Summer of Service

I've been home a week, now. This morning I went to the West Reading Diner (open 24 hours, jukeboxes affixed to the drywall, lukewarm coffee) and just listened to people. Most jarring for me is my newfound ability to understand everything swirling in the aether--or, at least, to grasp its English meaning; I can't, for the life of me, understand Brian Williams' voice, or cable news in general, or PennDOT, but hey, whatever. America's become, in a word, foreign, filled with things I translate but from which I feel distant. Such is the bane of the traveller (maybe, who knows?), and what a problem to have.

Anyway.

People inevitably ask me how China was or is. I'm shocked by the banality of my responses: oh, you know, the food was spicy, drier dumplings, you-wouldn't-believe-the-driving-wow-we-had-some-crazy-cab-rides. What I really want to convey is the grittiness of our hostel in Beijing, how I could scrape the city off my teeth by noon, how the restaurants were caked with a kind of brown-yellow film, how Pepto and hard water and toothpaste render a fine bouquet for the palate. What exactly did you do? leads to well, I taught...yes, taught...English...oh I know, not qualified at all...[nod]... And all I really want is to blurt out But I loved it! I tried! I've never tried so hard in my life! Tried to change things! I was doing something!

A few days back I was telling a high-school friend about one of my students (who shall remain anonymous, though all the other teachers know her name, rhymes with Missero) and I teared up. On a typical Wyomissing afternoon I'll walk for a bit around town, go to the supermarket, read a book, watch a movie, trawl the Internet, put on fresh socks, put away old socks--but all of it seems an imitation of a life I lived this summer thousands of miles away, with rattier books and rattier socks and a far more exciting supermarket. The feeling will go, I know, come Princeton and other things, but right at this moment, in the ligature between my SoS experience and first semester, I'm drawn back to people I met and taught and respected and cared about. What a bittersweet thing, that, what an advert for classroom instruction and travel.

I remember talking to Rory when our conversation stumbled on Peter Singer or someone like him, and we thought, and one of us asked why everyone isn't getting on a plane to Asia, textbook in hand. As lucky as I was to meet Mr. Truex and the rest of the gang, I'm not so sure I did anything right. Read a sign, wrote an essay, interviewed. It was so easy. And the return on all that? well, enormous, incalculable--perhaps the only way to pay it back is to (shudder at hokiness) pay it forward, encourage other students to lead trips around the world, textbooks in hand. Milan Kundera's thesis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being boils down to something like this idea--what is life when it is not repeated? Is not the greatest benefit derived from repetition, from expansion, from cyclic humanity which is (after all) growth? Edward Said said that, too, and Marx (gasp!)...in return to well-known places (well-known classrooms?) we create permanence, even as people change and programs change. Jishou and Princeton are linked, and thanks be to that.

Which is all to say, thank you, everyone. I'll see you around.

And until then,

chris.