Hellobike
I am happiest when I am riding my bike through the city. “My bike” is a very loose term. There is no real ownership involved (is it Communist?). The street is littered with parked bikes and you can unlock any of them with a mini-program within Alipay, paying just a few cents to ride anywhere you want. I love biking in the wide bike lanes, but I am most delighted by the bike-specific left turn lanes, which make me feel like the king of the road as I speed crosswise through the intersection. You park the bike wherever you land and go on your merry way. Though I try not to think too much about it, I believe I am somewhat of a spectacle. Once, an old man took a photo of me riding the bike and I tried to laugh it off.
On that subject, my shoe size is not readily available in China (and I expect my pants size isn’t either, though in the spirit of ED recovery I have chosen not to check). I have dubbed myself “Bigfoot,” despite my shoe size being the most common women’s size in the United States. It’s another way in which I am so visible: I am taller, larger than everyone else and take up more space. I have decided not to be ashamed of that. I have spent the last 20 years afraid of my body and the last year in the early stages of repairing this most important relationship. I refuse to let the relative body diversity here make me feel like I am unacceptable, not when I already exert so much energy to fight the body-negative thoughts that come just from within.
Another thing I have noticed about joining this fellowship is how important it seems to me to emphasize that I had a whole life I abandoned for this position. I keep finding myself talking about all the things I had before this: a full-time job I’d received two promotions at, a cat, a car, a Roth IRA, and a life entirely financially independent from my parents in a city with no connection to my family. I have noticed how crucial this seems to my identity, to prove that I completed something before I came here. I think in one way it is a manifestation of the weirdness I feel about being older and “more established” than some of the other fellows. It’s also representative of the conflict I felt in choosing to come here, all of the nights I spent asking Emily, “Why did I decide to give up my entire life to move across the world?” and making her tell me why, again and again.
In a deeper, more painful sense, I know I am protective of this fact of my post-graduate years because it was something so completely out of my control. I had no choice about it, no option to move home for a while before I set out alone. I was in this position from the moment I walked across the stage at Bryn Mawr, holding my prop diploma. And like accidental teenagers mothers who get married and proceed to have more and more kids—in my uncharitable perspective—I have to emphasize this part of my life to make it seem like I wanted it, like I chose it, and that it wasn’t just something that happened to me that I made the best of.
I’ve coped with some aspects of this identity discomfort by constantly reminding everyone that I am quickly approaching 25, as though hearing the year of my graduation and that I “worked for two years before this!” will make them think how mature and wise and accomplished I am. But I have also coped by holding on to aspects of that old life. I feel overly protective and nervous about my cat’s welfare. I developed a plan to save $10,000 more while I am here so I can return home with more than the cost of my student loans in savings. I browse Philadelphia job postings daily, just to worry about what position I will be able to achieve and how much money I make when I go back. And while part of my is so tied to the plan of returning, part of me wonders what it would be like to stay here, to be a true expatriate.
I do not know what form things will take. I say this while looking out the sliding glass door of my 26th floor apartment, past our dusty balcony and towards the lights of the high-rise buildings just across the way. I am not going to pretend that today that fact feels comforting—clearly not, if I am scheming about my car loan. But just as I sit here and worry about the future in mid-August, I was sitting in my dorm room listening to old Kanye four years ago. And worry about the SAT four years before that. In a year I could be here or in the US or somewhere else or nowhere at all. But thank god I won’t be in high school again.
