How About Another Shot?

September 9, 2009 02:30 hrs
Living in China is a constant series of adjustments. Like a drunken hire wire balancing act on too much cold medicine, where the psychic horror and exhilaration rush and wane in extremes so varied that even the most burned out or optimistic soul are taxed to the point of the same self recognition of what they are really made of that comes from the holiest of baptisms by fire. Welcome to being electrified and roasted alive by culture shock.

There is very little you can really do to prepare yourself for this life altering experience. When you are slow launched in that over powered aluminum tube with stale peanut free non allergenic snacks as it lumbers over the curvature of the planet for ten plus hours at an altitude so high that the Twilight Zone Simpson’s Gremlin has had his evil wing eating balls frozen stiff by the international dateline, you slowly accept your fate that Toto we indeed are no longer Kansas and there ain’t no coming back.

Listen I’m not talking about a little vacation time. This isn’t about that two week Chinese sojourn with your great Aunt Helen to fulfill her so called exotic last wishes to see the Great Wall and eat Peking Duck while rum fucking over a few sheckles to a few dirty moon eyed orphans the locals parade out for tourists to make themselves feel better about a life less lived.

This is about leaving everything behind and I really mean everything! The take your job and shove it, sell and or give away all your precious stuff kind of leaving. The kind of point of no return leaving that is bungee jumping without that giant rubber band strapped to your thrill seeking ass. I’m talking about a kind of Quantum leap that would have kept Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell permanently on the air so that this pop culture reference that bares the name of the TV show they were on would be as fresh as
________ (insert hip current reference here, please)

Upon landing in your new country you are instantly awaken from a dead cold sleep with the pounding head shaking knowledge that you are still very much in free fall. It’s the kind of dull tingly permeating sensation that must make new born babies stutter shake their limbs to a jolt of self actualization of “Oh shit I’m here!”

Culture shock is as real as a case of the shingles. You go through the same five stages of any loss. The denial, the anger, the bargaining, the *****, and the acceptance, with the final stage a work in progress as you realize that what you’ve lost is not your country, friends, family, or loved ones but yourself.

Where ever you go you are still you. Technically yes, I’m the same misfit here as I was back in the states. I get that. Yet now that I am in the breech of a life altering experience I know that the event horizon has me on the verge of becoming something that I won’t recognize when I look up from the bathroom sink in the morning.

It’s on par with having to eventually accept the fact that I am a functional illiterate in this Chinese society as I can barely read or write, much less speak so might as well add mute, deaf, and dumb to that grocery list. These the simple joys of being an immigrant, with Saint Sarcasm as my patron saint of maintaining some semblance of sanity and self respect with my new found dumb fuckery as a baby Laowai* in China.

It’s no wonder some of the locals laugh wildly when they see that the circus is in town when in fact it’s just me and the thing I have become.