The Word on the Street

The trick to being brave is not to think too hard. “How brave of you!” people would occasionally exclaim when they heard I was moving to China without knowing a soul. I would just sort of smile and shuffle awkwardly, knowing full well that I’m not really that brave of a person. But after four weeks in China, I’ve started to realize that it actually was somewhat brave of me to come here. Why? Because if I start thinking too hard about my situation, I get frightened and sad and horribly homesick for my friends and family.

Coming here was not difficult because I didn’t think very hard about it. I was like, “Ok, now I’ve decided to take this job: I’m going to China. Cool! It will be quite a learning experience.” and then promptly went about my everyday life.

I also think homesick is not quite the right word for what I’ve been feeling. It’s more like “friend/family-sick”. That feeling you get when it’s been far too long since you spent time with someone you felt supremely comfortable with.

Yesterday, the build-up of emotion was finally released by a very sad Chinese film. But in the midst of my misery (at times China feels like this vast plateau of foreignness filled with people and foods and words and grammatical constructions that clearly didn’t want anything to do with me) I started to read a book: “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Yeah, it’s popular fiction. But I think it’s pretty good. And it was more than perfect for my emotional state yesterday.

I’ve made a resolution based on the advice of Gilbert and one of my highly advanced English-learning students: I will not make learning Chinese my immediate goal. My student advised that I focus first on learning how the Chinese people think and make learning the Chinese language a side-hobby. Gilbert suggested that I simply fall in love with the language, and the culture it inhabits.

And so today I bought Chinese movies and cartoons to watch. My new friend Haili lent me two Chinese comics to slowly make my way through. I have made friends with the maintenance ladies at work who speak only Chinese. Our conversations are pretty simple and one-sided, but they exist. And on Monday and Wednesday mornings I meet my awesome tutor, who is helping me on the road towards functional conversation. It’s time for me to stop worrying about whether or not I’ll ever reach any level of fluency, and to start enjoying what little Chinese I do have!

And to end, I’ll finally get around to the title of this post. Gilbert met someone in Italy who had a theory that to know whether you belong in a city to stay, you have to know the word on the street. If that word is your word, then that city should be yours. Every city has a word on the street. That word is the word on almost everyone’s mind as they walk or drive or ride down the street. As examples, the word on the street in New York is “ACHIEVE”, in Los Angeles it’s “SUCCESS”, in Naples it’s “FIGHT” and in Rome it’s “SEX”. I think the word on the street at Stanford is “MATTER” and in Missoula it might be “CREATION” or “EXPRESS”. I asked Haili what the word on the street in Shenzhen is and without hesitation she said “MONEY”. And based on all my interactions since I came here, I’d have to say she was spot on.