Finding Your Space

Last summer I started watching K-dramas (Korean dramas). I knew going into it that I would likely become an addict, but since I don't watch any American TV anyway, it was a risk I was willing to take.

Then one day I sat down to watch a drama called Cheer Up!/Sassy Go-Go. And I only made it 2:30 into the first episode before I was hit with an image that made my breath rush like I'd been dancing. The scene was a gathering of the lowest-scoring students in the school dancing away their test scores and other stresses in their beloved club room, despite the junk piled in there by the rest of the school.

I ached as memories poured through me. Because I'd been in that room.

It's 2008. Ryan and I are teaching English in middle-of-nowhere southern China. This high school is huge--almost 2000 kids in each of the three grades--and many of the students live in the dorms. I teach all of grade two (ages 15-17). Ryan teaches all of grade one.

We wander, sometimes, around the campus after teaching hours. The students are at dinner, in study halls, or likewise wandering in little groups.

And we find the music building. 

It's right next to the burn pile for the campus's garbage, and everything is coated in a layer of soot. We sneak down the grimy, dark hallway toward the sound of voices singing scales--some more on pitch than others. We peek through the open door and see 11 students, most of them from my classes. There are the twin girls who love my husband and hate me. And there's a kid who sleeps or goofs off through English classes and only knows enough to say "Hello, how are you teacher?"

They see us too, and wave us in. The teacher, a young, annoyed-looking woman wearing skin-tight jeans covered in random zippers and 5-inch stilettos, rolls her eyes and waves at us to sit down. 

But it's after the class that the magic happens.

After the teacher leaves, the students hang around, grinning at us and making conversation half with words, half with pantomime. I ask if I can play the piano. I play a piece I've had memorized for years, a showy Tarantella that usually impresses. Ryan sings something for them. And it works--music connects us with these kids, and they sweep us from the classroom, up the stairs, and into a room with a drum set. They play, and we laugh and joke. New students trickle in. We learn that they're in music classes not because they initially loved or chose the arts, but because they're failing a core subject--for most of them, English--and this is the school's way of trying to find them a path to further education. The same goes for those who do art. The same for the dancers.

"Tiao wu," they say. "Dance." 
"You dance?" we ask. "We love dance."

That's when they take us to their room. Their sanctuary.

The floor is open in the middle, a space cleared and mopped before a wall of mirrors that is flecked with age, cracked in places and with broken pieces missing on the edges. Desks are piled against the walls, castoffs with bent legs and missing wood and rusty frames.

A girl goes to the corner and plugs in an old, dusty boom box. American Hip Hop music pours from low-quality speakers. 

And they dance.

They pop and lock. They body roll. They mix in traditional Chinese dance and martial arts figures like the "Wind Fire Wheel." 

The tight, stressed look always visible on the edges of their expressions, in the rise of their shoulders, slips away. There are no teachers here. We are not teachers to them, in this room. We are musicians, dancers... friends. Otherwise they would never have invited us in.

We go back, other days, slipping in as the teacher leaves. These students, who can hardly speak English, who are "not smart enough" to get to college the normal way--these become our friends. These are the students who take us 45 minutes across the city to find a KFC. These are the students who we allow into our apartment--our sanctuary--to watch Jackie Chan movies while drinking hot sweetened coconut milk from the vendor at the school gate. 

As I watched Korean teens dance in a fictional TV show, I saw again "Pepper" and "Animal," two of the students we most connected with. I saw the girl whose name I never learned, pushing up one leg of her sweat pants and eyeing herself critically in the mirror as she tried a new move over and over until she was satisfied.

And I also saw me, and my friends, forming a little dance club at our high school. Carving out a space for ourselves.

Because that's a need not restricted by country or race: Finding space to breathe, to be yourself, and to connect. And sometimes that space is a small, suffocating room filled with broken furniture.

Rainflowers

I regret not taking many pictures in China. This one is borrowed from here.

Rainflowers

Red city—

Rusted metal, russet bricks,

Stringy weeds masquerading as grass on
Playing field of cardamom-colored clay.

No sunflowers here.

Watch for rainflowers.

Fuschia, cobalt, goldenrod, lime,

Bobbing above slender, black-haired stems

Tugged by winds of tardiness.

Thousands of blossoms

Sprout from window grates,

Rooted by handles

Thrust hastily between schoolhouse bars.
Abandoned, they drip down the wall,
Casting rainbow shadows through windowpanes,
Illuminating textbooks until lunch.

While it rains, the air is clean—

Clean enough for flowers.

They shrivel away with the return of

Red sunshine glowing through smog from

Motorcycles, buses, factories,

Soot from burning garbage.

Part of Me

Misc. tickets, envelopes with toilet paper/napkins (we were never sure what they were meant for, but we carried them everywhere since most bathrooms didn't have toilet paper), a little plastic charm given to me by a student, a cell phone charm made by another student, and the battery to my Chinese cell phone. 

This weekend we went on a trip to Boston, and while there, we attended church. It was the first Sunday of the month, and in our church that means that anyone is allowed to go to the microphone and share some thoughts about the gospel.

A blonde-haired girl who looked to be about my age got up and began to talk about trials. She talked about a time when she and her husband had just returned from living in Chile, and how she sat in church and reveled in the "American-ness" of the lesson, and was just so grateful to have finished the Chile experience, and to be able to put it behind her and move on.

I'd never seen this girl before, but I saw my eyes in hers as she smiled wryly and spoke too lightly, mentioning the experience only briefly and then skipping past it. Skipping ahead before the memories got too painful.

China, my mind whispered. Only you can't claim you've moved on.

I've written before about trying to overcome my China experience. I said at one point that I was going to start writing lots of posts about China, to try to help me work through it all. I then wrote 3 more posts, none of which had to do with China, and then quit blogging at all for the next six months; in part because every time I went to write, I felt guilty for not writing about China.

I've told myself so many times that I want to put China behind me, yet in the same bag I packed for Boston this weekend I carried all the items in the picture above--they've been in that same bag, the bag I use for nearly every trip I take, for the last 4.5 years. In one pocket of a jacket I wear every spring and fall, I still carry a Chinese bus ticket.

I've come a long way in the last 4.5 years. I'm not as jumpy. I'm not quite as cynical. I've even started to study Chinese again, and, for the first time in years, I was listening to a Chinese podcast the other day and had the sudden desire to go to Asia--not China specifically, but maybe someday I'll get that far.

But I haven't moved on. I haven't given up my bitterness for not getting the experience I dreamed about for so long. Despite many people's reassurances that someday I'd look back and only remember the good things, my memories of China jump straight to the depression, the sickness, the frustrations, the injustices, and the week at the end that left me with 6 months of PTSD.

As I've thought about how to put China behind me, though, the answer I'm coming to is that I shouldn't. Instead of trying to put it behind me, I think I need to take it inside me, and make it a part of me; not in the traumatic way it's been a part of me up until now, but in a conscious, I can learn from this sort of way.

Up until now, I think I've done that only with one aspect of the China experience: being sick. During my first pregnancy, as I got up every morning and puked before heading off to class, I reminded myself that I did the same thing in China, and that I was still somehow able to go stand in front of classes of 50-85 students and teach. Because of that precedent, I knew I could go sit in my classes and finish my degree, even while sick, and even when my burgeoning belly no longer fit in the desks and I had to sit sideways. I received power because I internalized a difficult experience.

I don't know what lessons I'll learn from the rest of the experiences, and I may not have a "lesson" attached to each post I write. But I hope that, in writing out some of these things, I'll be able to learn the lessons that this experience was meant for. That I'll find power, instead of pain, in my memories.

After all, I survived. And anything which does not kill us is intended to make us stronger--if we will let it.

(Now lets see if we actually get any posts about China this time...)