Prologue

It's June, 2007. The hotel room I'm in, on the 9^th floor of a building in the city of Chengdu is a disaster. Everything I own can fit into one suitcase and yet I've managed to spread it out effectively to every corner of this substantial sized room so that it looks like there is enough junk to fill 50 large trucks. This loaves and fishes style miracle has me partially wishing someone would come by and be impressed.

The Boat Building

Outside my room is a balcony, with a view of the city. Directly across the way is a large 6 story building shaped to look exactly like a massive cruise liner. It contains a number of stores and clubs that I've never been to. Beyond the ship is the market where I make my once daily excursion in search of the most basic sustenance. You see, at the moment, I'm starving. 

Steamed bread, called Manto

I ran out of money when I lost my debit card, the sole connection I had to the money stored in the credit union back in Portland. Before I realized that I'd lost my card, I'd spent most of the money I had on this hotel room and a plane ticket to Beijing where I will be meeting my parents for the first time in almost a year. I have 20 dollars to survive on for the month I have left so, I am starving. Each day I buy exactly 8 steamed white bread rolls, purely to fill my stomach. I also by a package of small processed sausages that equate about 3 hot dogs worth of meat.  This is for protein. Then I buy a bottle of Gatorade, for electrolytes. I've been eating this every day for 2 weeks and am 25 pounds under weight.

bland sausages with corn shrink
wrapped in plastic, Yum

Of course this is not the only reason for my weight loss.  When I get home a month from now, after I have spend a week in Beijing, and a week in Tibet, and after spending days on bumpy trains with very, very poor bathrooms, I will be told that I have had a parasite living in my intestines for approximately four months. At the moment though, despite the fact that I never stay out of running distance from a toilet, I am in complete denial that I might be sick. I tell myself that it is just the spicy food I've been eating, or that it might be that old social anxiety that used to give me daily stomach aches every day before school. Later I will look back and realize I'd had no choice, this was my only way of staying sane. I refuse to go to the doctor because of my uncomfortable experience with the Chinese medical establishment when I'd torn all the tendons in my left middle finger during a martial arts demonstration. Not to mention the time my girlfriend's grandfather had gone for a regular checkup and they had injected him with the wrong medication. He died on the way home in a taxi cab.

So believing that not believing in something makes it not exist, I have been bravely spending day in and day out in my hotel room crumbling as a human being. Just moments ago, I was looking out at the big shipbuilding, at the market beyond, and the smog enshrined setting sun. I'd been suddenly overwhelmed with how much I loved all of it. And in a instant I'd flopped to my bed where I find myself now sobbing at everything I'm about to lose. It's only a couple days till I go to Beijing to meet my parents. I'll still be in China for another couple weeks but my time on my own is over, it's time to say good by to my own private adventure.

Fried scorpion on a stick

The adventure that has seen me fall in love with a girl at the top of a holy Buddhist mountain under a softly snowing sky. The adventure that had cast me as the star in a Chinese commercial. I'd learned martial arts in a kungfu boarding school, eaten the most bizarre foods including rabbits' heads and steamed tortoise. And now I'm starving, sick, exhausted and all I can think is that I can't imagine living any other way.

As I stop crying I even miss that, I want to mourn longer, but I don't have that many tears to shed. I try to write about it, to send a China Journal on this emotion that seems so important, but I can't figure out what I'm actually feeling. I won't write another journal after this moment. I won't tell about Tibet, by far the most amazing leg of my journey. You won't read about the great wall, or the difficult transition returning to a western continent.

Much later, I start to understand what is happening now. This is the moment where my heart is breaking into two even pieces.

This is not the absolute crushing pain that I will feel in a few months, when the girl I was imagining the rest of my life with leaves me to live in Australia with a man she met online. A pain that will last for years and never truly go away. No, this tearing heart, is the tearing of my world into it's opposite poles. I feel a connection and a love for China like no other place in the world. To feel comfortable and confident in a culture that is not your own, to know how to survive in a formidable place, all by yourself. I have made China my home. At the same time I recognize finally what it means to be an American, and I know that too is my home, a place I have pride in and miss deeply. I feel like home is split between far distant places and I cannot figure out how to bring them together. I think I will forever be homesick.

Tryg eating cricket tacos in Mexico

Now it is 2011, and I'm going back to China for the first time in 4 years. This time I'm going with my best friend and brother, Tryg. I'm not going on my parents dime, and I have very little money. I really am afraid, wondering if I can really do this. That person who survived, who did so many incredible things, he seems like someone else, a person from a story I read once. I'm just some guy who's been living in his parent's house for the past 4 years. I've been dormant for so long I don't really know what I'm capable of anymore. 

It took me years to digest the experiences I had in China, for them to express themselves in who I was, and to learn the lessons that I had to learn. Now as I go back, older, as a completely different person, to what might now be a completely different country. I have no idea what might happen. Last time was full of things that I could have never predicted, on a scale I still cannot fully comprehend. All I expect now is something amazing. Something that I'll talk about for years, for a lifetime even. 

We leave November 2^nd. We have one way tickets. We don't know how long we'll be gone, where exactly we're going, or how we're going to get there.  Everything is changing soon.  We're standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing the time until we jump is finite.