Done with School, Snapshot of China

Every time I think of it, I can't help but marvel at how it is to be finished with the school system after 19 years of going to class, long hours with textbooks, taking notes, dealing with new teachers, and meeting classmates for work and play. After being in such a stiff and well-defined system, I feel a bit floaty out here in this world where there are a huge variety of possible choices one could make. It's great to be free enough to reconnect with friends in the area, though - and soon, I'll be across the country to see the California side of the family for a kiddie birthday party!

After such a preamble, I'm posting an excerpt from one of my PC essays, for entertainment and for show. This is one ingredient in one such possibility for the future. I write about my two weeks in China, which I visited five years ago.

"I learned to bring toilet paper with me, to tolerate trash on the streets and to remain (relatively) calm on chaotic highways teeming with bikes and rickshaws operating independent of any apparent traffic laws. It wasn’t a freewheeling kind of integration that my friend and I eased ourselves into, but more of a cautious one; awareness for my own safety seemed suddenly closely linked to my decisions. At the same time, I felt sympathetic toward the people who lived there—the old huotong neighborhoods seemed a tragic place to live if lung-crippling coal was the most widely-used fuel for cooking and heating available, and the ugly practice of land-reclamation continued to leave its mark on the local mountains, all in the name of low-cost capital development. The smog coloring the sunset gray was the suspect in the case of my own respiratory ailment that developed after only 4 or 5 days. Water was also a huge problem, as every bottle-toting tourist knows, but 300 million residents will never be truly adapted to a water table contaminated by human waste. Chinese behaviors were discouraging, but what I took away was this: there probably weren’t better options readily available, and my ability to recognize such inequities could be a means to help. In China, health risks and environmental deterioration have a real, tangible meaning in a way that’s more often talked about than experienced in the US."