I was chatting with a co-worker the week before Christmas when he asked me if I would be taking any time off then.  With a touch of wistfulness, I responded in the negative but followed up with, “But that’s okay, because I’ll be taking my leave later in January and going back to China.”

“Going back?”

A view of the Oriental Pearl Tower.  Shanghai.

Acknowledging the inaccuracy of my choice of words, I rephrased the statement by omitting that last word, but, looking back on this otherwise banal exchange, was it really an incorrect thing to say?  Among the overseas Chinese community (or, as I enjoy calling it, the Great Overseas Chinese Conspiracy – e.g., in ur math classes, trumpin ur inferior collective intellect, etc.), when we speak about making the trip to either the land of our birth or not-so-distant ancestral homeland, we never say that we are simply “going to China” (去中国).  Rather, we use a more particular phrase, 回国, which literally translates into “to return to one’s country.”  To journey to the motherland has always been to perform an act of homecoming; that I was born in the States, have spent my entire life in the West, and could – for a long time, anyway – speak more fluently about the French Revolution than the great upheaval that saw China transformed from dynastic empire to fitful republic never seemed to matter much in this calculation.

Sunset over Aimin Village.  Near Xuancheng, Hefei Province.

Thus, for the first time in over three and a half years, I am going home today.  That isn’t a very long time on paper, but, when I think about where I was in the summer of 2008 (fresh out of my first year at Georgetown, if I could believe that I was ever that young), compare that to where I am now, and think about everything that has happened in between, I feel like I’ve done at least a decade’s worth of ageing and growing in those years.  A return is long overdue.

The distinctive pine trees of Yellow Mountain, Anhui Province.

I’ve done a handful of two-month stays in the country, but this jaunt will be just two weeks long.  I am especially excited for it because this is the first time in my life that I will be marking the Chinese New Year in China itself, as it’s the first time since I was, oh, four years old that my existence is not under the dictates of the academic calendar – what a novel concept, the idea that I can go on holiday whenever I’d like (subject to office workload and accumulated leave, naturally)!  I have been warned by my mother, with whom I am travelling, that it will be filled with more food than I could possible consume.  To that, I say: bah humbug.

Inside the Forbidden City.  Beijing.

There are, of course, also some anxieties involved.  My ability to speak Chinese has rather fallen into disrepair – the longer I go without stepping foot in the Mainland, the worse it gets – and, every time I go back, I’m always vaguely terrified that the natives will think I’m some kind of linguistically challenged cretin.  For all that living standards have improved dramatically in China within my lifetime, it still is a very, very different place from the United States, and I fear I have forgotten what it is like to actually be in the country.  Also, the jetlag is absolutely miserable – as in, twelve time zones’ worth of discombobulated biorhythms.  I am dreading it already.

The afterlife duties of a terracotta warrior and his steeds.  Near Xi’an, Shaanxi Province.

But these are all minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things.  This is a well-deserved holiday – no working vacation for me, thank you very much – and I will even be leaving my laptop at home, which feels like much greater a sacrifice than I know it to actually be.  This is a time to disconnect (from unessential things), reconnect (with family, history, and so forth), and reflect.  I’m keeping my personal possessions (relatively) simple: my Moleskine, two books, a manuscript of my novel to edit, erstwhile stuffed animals, my trusty iPod Classic, and a camera outfitted with a lightweight prime lens and two empty memory cards.  It does mean that I won’t blog again until I return in early February, but don’t worry: my absence from your internet lives will be over before you know it.

See you in a few weeks!

I usually don’t bother devoting an entire blog post to one video, but this one, which I came upon via Kottke, resonated (no pun intended) with me so much that I simply had to share it:

It’s a five-minute documentary about the oldest piano shop in Paris.  I am an unabashed devotee of all things France and piano, so the the premise alone, of course, was enough to lure me in, but nothing quite prepared me for the magic and melancholy of it all: an immaculate handwritten ledger, narrow dusty shelves of hammers and dampers, and the owner of the shop himself, unflinching in the absence of sentimentality required by his line of work (“I put off the actual kill until the last possible moment'”) even as he doodles sailboats bobbing on oceans.  (Surely there’s a novel to be written about this guy’s life.  Idea for NaNoWriMo 2012?  Oh, dear.) 

♪ Frédéric Chopin – Nocturne No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 9 No. 1: Larghetto

When he speaks of the Pleyel piano of the 1920s, I remember that Chopin composed his indelible music on just such an instrument, albeit of an earlier vintage.  I think about all that is lost to us and all that we try to salvage: sounds with no echo, a music that casts no shadow.

It occurs to me that, over time, I have become increasingly disinclined to use this blog as a record of the day-to-day happenings of my life and, instead, favoured more deliberately crafted content that either projects some kind of Greater Meaning™ or that I think will be interesting to the (limited) readership at large.  This is primarily because my life is, more often than not, a pretty dull entity, and the last thing I would want to do is reveal to the internet just how uneventful it is.  Oh, wait…Anyway, this is going to be one of those times that I talk about what I’ve been up to.  When one is at a loss for things to say, self-centred bloviating is a reliable escape route!

It’s difficult to believe that the new year is only a shade over two weeks old.  I have found myself so occupied on any number of fronts that the quiet reflection associated with the turning of the calendar page has long since given way to attempts just to keep pace with the present.  Most of this can be attributed to work – more on that in a second – but I have still managed to have something resembling a social life as well.  Two weekends ago, my friend and economics partner-in-crime Shapiro was in town during his temporary respite from graduate studies.  The occasion was fêted by a dinner with Shapiro’s former roommate, Joe, at the H Street Country Club.  It was the first time I had ventured into that part of the city, which, in classic realtor’s language, might be described as “up and coming,” but it was a welcome change from the usual NW haunts, and the food was also quite good.

Following dinner, we went to Joe’s place, where the boys unsuccessfully tried to hunt down a forthcoming episode of Portlandia before the three of us sat down to a game of The Settlers of Catan.  It’s a strategy-based board game in which one must gather resources to construct settlements, roads, and other such works of infrastructure.  Unlike many other such games, however, there is no killing, raping, or pillaging involved, at least not in a systematic fashion.  In fact, the game is oddly progressive: for instance, if you have more than seven resource cards in your hand, you run the risk of forfeiting some of them.  Playing this game, I felt like I was living out The Big Bang Theory, only, in our case, there were threats and profanity involved that likely were not kosher for network television.

Mostly, my life has been swamped by demands from the office. I am going on leave later this week, with the expected result that I have certain projects that absolutely need to be completed before I can decamp for my long-awaited holiday.  How swamped, you might be wondering?  I haven’t been keeping track, per se, but it’s been enough to make me feel like I am reliving my undergraduate days, guided so singular and obsessive a focus on the task at hand that everything else seems perfectly unimportant by comparison.  This nostalgia reached its height yesterday, when I actually went back to Georgetown’s hideous concrete monstrosity of a library (and, yet, how very much like home it was!) to seek out some books for my research.  I’ll remain mum on the specifics of what I’m doing, as I suspect the world wide web isn’t the right platform for that kind of thing, but it has involved Googling exchange rates between former European currencies and the euro – at a certain point, I realised I should just write them all down instead of constantly going back to the same Wikipedia page – as well as managing an Excel file that has at least 50 individual sheets within it.

I did take a bit of an extended lunch break from work on Friday, though, to enjoy Restaurant Week offerings with my friend Shuo at Kinkead’s, a seafood place near Foggy Bottom whose usual clientele, I would imagine, are the sorts of people with expense accounts and very impressive salaries.  Fortunately, Restaurant Week opens these tony dining establishments to the rest of us through reasonably priced prix fixé menus!  I, of course, had to be the annoying person who whips out her camera out at the start of every course to photograph her food, but I at least ensured that our waiter was out of sight before doing so.  (Looking at these pictures again, I ought to have gone with a smaller aperture, but oh well.)

Finally, I would like to conclude this entry by saying a few words on the occasion of the basically inevitable demise of Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign.  Like so many Americans, I have been following the GOP primary competition as one might a reality TV show – that is, with both a perverse fascination at the foibles of so sterling a collection of nutters and nincompoops and a disgust at myself, that I should be so drawn to all of it.  The obvious difference between the two is that the former will, sooner or later, produce someone who will contest to hold the highest political office in the land, which really just makes it the most terrifying spectacle on the planet.  The only man in this cast of characters who did not serve to further degrade my faith in humanity American voters the Republican Party was Huntsman, and, as the use of past tense would indicate, he is gone now, having formally dropped out of the race today. 

It’s not that I would have ever voted for him over Obama or that he was an especially good candidate – by all accounts, he was a pretty shit campaigner – but there was something rather appealing and admirable about his refusal to pander to the conservative id.  That is the kind of character that has been sorely absent from the American right in recent years, and the fact that, at least for a time, even Herman Cain was apparently taken more seriously by that slice of the electorate than Huntsman ever was is just utterly damning commentary vis-à-vis the current state of the GOP.  Also, I kind of have an none-too-disguised crush on him and his collection of colourful ties.

Too bad not enough primary voters thought the same, Jon!

Just a quick, drive-by update (not the least because I am guiltily typing this at 6:47am when I should be getting ready for work instead): my friend Katherine and I have officially launched a collaborative blog called The Perfume of Paper, in which we set monthly reading challenges for ourselves (e.g., “Read a Serious Russian Novel”).  It’s an idea that we had been playing with for some time, and it is my hope that participating in this side project will enable me to read a wider variety of books this year – and, assuming we can keep this going, in years to come!  This is more for our own literary edification than anything else, but do feel free to follow along if you’d like to.

(May it not fall into neglect like my first attempt, though I feel that its short lifespan is at least somewhat compensated for by its fifteen milliseconds of internet fame.)

The first work week of the new year started on a rather bad, if also hilarious note.  I had actually woken up with my alarm clock for once, proceeded through my getting ready routine smoothly, and was about to head out the door when I noticed the accumulated debris at the bottom of my tote bag – you know, the crumpled corners of receipts, glitter that rubbed off this year’s Christmas wrapping paper, and that sort of thing.  Inexplicably, I was struck by the need to rid myself of this detritus without a moment to lose, but, not wanting to get any of it in my flat, I threw my window open, turned my ostensibly empty tote upside down, and began to shake it.

Something vaguely substantial tumbled out of my bag.  Just a hair tie, I thought with a shrug as I watched it fall to the ground.  Then something rather more substantial joined it.  Leaning over the windowsill, I wondered what else I could have possibly left in my bag.  And, this time, the thoughts that raced through my mind were decidedly less genteel:

Because, you see, I leave my work ID badge in the unsecured front pocket of my tote, as there is never really any point in placing it anywhere else, and, in my obsessive-compulsive daze, had thoughtlessly sent it plummeting into the gated patio of a first-floor tenant.

Fortunately, this story has a happy resolution: I left a deeply apologetic note, along with an envelope, for said tenant, explaining what had happened and whether it would be terribly rude for me ask if he/she could retrieve my ID for me.  I was able to get into my office building with a temporary staff badge, and, a few hours into the morning, the tenant gave me a ring and told me that she had found my ID and slid it under my door.  I thanked her profusely – and the kindness of strangers more generally – and promised to never do such a stupid thing again.  Not the least because, when I thought about it, there really wasn’t much dirt & dust at the bottom of my bag to begin with.

On an at-first-glance unrelated note, I found myself desiring to waste time on Sunday – a treasured pastime of the working twentysomething – and decided to curl my hair for the first time in my life.  Secretly, I had been wanting to try this for a while, but my hair required time to grow out and I needed to consult the boundless expertise of YouTube vis-à-vis the proper handling of a curling iron because, when I was a teenager, I instead chose to spend my time learning the ins and outs of the French Republican Calendar.  Yeah.

Anyway, I spent more time than I am willing to admit in front of the bathroom mirror, trying my best not to inflict first-degree burns on my fingers or scalp, and the result came out satisfactorily enough that a crappy webcam photo was necessary to mark the occasion.  Please forgive my wan & listless demeanour: I was not feeling well that day, and the lighting in these kinds of situations is almost always disadvantageous for one’s complexion.

I’ve had fine, (more or less) straight hair for my entire life.  You’d think it would be easy to deal with, but the funny reality is that my hair is a maddeningly malleable thing: if I put it up in so much as a loose ponytail and let it down a few hours later, it will possess for the rest of the day that odd indentation where the elastic had been.  I am deeply jealous of people who wake up in the morning blessed with easily manageable locks; mine usually resemble an electrified bird’s nest.  And letting my hair air dry is a definite no-no unless I want odd strands here or there curling out at odd angles; ergo, I devote a good 20-25 minutes on most mornings emphasising applying copious amounts of product, blow drying it until my bathroom feels like a rain forest, and touching up the unruly bits with a flat iron afterwards.  There is the sense that, because my hair is straight, it ought to be so in an unambiguous, clear cut fashion, and anything less than that is unacceptable.

As I was “posing” for this “photograph,” I found myself fiddling with my hair a bit, trying to make it look a bit less unruly before I committed it to my hard drive for all eternity, but then it occurred to me that it was supposed to be a little messy.  By electing to curl my hair, I had already surrendered to a kind of disorder, albeit still a controlled one, and really, I began to tell myself, you know you’re just going to spend the rest of the day sprawled on your bed, crying your way through the second series of Downton Abbey and snacking on puppy chow.  Honestly, is there even one defensible reason you should be wasting your time dwelling on this, of all things?

Thus, I threw up my proverbial hands and just took the damn photo, and now I’ve blogged about it.  Daring to disturbing the universe is scary business indeed, but baby steps, as they say, baby steps.