I met you, Jun, while walking between a smallish plaza-like space behind a place called West Street in Yangshuo, China. Myself, I was meandering, but I don't know what you were doing. In fact, you were dressed in a taupe dress jacket and pants like you should have been doing something else. I remember vague details from our conversation. For instance, you were a tour guide and you were also managing a company, which I later discovered was a grocery store near the very plaza we were standing in. But I'm sorry, I don't remember much more than that. I'm writing now because 1.) I need to let you know how I felt about this West Street you seemed so proud of, this anomaly in the heart of what would be a farming outpost on a lazy river. I need to say these things about that place, but I also know that you don't need to really know what I mean. I need to say them out loud none-the-less. 2.) I need to apologize for how I didn't deal with you as a person, but as an abstract voice that, to me, represented a gulf of cultural difference and material opportunity. Me not dealing with you was a manifestation of my guilt. You seemed to want something that you thought I had. You thought I had this thing, perhaps, because I represented a freedom and worldliness. I feel guilty because I am this freedom and worldliness, because this unfairly is my privilege. However, I was not willing to let you know what I have because telling you makes me feel more guilty.

At the time we chatted, I was eager to have a passing conversation in English with you. I've had so many of these while living abroad. People approach me all the time with random invitations to chat. It's not like home for me, these chats. No one approaches me back home and carves this kind of air space between us to have a conversation about who we are, where we're from, and what we're doing. So, this novelty makes me appreciate these encounters.

But now, let me just tell l you about West Street and how it made me feel. It made me feel like I was missing something. I wondered what I was not feeling that I was supposed to feel when I walked down its newly cobble-stoned lanes, with its international Bob Marley soundtrack seeping out of restaurants that advertise milkshakes, hamburgers, and burritos, past boutiques that sell tie dye and beaded scarfs. I don't have something against these things, or what they mean for the local economy, but I wondered what I am supposed to feel here with all these good-hearted intentions at enterprise, but here I am sarcastic and critical. In fact all I felt was the suspicion that I had been corralled there, that I was lazy and gullible for giving in; and that, maybe, I wanted it secretly because I wanted to feel superior to it.

There I was a westerner on West Street after having been in the wilds of your countryside for a month, having been the guest of a village feast, having gotten used to your snacks, and taking breaks in small village stores, and getting to know and making use of the general redundancies of a typical small town: where to find food, where to find a place to sleep, and how these places can be not so easily recognizable. Living in your country requires learning basic things all over again. To be honest, learning these basic things and then coming to the more difficult challenge of knowing what's going on around me; to me, this is a bit of a merit badge that I sported proudly. I think many foreigners who live here might brandish this mundane achievement, as well; and, perhaps, so might you if you lived in my country. If you had to figure out how to survive the wilds of the USA I think you too would shelve this trophy up on your ego. And believe me, though America looks like it would be an easy, modern, convenient place to live, there is a way to be learned and survival skills to be honed. Like anywhere in the world, you are easily swallowed if you can't swim with the fishes. Funny, I'm not exactly sure if I'm ready to survive in my own country. So, there I was in China. This desire of the greener-pasture other land and the half-blind-folded reality of living there is what I will not begrudge you either, if you ever get the opportunity to live abroad, which I know from your correspondence is something that you might yearn for.

Coming back to West Street, I know that this street is not entirely for me and my kind. It is for your people, too. It is for your people to cavort a little in the multicultural playground of an idealized western commercial space. It's for your people to pass us in restaurants and behold us in some, though crude, re-creation of our natural environment, to see us eating with our knives and forks, slathering sauces from bottles on our foods, and drinking ice-filled beverages in large glasses. It's to watch us carry-on in big groups of us, and watch how we gesticulate and express ourselves outwardly and physically in our native tongue. I know this street is your novel amusement park or zoo, and I don't begrudge you that because that is near to how I move about and observe your people everyday. I 'people watch' your people. I try to get to know your peoples' manner, your way. I eavesdrop on your people. I snatch pieces of your language that I only kind of understand, and I try to figure out how you speak. I don't mean I try to figure out this dead Chinese that people learn on audio-tapes and in books, but the living, diverging, scattering arms of the language as it envelops all everyday spaces. I love walking through your peoples' built environments and examining how your people have made this part of world, how it's superficially different than mine, but how it's functionally the same. I like coming to know how your people behave in these trivial tests of social living: how you line up at the bank, how you drive and under what social contract (or none) you operate within these lanes of human targets, how you respond to minor breaches of etiquette, how you keep or lose your cool. All these things are so small in the understanding of a people, but they are within my grasp because they are within the field of view of everyday life, which as a human, is the one thing in which I'm an expert.

To be honest, I do admonish myself for having not just avoided your town entirely. Because now I have to face these contradictions in myself. Had I not gone to Yangshuo I wouldn't have met you and you wouldn't have become this composite representation of these earnest everyday people who yearn to learn English, to meet a foreigner, to have what you've determined to be a better life. Why should I assign you this composite role, I don't know, but I'm sorry that it's what I've made you become (to me, at least). I'm sorry that I allowed you to write me for a year. I'm sorry I sat silently on the other side of this terminal between our two very different set of possibilities and allowed your yearning for a connection with me to fester. I'm sorry that after this silent treatment I lashed out at you. This is not to say that you were not infatuated with me, and that you needed to address that sickness. I believe it was a kind of a sickness and that your intentions weren't exactly innocent. We've all been infatuated. We've all behaved weirdly under the spell of these infatuations, so I shouldn't hold it against you too much. In my attempt to be a kind observer of human nature and human society, I failed. I apologize for my automatic response, which was aversion. I should be able to see that being corralled to West Street and that having a wisp of you trail me for a year is an ironic helping of just desserts. When you say that being home in Yangshuo and on West Street that you can't help but to think of me, a bit of me bristles because I don't want to be a part of what gives West Street an authenticity for you. However, all of this is not unlike my continuing interest and presence in the Chinese world. My meandering and so-called observations of your 'people' in their native habitat, my yearning to know your language, to make an authentic human connection, all this is not unlike an infatuation. However, unlike you, I've not pinned these infatuations up on a single individual. This is not say that under a different set of stresses that I wouldn't or am not capable of having such a delusion about one person. I suppose I'm really not too different in my earnest, near bordering infatuation with wanting to know other foreign 'exotic' places. I've met my match it seems, in you; like we've come together holding these wands that color the world how we want it to be. I sweep my wand across a society, as you sweep it across me. If all my pictures and writing and desires to know China could be summed up in a succinct email, maybe too, I might write something crude to your civilization as a whole:

subject: miss you

sincerely,
hannah