#jishou

INTI in Jishou, China

Back in September, Chilean artist INTI created a brilliant mural for the Back To School! Art + China Art initiative in Jishou, in the Hunan province, China. This project was curated by Seth Globepainter.

About The Mural The artist said: “Since the first astronomy records 4000 years ago in China, until today with modern mathematics, we are observing the universe attempting to decipher the…

I find myself settling into a new rhythm, which is what happens when people adjust to their surroundings. What is new this time, however, is that this rhythm is dictated by something bigger than myself. My parents were asking me, the other night, how teaching was going, how Hunan was. I struggled with answering, but finally, in a series of WeChat voice messages I finally told them simply that I was okay, that I was tired, but that those were the only things I could say for myself because for the first time in my life I was existing outside of myself.

Or at least the first time I ever felt it so acutely.

This sort of realization persisted throughout the week. Floating somewhere in the back of my mind, like a sort of mantra, This is for them. It is incredible how quickly you grow to be concerned for your students, that it has been less than two full weeks since we’ve met each other and started teaching with our words, our hearts and hands. Sometimes Carter wakes up from a nap feeling incredibly sentimental or emotional, and he says, “They’re so brilliant. What can we do for them?” Once again, I’ve never about being a teacher, or about service, but being here makes me realize there is something so wonderful and poignant about human connection—and it’s that caring is contagious. Kat said this during our weekly meeting, and maybe it was also the alliteration that appealed to the literature lover inside me, but the simplicity, the truth in those three words made me want to give it all my all for the rest of my time here. I mentioned in a previous reflection that I didn’t know who Joy in Jishou was, or how she was supposed to be different from the Joy who got on the plane at JFK Airport in New York. But I have this urge to delve into others, to make eye contact with them during class and make them smile because they are learning something relevant and interesting, something that can help them come closer to wherever they want to be in ten years.

It almost sounds disgustingly self-important, to think that our being here for a bare six weeks can have a considerable impact on the lives of the students—and of course, I did not come wanting or thinking to change anybody’s lives. But I don’t mean it that way. You know the question that gets tossed around—if you found out you only had a certain numbers of days left, what would you do? It’s a timeless question because everyone wonders who they would be or what they would do if they had nothing to lose. In a less dramatic sense, I know that Joy in Jishou is a character that is being developed under special circumstances, and if she only has six weeks to exist before she leaves and become Just Joy Again, then she should be the best version of that character.

At first I was planning on writing this in Chinese. I think about the things I could tell you—about the weird sort of nostalgia I get walking past street vendors selling ripe honey-peaches and the mom-and-pop baozi shops with their steaming baskets of meat buns and brown sugar mantou, worn tin pots bobbing with tea eggs. About night markets I think I may known from a hazy childhood summer, filled with lights and red meats and smoke from men gathered together to have skewered lamb and beer. I try to ward against this sort of romanticism, because the thing about this particular nostalgia is it is not really mine. I do not miss it, nor do I yearn for it—simply these images are in front of me in Jishou, and I simply walk past them on the street.

This summer has been different and is different, expectedly so. I’m sorry I have not been very good with replying to you two. Sometimes I do not know what to say, and part of me is still insecure that you will ask why I chose to come to a random part of China to teach English when I live in New York City, home to a dozen publishing companies and a world I know. Because I do not know. I have never been a teacher, nor have I thought of being one since first grade when I discovered liking to write on the chalkboard. New places and circumstances are interesting in that I have many faults: I cry easily; I complain too much; I am most often too concerned with control and control and control, something nobody can afford to always have.

Yet despite all this, I’m here and I’m almost surprised at how okay I’ve been. I am not in Jishou as a writer, nor as a daughter wanting to leave home, not even as the foreign language teacher I am supposed to be. At the end of the day, I put on jasmine scented bug spray and all I feel is just me—an “I.” Like simultaneously with identity and without, a ubiquitous “I” that is common in perspective, just like how you are an “I,” how the 13 year-old daughter of the stationery shop lady is an “I,” how some old toothless man I have unknowingly passed in the supermarket is an “I.” Yet it’s so lonely in its particularities. I wake up and go to sleep as Joy, wake up and go to sleep as Joy, as Joy in Jishou, as a name and something I struggle to figure out.

A disclaimer. This is not a letter about identity. At least I do not think it is.

That is as broad and as narrow as I can get. Each passing day comes with its small distinctions—lotus for dinner instead of Chinese spinach, going to the gym or not going to gym, feeling guilty or feeling okay about it. Sometimes I eat too much sugar and get angry. Pointless things that seem to form the threads of a new narrative I do not yet know. I am not saying that this narrative will be amazing or terrible or life-changing, or if so, to what extent, but—

Let me put it this way. 

When I run at the gym the open windows look across into apartment buildings with gridded windows, clothes hung up to dry. Spices float up from the street below and make me sneeze. Whose clothes are they? Who is cooking what and for whom? Realistically, these things do not matter to me, or to the family to which the clothes belong or dinner is being cooked for. 

Yet despite how much these details do not matter, I am still looking out the window and wondering.

JISHOU UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL BUILDING, JISHOU