Which occasioned me to reflect that this year is my twenty year high school reunion.

The year I graduated from college:

• The big summer movies were Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, the first Batman movie (with Michael Keaton), and the Abyss. Only the Abyss used computer special effects to any great degree, and then only in one scene.
• John McTiernan filmed Hunt for Red October because the Soviet Union represented a safely evergreen nuclear threat.
• There were two Germanys and one Czechoslovakia.
• China was a hermitic third-world country with a troublesome democracy movement.
• There was no World Wide Web. The industry where I have made my career did not yet exist.
• Futurists like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler thought industries like finance, media and publishing would lead the new Information Economy.
• HS advisors said journalism was a solid career choice for the future.
• Cell phones cost about $3/minute to use, and weighed about a pound.
• Colleges would accept neatly-handwritten application essays.

Courtesy of James Fallows, I learned that the Mandarin transcription of “Obama” is 奥巴马. I’ve written previously about the danger of “translating” foreign words from Chinese based on their characters, which are chosen primarily for their calligraphic appearance, not their semantic meaning. But it’s fun to do anyway.

Also, as soon as I saw this t-shirt I realized “I can read those characters!” Of course, those characters say “Obama,” helpfully translated above, but still: a fun party trick.

奥 is a common character for foreign transcription, usually for the long o or ah sounds. You find it in the Chinese words for Austria (奥地利), Australia (澳洲), and Olympics (奥林匹克). It means “mysterious.”

巴 is (I think) a noun particle (and thus essentially meaningless); dict.cn also translates it as “hope” which is very fitting indeed. I recognized it as the sound-part of the second character in 酒吧, which is the Chinese word for “bar” (as in “the place where you get drunk”).

马 means “horse,” which is the core of a common Chinese tongue-twister. Again, this is a common character for transliterations of foreign words; last year for example, Jenny and I ran in the 厦门国际马拉松.

So, the literal, direct, character-for-character translation of the Chinese transliteration of “Obama” is “Mysterious hopeful horse.”

…

This post comes in the midst of a little nostalgia Jenny and I are feeling for Xiamen. For example, scarcely a week goes by when we don’t lament our inability to get noodles from Bu Er Zhai.

One of my coworkers is leaving this week for a tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prompted some conversation around the office about life as a foreigner or outsider. In relaying this to Jenny I realized what I really missed about living in China: I am no longer special. In Portland, I’m just another white guy on a bicycle, a demographic pretty well represented here anyway. In Xiamen, it was impossible not to attract a lot of attention everywhere we went. So, to our neighbors we were special, because we were 老外. And to our friends and family “back home,” we were the exciting couple living an adventurous life in China.

The woman heroically coordinating my 20th high school reunion sent a mass email requesting RSVPs. The putative event is a year away. I’m inclined to just say “yes,” but with my life, it’s hard to estimate my ability to attend something like a high school reunion as much as a year in advance. A year ago, we were living in China with no kids, no car, no house, and no furniture. We have since corrected those omissions.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of our return from China. We literally descended through fireworks; I saw Independence Day 2007 from above.

It’s been a busy year. I haven’t been on airplane at all in the last 12 months.

From 1995 to 2003, somehow I managed to visit Eugene at least once a year. For eight years, when I thought of “Oregon” the place I pictured, instinctively (and a little bit sadly), was “Eugene.” Since my brother moved to Portland, I haven’t so much as driven through.

I haven’t been back to Nebraska — my home state — since the summer of 2004. Thus marking the longest period of my life that I’ve gone without setting foot on native soil.

Ten years ago, I had every intention of attending my 10-year reunion. I even paid for a ticket, filled out an entry for the facebook, and everything. Then I was laid off from what would be my last-ever archaeology job ... which layoff was approximately coincident with a move from Southern California (back) to Oregon; my first wedding (the less said, the better); and launching a glorious new career in web design. I pretty literally forgot I had a high school reunion to attend.

Sometimes I say things like “web design isn’t like digging ditches.” Meaning: more time ≠ better design The past week at Mercy Corps has proven that sometimes, web design is like digging ditches. Fresh on the heels of Cyclone Nargis, we’ve been fundraising for a response to the earthquake in southwest China. That’s meant a constant stream of creative: web pages, banners, logos ... and every minute I’m not pumping out creative is another minute we’re not raising money for our program partners in China.

Jenny hates this picture

So was it only a year ago we arrived in Xiamen? (Was it only a month ago [+4 days] that we arrived back in Portland?) Which part was (or is) the dream: the part where we lived in China or the part where we hadn’t ever lived in China?

One of my new coworkers (see previous post for more info) just returned from China. I was looking through his photos and feeling...God, I can only describe it as homesickness. Maybe not for China, so much, but certainly for Asia and, yeah, OK for Xiamen. Wow, how did that happen?

And clearly Portland life isn’t nearly as blog-worthy as Xiamen life. There’s your metaphor, Professor.