings talking. It’s getting harder to tell—and that’s why I suspect this impossible process might be working.

The Playlists of “Morgan Turner”

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WithoutcallingcreditsMaybe you don’t feel like reading a book right now. I understand completely. Fortunately, reading isn’t the only way to experience a story, especially if it’s full of music and pictures. And so we bring you a bit of a playlist from my newly released novel, The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner.

(Real-life friends and family: keep reading if you want to be able to talk to me like you’ve read my new novel, even if you haven’t got to it yet. Ha!)

The book’s protagonist is looking for meaning, and art is one of the places she looks first. Not at all an elite high-culture consumer, art for Morgan Turner is the movies, TV, music other people have cued up, and books from the stacks at the public library.  Much of it, she doesn’t even like (and, though it doesn’t matter, I don’t like all of it either). But here is a little of what she is watching and hearing.

Movies

In trying to understand evil, Morgan watches scary movies–typical canonical horror like Psycho and The Exorcist and, a little farther afield, Nosferatu. The most important movie in the book, however, is one hardly anyone has seen. It’s a movie about home fire prevention produced for Canada’s National Film Board by the Alberta Native Communications Society for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (as it was called in 1975 when the film was made). Its title is He Comes Without Calling. Don’t Google it. Trust me. But please enjoy a few clips of it, including the mesmerizing opening snow-plough scene, right here:

 

Morgan also watches The Seventh Seal/ Det sjunde inseglet. The first scene, where the Crusader knight returning to Europe plays chess with Death on a rocky beach, is probably what this film is best known for, but don’t miss the final chess scene, in the forest.

 

Television

The television Morgan ends up watching is much brighter than the films she sees. You’re welcome. It’s Morgan’s coworkers who introduce her to South Korean romantic comedies. Here is one she loves: Secret Garden, where risqué action like this is a big deal.

 

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And here is a show she wants to love but can’t because the heroine falls in love with the wrong boy-band member in the end, stupid You’re Beautiful…

 

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Music

The music in Morgan’s orbit is also out of her control. Sometimes it’s her brother’s electro-goth spooky Skinny Puppy. Sometimes it’s the bittersweet Psychedelic Furs someone is singing along to in her car, and sometimes it’s 我的快乐就是想你 by 陈雅森 。

 

 

Many thanks to the cab driver in northern China who had this song playing on repeat one sweltering Saturday morning.

Books

This book has books in it, from the Criminal Code of Canada to the Bible to The Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook itself. The book that figures most prominently is probably a graphic novel version of Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy/Divina Commedia. I didn’t have any particular version in mind but I did imagine it illustrated with Gustave Doré’s definitive wood cuttings. Here is one of my favourite pieces from the Paradise book of  the Divine Comedy, the Celestial Rose.

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I think it’s probably Morgan Turner’s favourite too.

 

 

 

Raising the Dead: Finally Fixing My French

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digAs a tiny girl still not able to read much in my native English, I was taught a little French by the short films pasted into the Canadian version of the Sesame Street program my mother dialed us into to give herself an hour of time for something other than childcare every day. This French was mostly just counting to twelve and “Mon ami, mon ami, mon ami pour la vie…”, but it was not nothing.

When I learned to read English, it became clear that half of the words on the sides of the salad dressing bottles and milk cartons on our dinner table were not English. “Agitez bien”, “Sans arômes artificiels.” My oldest son, who worked as grocery stocker, calls this Cereal Box French and every life-long Canadian knows it.

On the east coast of Canada, French was a mandatory part of the school curriculum, taught in elementary schools with wacky rhymes about lonely old men who dress up brooms as women and with games ending in the taunting victory song “Eh, eh, eh, nous avons gagnéeeeeee…”  My teachers were natural Francophones—Acadians who pronounced “oui” more like “weh”, like I still do when I’m in a French situation and I finally start to relax.

My bff was half Acadian herself, with a Francophone dad who raised her almost completely in English. Still, we’d often speak to each other in a Frankenstein-ian abomination of French and English, ingraining mistakes and bad habits. But Nova Scotia Public School Patois was good for when we were babysitting and wanted to tell each other things without the preschool kids understanding. “You’re talkin’ silly,” one of them told us. How right she was.

I didn’t finish high school in Nova Scotia but in western Canada, in a small town where the oral French exam was simply reading a list of words aloud. This was the fizzling end of my formal French education. But at the restaurant where I worked was a boy my age newly emigrated from France. We spent our shifts speaking mostly in French until my new bff—who had a huge crush on French boy—rightly pointed out how rude this was to the rest of the staff. “And what does ‘salut’ mean, anyway? Why does he always say it to you?”

In university, I wanted new things, foreign things, and left French for German, which I studied long enough to know its grammar was not to be taken lightly, and not to be taken any further by me.

My history with French is one of forcing it and faking it. Now, I’ve come to the end of the line of that approach. I’m working on a graduate degree that requires me to read academic texts in at least two languages other than English. I’ve satisfied the requirement for Chinese (on paper, anyways) and the quickest route to a third language is back in time, back to French. In a Canadian modern languages department, it is often very generously assumed that I must have decent French. When I met my thesis supervisor for the first time, she began our conversation in French. I understood, but answered in English. Not good enough, Wannabe-Doctor-Q.

I’ve said elsewhere that relearning French—a language I have never really studied but learned by lazy childish osmosis before setting it aside for decades–has been like trying to summon the dead. It’s an archaeological dig after the bones of something that is still with me but buried in time, disuse, and in a little German and a lot of Chinese. I unearth things, hold them up to the light, and test them out to see if they still work. The results are mixed.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a compartment in my brain for every language I’m using. All I have is an English compartment and a non-English compartment. I go to the non-English area looking for des mots français and come away with a handful of  汉语. It’s my ridiculous Mando-Franc-ösisch, making me sound like a lunatic. I sit blinking, stammering, translating French out of the Chinese that’s tumbled out of the non-English compartment of my brain. When I mentioned it to a linguist friend of mine, she told me it’s normal, and to some extent it will always be a part of my struggle.

One month into my first French course of the old new millennium, I sat in a university stairwell, phone to my ear, listening to my half-Acadian bff asking me in my own accent, “Pourquoi prends-tu le français, mon amie?” I launched into my “Parce-que…” naturally, easily. In that French, she still sounded like herself, and I still sounded like me. Even after I slipped into broken Chinese, and she laughed, and we went back to English—every word was still me. This dusty dig-site, this messy mind, this chaos is really me.

Sunshine Ceiling 4LYFE–Maybe

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Lately, my husband has been ending remarks with “…for the past two years.”

And I have been correcting him with “…for the past three years.”

That is how long it’s been since we moved our family back to the city—three years only, three years already. In a large family like ours, where seven timelines run simultaneously, three years is more like twenty-one. Graduations, promotions, publications, growth spurts, near misses, rescues, the death of our insane pet bird have all happened in that time. Romania and China have happened in that time, all based from our house in an aging suburb.

The house itself hasn’t fared as well as the rest of us. Wear and tear happen here to the power of seven as well. When we were trying to decide on a house to mortgage (it’s still too early for me to think of it as something we bought), we made lists of the improvements we’d have to do once we chose a place and moved into it. Once we decided, our home improvements started right away. Walls were painted, trees were planted, the forty-pound metal, office grade fluorescent light fixture which used to buzz and flicker over my head in my laundry room/office was taken down. The renovations started, and then they stopped.

 

wallpaper

No, I still haven’t peeled away this odd, flocked white wallpaper in my son’s bedroom. Frankly, the room is chilly in the winter and it might have been put up in the first place to provide a little extra insulation. Whatever its original purpose, no one cares that it’s still stuck to the house. When I told the boys, three years ago, that I was willing to repaint and redecorate their bedrooms, all I got for a reply was “Why?” I prefer to credit this to their easygoing-ness rather than slobbery, and I happily go along with it.

Speaking of paint, fancy paint finishes were trendy in the early 2000s. Remember? I am purplewallterrible at pretty things and never attempted the trend myself but the last person to decorate my rec room and my all-purple-walls-all-the-time bathroom mastered this highly textured technique. It’s dated now, but I’m not sure how to remove and redo it. So I haven’t.

 

 

 

This is the undone renovation I notice most often: the staggering anticlimax which is a twelve-foot chain suspended from a vaulted dining room ceiling which, after all that tension, ends in…a simple pendantlamppendant lamp. Maybe that’s what bugs me most about it—the chain and its lamp are bad storytelling, right there in my front room.

For lighting in the kitchen, we still have a sunshine ceiling—1990s shorthand for fluorescent tubes and smooth plastic panels.  Two of my sisters bought houses of the same vintage as mine and their sunshine ceilings were the first things to go. We all had equally bad feelings about them but I got distracted, didn’t act on my feelings soon enough, and now—the moment has passed.

 

The moment has passed for all the brass trim in the basement too, for the “bone” sunshineceilcoloured special-order 5-plex light switch plate by the front door, for the rattly aluminum blind in the living room with its dimming rod held in place by a paper clip. I’ve settled into all of it now. The chain-and-pendant lamp is still in some danger, but the rest of it—no one cares, not even me.

 

I suppose this means we did it. In three years we have truly made a new life for ourselves. Looks like it’s done not by making everything perfect and different and new, but by making new priorities, letting go of things that might have been important once, to people we used to be, getting comfortable with the baggage those people left when they turned into something new. Maybe “settled” isn’t the right word for it. Or maybe I don’t even care about that anymore. Simply put, some of our priorities have shifted to make room for things we never would have dreamed would become important to us. It’s a metric of change and—I hope—of growth.

I’d Rather Be a Cyborg…: The Unexpected Inter-sectional Feminism of Losing My Hearing

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20170823_143656 (1)My hearing has never been good. Normal hearing is something I’ve had to work to maintain all my life with surgeries and procedures in doctors’ offices. Over time, I’ve progressed to having irretrievable below-normal hearing in the upper frequencies on my left side. I am hard of hearing, and as I age I will only become more so.

Knowing this, accepting it about myself is important in situations where faking normal hearing could cause problems, like when I’m standing in a noisy airport security line, talking to an officer, a fellow short-lady, through a pane of glass taller than both of us. Instead of gambling, guessing what she wants, I say, “Sorry, I’m hard of hearing,” explaining that I can’t meet her halfway and she needs to bear more of the burden of communication than she’s used to—which really just means she has to stop being verbally lazy and ask me about the yoghurt I forgot in my bag in a louder, clearer voice. The upper frequencies–voices of women and children–are less heard, and until they are, they need to be louder. The sexism built into my language tells me to call voices like these “shrill,” a word meant to shame people into silence, but a word which, for people like me, simply means “audible.”

My deaf sister-in-law says I need to stop introducing my condition with “Sorry…” Wheelchair users aren’t expected to stare down flights of stairs and tell anyone they’re sorry. I get it, and I’m working on it. I’ve even realized why I’ve always suffered a little stab of anger whenever someone doesn’t hear me and lets me know by saying, “Sorry.” The implication that anyone needs to apologize for not hearing—or not seeing or not walking—is ableist and backward. The idea that intruding on able-bodied privilege with requests that accommodations be made to social and physical structures that dismiss and deny special needs is something that demands an apology–I hate it. I do feel sorrow for the decline in my hearing. But I’m not responsible for it. No one owes anyone else a normal level of natural ability in anything, including hearing.

Anyways…

I noticed the decline in my hearing once I switched from working at home to studying in a large, crowded university—especially when my studies are in a new language where the skills and strategies I use in English to guess and gloss over what I don’t hear can’t be applied. While my Chinese reading and writing is quite good for someone at my level, my ability to understand what I’m listening to is bad. By the end of the month I spent living in China this summer, I realized that, some of the time, when I was giving my stock reply of “I can’t understand what you’re saying” what I really meant was “I can’t hear what you’re saying.” Coming home to my English-speaking family, I saw for the first time how much trouble I was having receiving all kinds of messages, including ones in my native language.

The audiology clinic asked me to bring an able-bodied handler with me to my hearing test, but I rebelled and came alone. The appointment was a sad trip back in time to when I was seven years old and facing my below-average hearing for the first time. Strangely enough the list of words I had to repeat in the soundproof booth hadn’t changed in all that time. The list was an odd, old-fashioned collection—and old-fashioned means sexist and Anglo-centric. The words were meant to be recognizable to elderly men. “Whitewash, inkwell, cowboy, baseball.” I asked, “Do you have lists in any languages other than English?” No, of course they didn’t. English was confounding my test results. Once I realized the list of words was taken from Tom Sawyer, once I knew I was amassing a set with a theme, I could guess them even more easily than usual.

I’ve never worn eyeglasses, and my childhood surgeries completely extinguished any interest in getting my ears pierced so I’m just now learning to tolerate a foreign object against my ear. My hearing aid penetrates much further into my head than I expected. It’s an infiltration. “I’m a cyborg,” I told the technician–not a word from the clinic’s list.

Back at our house, with my new circuitry, my youngest son was relieved I hadn’t come back with a hole drilled in my skull, and my oldest son congratulated me on my “augmented reality.” I smirked. “You mean, like your glasses?” That’s all a hearing aid should be for someone outside of Deaf culture who comes to be hard of hearing later in life. It’s eyeglasses for the ears, the restoration of a baseline. Cyborg-me knows it but does not know how to believe it yet, and sits by herself flexing her jaw, tipping the electronic node against the inside of her post-human head.

Thirteen Things That Are Better In China

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My China Look

I am back in Canada, back to the ridiculous standard of living I enjoy in what is the best of all nations on this planet. Don’t bother to argue. Canada and I are in a honeymoon phase right now and I won’t be dissuaded.

For the month of July 2017, I lived in northeast China, studying at a university in the little-known city of Harbin, which is twice the size of the biggest city in Canada. By now, my experiences with China and Chinese are bigger than a single blog-post or Instagram feed. They are more like a book–nuanced and complex. When I look at the Instagram feed (find it at jennylquist) I used to curate some what I encountered on my latest trip to China, I’m afraid the overall impression might be a bit too negative, too “other.”

So in the spirit of fairness, positivity, and unity, I bring you a list of things about China that are actually better than what we have here in the West.

  • Hailing Waiters – The relationships Western diners have with their servers—it’s weird. It’s a complicated game where servers try to guess and perfectly time diners’ needs while diners try to stiffly and silently catch their eyes, getting huffier and huffier when things aren’t perfect, everyone wondering what it might all mean for the fraught practice of tipping at the end of the night. In China, when a diner needs something, she waves and calls out. The server expects it and doesn’t get worried or offended by it. The communication is direct, uncomplicated, and effective. It’s better.
  • Over-dressing – Fancy dresses, shoes, and accessories are worn in China because they are fun and beautiful–no other justification needed. Where I was staying, this seemed to be more common for women than it was for men (head to South Korea for guys in suits for no special reason). Fancy dressing is not something Chinese women age out of either. In fact, the frilliest dresses on the street are worn by auntie-aged ladies. No one in China seems to have any idea how old I am and when I tried on one of these dresses in a store—a silk shift dress for $20–the clerk asked if I was going to wear this auntie dress myself. 当然自己穿！I bought a pair of pointy-toed gold shoes to go with it.
  • Bathroom Mysteries – Not since I last toilet-trained someone have I talked as freely about bathroom issues as I did in China. It really is strange that in the West the perfectly normal, sometimes medically important movements of toilet fluids are still taboo. Being able to talk about it openly is a more genuinely human way to behave. “I’ll be downstairs right after I finish pooping,” a 20-year-old man texted me. Sure, fair enough.
  • Love Songs – The last hour of formal Chinese instruction I had at the Harbin Institute of Technology was spent learning love songs to sing at the end of semester concert for our classmates. They were overwrought and awesome—all about crying and being wrong and loving too much. During our long, long day of airport delays on the way home, my traveling companion and I amused ourselves singing what we remembered of them, using them as an emotional safety valve for a harrowing, exhausting day.
  • Proper Use of Air Conditioning – In the West, especially in the hottest parts of America, air conditioning is used to transform interior spaces into refrigerator units. It wastes an obscene amount of energy and can lead to people stuck indoors dressing up in layers of warm clothing to counteract the air conditioning. In China, air conditioning is meant to make interior spaces not cold but merely warm. They’re usually set around 25 degrees Celsius—the temperature of a pleasant summer day–rather than at 19 degrees Celsius—the temperature of a colossal Target store in Phoenix.
  • Russia – When traveling in Asia (and in Europe, where my son lives) it’s remarkable to realize how pervasive the Russian language and Russian people are in the countries bordering their own. In Beijing and in the north, people trying to guess my nationality usually guessed Russian first. An elite Russian high school student can function in Russian, English, and often another language such as, yes, Chinese. So…yeah.
  • Kitchen in the Front, Party in the Back – It’s not uncommon for a Chinese restaurant’s dining room to be in the back of the building, meaning diners get to walk through and see all the ugly truths of the kitchens where their food is prepared. If there’s an overflowing garbage can covered in flies, or a live turtle living in a plastic box right on the food prep space, we’re going to know about it and have no one but ourselves to blame for the astounding bathroom story we’ll wind up with later.
  • Public Transportation – In my home town, riding the lacklustre subway costs just under $4. In north east China, riding the clean, flashy subway cost about 20 cents.
  • The Welcome Applause – In China, applause comes at the beginning of the performance to get the performers psyched up and feeling welcome. There’s no daunting, expectant silence as they take the stage.
  • Drinks in Bags – Instead of selling drinks to-go in tippy cardboard drink trays, Chinese cafes hand them out in slender plastic bags with handles. We can carry more than one without spilling or getting wet from the condensation on the sides of the cup. I hereby call out the cardboard drink tray cartel that is holding this back in the West.
  • Scale – In the West, at five foot one inch tall (about 155cm) my height is that of a child in the sixth grade. In China, I’m fairly normal. I sail right under low hanging staircases and doorways, and I can always find shoes in my size. Back home, many shoe stores don’t even order merchandise in my size.
  • Talking to Strangers – Homes tend to be small in China so cities are planned with shared outdoor living spaces where people come together to sit, talk, eat, play, sing, and dance. This fosters a culture where people accept the nearness of strangers as part of normal private life. They initiate conversations, stare, scold, speak their minds even on personal topics. The look of my transparent Irish skin provoked a lot of advice from strangers on how to take better care of my body. It was invasive and strange but I was touched by it. I felt loved and important when I heard it. I felt like I was being allowed to become part of something.

The reason I went to China was to learn, especially to learn its language. I don’t think one language can be better than another but what I love about Chinese is how different it is from every other language I know anything about. Chinese isn’t just a new language to me, it’s a new mental faculty–one that also exists in the minds of a billion other people. After all these little details, what, in the end, is better in China than in the West? I am. I am more human for having been there and I hope I have brought that home with me to my family, friends, and country-people. Not everyone’s journey will pass through China—or anyplace in particular–to make them who they need to be. But mine does, and I am so grateful.