XX (Returning: Part 1)

I write this on an Amtrak traveling through Michigan. The train, amazingly, to me at least, has the internet. Right now I'm looking out the window at a water tower, blue on the stem and white around the bulb: "Wilson," it reads. Or at least I think that's what it said. By the time I finished the sentence and worked out the syntax of how to describe the tower I had forgotten what it said. At any rate, we're passing though a small town somewhere in the middle of lower Michigan. I came here to attend the Consortium of Graduate Communication Institute at the U of Michigan in Ann Arbor, getting in late late Saturday night, Shanghai to Dallas to Detroit to a really expensive cab ride. The thing ended today, Tuesday, though I had to skip out in the middle of keynote to get on this train; going to Chicago, and from there I will get on a bus to Madison. On Friday Buddyfest begins and after, will have two weeks to see family and other friends before heading back to China at the end of June. I'm a bit sick but it's nothing serious, run down from the jet lag and lack of sleep in combination with the business of the conference. All said I learned a lot and made a few connections. Swales and Feak, pretty much the biggest names in the field of graduate communication were at my presentation / "works-in-progress talk" (of course not to see me but the person before me), and that in itself would make it all worthwhile.

Being back in the U.S. feels surprisingly uneventful so far. Asides from my frequent encounters with cheese, and seeing a few old friends and acquaintances at the conference, there is an odd lack of novelty. Part of this is due to the fact that I was back in the States in February, part of this is due to the fact that I was at a similarly purposed and populated conference in China last March, and part is due to my relentless connection to the people I love via smart phone. One of the best days of my life, so the story goes, is the day I got back from Japan, a place that I was much more isolated in because there weren't smart phones or Skype or Wechat. I spoke with my family maybe three times over the course of a year. The only thing that was constant was email, and even then there was a delay between sending and receiving due to the fact that I had to travel an hour to get to a computer to check my email. Of course email was the beginning of instantaneous global communication (for those who couldn't afford to buy expensive international phone cards such as my 19 year old self), so I was lucky to have that. And of course it's not like I'm two-hundred years old, and kids these days, and etc. performances of the wizened and wow I was alive in 1998! My point though is that part of my joy upon returning to the States, of the thrill of being able to speak English and be "understood" again, was the fact that I had spent the previous year in a kind of seclusion, one where I didn't really ever really get to "be myself" though the expression of language.

Connecting this to the last post then, and the "privilege" of possessing these technologies that continually spin around us, is that I'm never very far away from anyone that I want to talk to (and who wants to talk to me). Seeing, say, my girlfriend in the flesh is certainly different than seeing her on the Wechat, but I don't forget what she looks like or the sound of her voice. Some of my most pressing needs then, the need of talking about my day or for goofing around, or the more "practical" needs of coordinating plane tickets or getting help with a recipe, are taken care of in the moment, and I don't experience much longing. The global economy, at least in the part of China where I live, is ever present, and though I can't get a good burrito, I can get a-good a lot of other things. All said, as I come back the States it doesn't feel like I've been gone a long time. During the entire time I've been in China I've also been in constant touch with most of the people and things I care about. "Wherever you go there you are," the title of a book I've never read but it's seems true in this case, that I feel many of the same things here in the U.S. that I felt in China since much of my immediate experience is similar. Further, I can even be foreign in the U.S. so long as I hold the idea of China in my head, or rather, the idea that I am a person who has been living in China for the last year in my head (and therefore the idea that I am different than a person who has not been living in China). This spirit of difference in mind then, I will say one thing: the trains here are quite old and a little dirty and slow, but they are quite comfortable.