C - day by day

Lately I've been feeling incredibly happy to be in China. When I left our apartment to get some food for lunch this afternoon, everything smelled wonderful. First I smelled burning leaves, which were very autumnal and lovely, and then I smelled some sort of food being grilled or barbecued. Even though I wasn't really in the mood for Chinese food (I was en route to KFC, in fact) it still smelled delicious.

Then I walked a bit further up the road and was overwhelmed by the smell of, well, human waste.

Regardless, I'm quite pleased to be living here in China. It's such food for thought, because the cultural foundation is quite foreign to that of my own, and meanwhile no single political or social ideology is really prevailing because everything is changing so fast. It's impossible not to reconsider one's fundamental principles in a place like this. My mind is constantly churning out new theories and suggestions -- almost as fast as I can make observations.

I'm definitely a tad homesick, though. I've been telling myself that things are the same as they would be if I'd gone to Duke for law school this fall; I most likely would've last seen my family in mid-August and would be seeing them again at Christmastime. In that case, however, I at least would've been living in the United States, in a culture that I can make a bit more sense of, under a government that is currently troubling but not nearly as terrifying to me as China's. But if someone offered to wave a magic wand where our teaching contracts would go away and a free flight home and terrific 9-month job offer would appear, I wouldn't take it. There's too much to be learned here, and we just have to wade through it, homesickness and all. Or, as my mother would say, "put one foot in front of the other." And that's what we'll do.