I
just finished an email from Yvonne. You
should all be so lucky to receive such delicious emails. She writes like a luxurious 80 foot yacht
that can take you to Tahiti. Mine is more like a dinghy
that fills up with water.
I see the door opening to my passage out of
shanghai and although saying goodbye to Shanghai for the
first time ( last time?) will be filled with an array of different emotions…I
look forward to feeling them. I’ve
changed some things about my personality to fit in, and in some ways, I feel very
disappointed in myself. In other’s I
feel very proud. I’m rather tired of the
fiasco. ( The fiasco is something very hard for me to describe because I’m
afraid that my meager intelligence makes me unworthy to lay down the
specifics. I neither want to turn people
off, nor turn anyone on to the ease of hating something that we know so little
about. Lets just say it has some
political flavor, swallows up women, and has this and that to do with social
issues with regard to a trillion things that I would love to listen to someone
else rattle on about. The responsibility
of sharing so much information is so daunting, and requires really serious
preparation. I’m neither qualified, nor
prepared to take such a leap. I cannot
wait to be that woman at community college taking night classes, and wearing a
messenger bag with a lot of political messages on little pins, driving home in
my Volvo with my kids’ equestrian gear in the backseat. I’ll probably be wearing cross trainers, have
a manicure, and ready to go to Step class after school. Oh and I’ll be in my
forties, with blonde hair. Additionally,
I might be divorced, and have a pimple.)
Shanghai and life in China has taught me things
about restraint that perhaps only my Great Grandmother who was born in 1908 and
died in 2001 could have talked to me about. At work I see “ my place”, and I hate it. Everyday I find ways to overcome it. Personally I see “my place” and realize that the
time has come for me to make the greatest effort of all in preparing myself for
a move that seems more difficult then the one that brought me here. I already feel nostalgic about China, and
“ my place”. This move has taught me about
a phrase that Edith Hanselman, the Ambassador of Great Grandmothers, said to me
a million more times then I actually ever heard. “ You’ve got a lot to learn.”
I’m not sure of a date, because in the land
of internationalisms, 3 months is no time at all. I’m thinking summer 2006. Love, big fat kris