Time’s Gone Inside Out

I knew this period of my life would end and at times I willed it into existence. I have been a constant surveyor of “normalcy.” I have seen it in this blog over and over; it is clear it is on my mind. At the same time that I feel a sense of normal. I feel time slipping past me in the way it always does in spring. I am reminded of my senior spring, when on the first warm day I sat outside on a bench with the boy I liked, drinking Jack’s Hard Cider. Those kinds of days passed very quickly. In some ways, I wanted them to (so I could enter the big, confusing rest-of-my-life I had been promised after college). But in retrospect, they ended and I missed them. I think I get this feeling every time it gets warm. Living is a very cyclical thing.

A few weeks ago, I biked to Fuxing Rd. and drank a beer outside, completely without cares. It is the epitome of springtime to get a little drunk in the sunshine. Before my friends showed up, a very little old lady approached me and asked me something about Russia in Chinese. I am often mistaken for Russian, so I told her that I am an American. She nodded knowingly and started singing a little song. I believe it to be a tiny Russian tune. Now there is covid all over Shanghai and these kinds of interactions feel less likely.

When I say there is covid “all over” Shanghai, I mean that there are like 100 cases or less and they are extremely contained by all the policies and infrastructure that China has built over the last two years. But yesterday afternoon our whole university was called to return to the building and get covid tested onsite. We were afraid we could be locked in the building for 48 hours or more if it was discovered someone was a close contact (or worse, a covid case), as many people have in the last weeks and months. But all 1800 tests came back negative. We scanned a QR code to view our own results, stamped in red by the Chinese government. It was the kind of beautiful bureaucratic situation I have come to expect from living here.

There has been a real panic in the building. Classes have voluntarily gone online and our office will be alternating in-person and remote days. The risk is still incredibly low, but the logic is that if only half of us are in the building when it is locked down, then only half of us will be trapped. Not sure if that is exactly the mode of thinking we should be going with, but it is also characteristic of my experience in this institution. It feels a bit like March 2020 again, and these are feelings that I had a) forgotten and b) hoped to never feel again. Yet this time it is not the virus that is unfamiliar to me, but the government that is tasked with containing it. This is a very interesting time to be here and in some ways, time is really all I am thinking about.

Things Left in Closets

Recent events have put me back in my old Philadelphia house. I often think about former homes in terms of their requirements for cleaning. I know the scratches in the floor of the Tulip Street house because I used to Swiffer mop it every week. I know the corners of the room I came of age in because I used to sweep it. I know the weird floorboards and fireplaces of my Bryn Mawr life because I was constantly battling 1880s dust bunnies. I’m not quite sure yet how I will remember this apartment. Maybe the wad of hair that the washer exposes every time it spin-cycles itself out of its nook.

In the Philadelphia house, there was a thin sheet of metal that reinforced the right edge of the closet, some quickie renovation blemish. There was a very small crack between the sheet and the doorframe. When I first moved in, I shoved a bunch of discarded wall art and a loose shelf from my IKEA desk in there. Every time I vacuumed the closet, I’d make a mental note not to forget those things were there. When I gave away my desk when I moved out, I had to run up the stair to grab that leaf of particle board: and here’s a shelf! I think I remembered taking everything out of that crack when I left, but my move was chaotic and full of grief and my mother was determined to make good time to Pittsburgh. I never really got a chance to sit in that room and thank it for the two really messy years I spent growing up there.

Now that there is just a spring ahead of my move back to America, I have been thinking a lot about the process of leaving. I have accumulated so many belongings here, mainly the twins of things I had in the US. There is no reason to bring these duplicates back: they’d be expensive to ship and once back, what would I do with 3 IKEA lamps and a giant blanket? They are relics of this time. They won’t fit in a future life. I don’t know what to do with them. I think of them like the items left behind in Pripyat, Ukraine. They won’t decay for 35 years, but somehow that possibility seems more comforting than the image of a hotel staff member coming across them and disposing of them.

I am looking for connection. I try to remind myself that this is human, part of this experience. Sometimes it just feels weak.

Consistency

I refuse to have New Years resolutions, for a thousand reasons. More interestingly, though, I can’t make any resolutions because I am stubbornly always going to be this person.

Tonight Cheng Mun and I Zoomed with some potential fellows for next year. Afterwards, she read some of her old application essays aloud. I hadn’t saved mine to my computer, so I had to log into Interfolio to see what I had written for my own. Just under a year later, it is interesting to see what I was thinking at the time and what I thought the application readers would want to read from me. I wrote those essays in a few hours in early January, at the kitchen table on Tulip Street, a glass of sour beer next to me. Reading them again, I could’ve written them now. Some lines are slightly more cogent versions of sentences that appeared in my PhD applications. Some pieces of that application were eloquent (and at the time, I felt certain that they would be well received) and I am glad I got to read them again. At the same time, I am filled with a little bit of sadness about what I thought would be desired of me in this job and how horribly it contrasts with what has actually been expected. All of the things I wrote, the things I thought I was hired for, have been received with confusion when I have voiced them here. In my IEP, I have had to spend a lot of time explaining why the things that I am knowledgable about are true and real and important. In the application process, I thought the fact of my hiring was proof that those things were also valued here.

I knew I would be hired for the job. I said many times that I did not know how it would turn out, but that I would be very surprised if I did not end up with a job offer. Now I wonder what about me seemed desirable. Did I seem like the kind of person who wouldn’t try to put up a fight or try to change things? My mother says that her best friends always says that when you get a job or acceptance, it’s also a little bit of an insult. They see something in you. You can’t always be sure the thing they see is your talent. Maybe it is just your willingness to go along with some idea they have about the world.

Pangs of something

I am sitting at a table in one of the classrooms at NYUSH. I feel the table shaking slightly because Julius sits next to me, writing as he does in the notebook where he seems to do all of his thinking. He is wearing a peacoat inside. He looks extraordinarily European.

It’s finals week here and the office building--university is extremely quiet. It does not have the manic, unhinged quality of finals week that I always relished at Bryn Mawr. I used to love going into the library at that time, when it would be open 24-hours a day, and soak in the absolutely reckless vibrations of every other stressed undergraduate. Once during a writing center shift, an older woman called me over to the beanbag chair where she was wrapped in one of our communal blankets. “Wake me up at nine PM,” she said, as if I were nursemaid, or her mother. “A fews ago my alarm didn’t go off and I woke up at midnight. All the lights were off and I had to call public safety to let me out of the locked library.” Finals week should feel a bit like that, like waking up in the dead, cold library at midnight because you decided falling asleep at someone’s workplace was the way to go. But now, the hallways are empty and there is a sense of letdown that is decidedly un-December.

A few weeks ago an Amazon package arrived from the US for me. I fetched it from the university mailroom and brought it up to the fifth floor. Inside was a tiny Christmas tree and miniature ornaments, made in China and sent to the US, where my mother picked them out and had them sent from the warehouse to me in China again. Opening it, it felt briefly like an integration from an old life to the life I have now.