memory lane
Last night as I was washing dishes, the scent of the dish soap reminded me of a previous life of mine. Have you ever had that happen before? Has a scent or a song or a certain taste taken you back to another time and another place? Dish soap isn't all that glamorous a time machine, but it smelled the same as the soap I used when I would wash dishes in my little apartment in China. Yes, China. I used to live in China. Did you know that? I spent 4 years there, in fact. It seems strange now that I lived there, almost like it really was another lifetime. But the images are still strong in my mind ...kids eating squid on a stick;
squatty potties;
the sea of red and yellow taxis;
the 5 a.m. corn vendor whose voice didn't need an amplifier;
the potholes;
the mosquitoes, whose tiny buzzing could evict me from my bedroom for the night;
the crushing humid summers and the bitter winters;
the 5,000 years of uninterrupted history, some of it still evident in the lined faces of the old men and women sitting outside their homes in the sun;
the one English word known to all humanity, "Hello!" yelled at me from all corners of the country;
the vast countryside with its horse-drawn carriages;
the trains, with toilets that literally empty right on to the track below;
the Great Wall, just a weekend vacation;
the food ... oh how I miss the food;
so many Chinese students who so easily became friends ...
My list could go on for days, but perhaps only I would be interested in it ...
As of this summer I will have been back in the States for four years, the same amount of time I spent living in China. It was once an everyday occurrence for me to walk down the street and buy fried rice from the vendor on the corner for $.25. I used to walk to Chinese language class five days a week, which was entirely in Chinese, from day one, and read characters on the board and understand what they meant. I've spent weekend vacations in Beijing, Hong Kong, XiAn and Shanghai. I've been on the Great Wall of China three times, and riding past TianAnMen Square on my way to the train station became a ho-hum occurence. I used to bargain for goods on the streets ... in Chinese. I shopped in open air markets almost every day for fresh vegetables and fruit, walked nonchalantly past cooked ducks hanging by their necks in the windows of restaurants ... and then happily order one of them for dinner.
My years in China were also home to some of my closest relationships ... roommates and teammates. There's something about being Americans together in a foreign land that draws you close together. We lived together, worked together, ate together, played together, cried together, prayed together ... and it only took a few days of that to become best friends. I believe there will always be a special bond between us who experienced those years together. It was too grand an experience, too deep a lesson, too strong a connection to be lost to mere years and distance. There was Kimberly (pictured), Chrissy, Carlynne, Scott & Elaine, Trey & Tania, and so many others whose lives touched mine so profoundly. I miss them all, and yet hold fast to their everlasting impact on me.So, today let us sing praises to dish soap ... for taking me back to perhaps the hardest four years of my life (the hard times are another essay in themselves), and yet some of the most endearing and life-changing ones. I wouldn't trade my years overseas for anything, and would even go so far as to recommend such difficult times to others. They are so much a part of who I am now, taught me so much about myself and the world around me ... including that not having a dishwasher really isn't all that bad.
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