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I arrived in China on August 12th, 2017. I'll be here for at least three years, working at Duke Kunshan University as an assistant professor in the Language and Culture Center, teaching academic writing and speaking, along with my other duties as faculty. This blog is about the experience of being foreign in China. Of course this means it is also about China, as much as it is about my experience. It also means that this blog is about being American, and to subdivide further, about being a white male American in China. And even further, about being in Kunshan, a city about 19 minutes via high speed train outside of Shanghai. A "suburb" as it's called, though there are 1.5 million people in the area. Already then I offer a definition of foreignness: that of the solitary figure in a large impersonal landscape hanging somewhere on a panel at the Asian art museum. For now though I will have to start here, as my foreignness is fledgling and indistinct. 

I am a novice when it comes to China. I have not studied its history, asides from a course I took in high school; nor its language asides from the intro to Chinese course that I took over the summer. But I have worked with many Chinese students over the last twelve years of teaching writing and ESL, which is partly why I was qualified for this position. Further, I have been reading about China in the newspapers for many years, its trends and economics and politics, and I have, more generally, always been interested in East Asian culture, literature, and philosophy. I spent a year in Japan when I was an undergraduate student and this had a profound impact by leading me down the path of working with international students, which maybe not so surprisingly, has lead me back to Asia nearly 20 years later. China, as we all know, is a happening place. And so this is another reason why I am here: for the sake of novelty, a vain desire to gain knowledge through experience. 

There are other reasons, and as I write further into this blog, as relevant, I will share them. If motivations are the root of experience, then it seems necessary to explore them further. On that note, I do not want this blog to be about me sitting on my couch and looking out at China from the window of my 12th floor apartment. Which points at another motivation, i.e. that I wanted to try again to live outside of the United States. When I was in Japan I was more interested in tending to my own thoughts and feelings than I was in tending to Japan. Now that I am here, I have an opportunity to experience foreigness again as a semi-competent adult, and so getting out into China is an essential part of why I am here. I am still terrified of the outside world as I was when I was 19, but the difference now is that I have some confidence that no matter what happens, things will be alright. This is a kind of freedom, and it allows me to take the kinds of risks, be it speaking to a stranger or venturing out alone, that I would be reluctant to take when I was younger. And now I am in China.  Welcome.