Pretty much the first thing anyone says when we see them for the first time is “are you glad to be back?” This is surprisingly hard to answer. Yeah, it’s good to be back but the emotion is weirdly muted. We were only gone a year so returning to life in Oregon is a little too easy. We just bought a new car — a Subaru Impreza, just like our last car. Well, this one is silver, not blue.

The other thing people ask is “so what was China like?” (or variations thereof, such as “did you like China?”). The question is so hard to answer — that life being so different from this life. It’s easier (for me) to express it in reverse: Oregon, after a year in China, feels like a fairytale land. At almost any given moment, in almost any given location, the beauty of the immediate situation is overwhelming. If nothing else, the air is clean. It’s like, everything is Oregon is so easy and beautiful and of such high quality (hell, the tap water tastes like bottled water) that Oregonians could be forgiven for losing a little perspective about what makes life actually hard. Think of it like this: we routinely saw people in China who were starving. What would it take for an American to starve? Debilitating mental illness, or the terminal stages of a substance addiction, probably.

If you’ve never lived in a place like China, you’ll have a really hard time understanding what it’s like to live in a place like China. Maybe it’s like prison, or combat. Everything is difficult all the time. There are moments of amazement and transcendent beauty, but they don’t come constantly and unbidden, as in the lazy minutes of an Oregon summer afternoon. Every day in Oregon is like your spouse handing you a coffee while you drive your air-conditioned Subaru through green trees along a traffic-less highway. Every day in China is like doing the Friday New York Times crossword while standing in a filthy 100° bus packed with factory workers, where occasionally you pass the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen.

So:

Q: What’s it like to be back?
A: Easy.

Q: What’s China like?
A: Hard.

In the last 24 hours the feeling finally hit us: OK, we're actually leaving. We finished our bank work yesterday, after a brief scare where we learned that foreigners can’t send RMB out of the country. We thought all my earnings at Ports (in RMB) would be stuck in the country, but the bank clerk presented a workaround: have a Chinese friend transfer the money to the US. Which we did.

Yesterday was also last day we engaged our maid, Yalian, who evinced a surprisingly emotional goodbye. She had really taken to Bismarck (after about an hour of abject terror) and especially loved Jenny. She was in tears and huggy...this is huge in China where holding hands is a scandalous display of public emotion. In saying goodbye to Bismarck — which was really strange behavior in a country where some people still see dogs as potential food — Yalian remarked how strange it was that Bismarck will have flown to China and back, and she had never even been to the airport. I think we probably treated her better than many of her other clients did. We paid her 10 RMB more than her asking price because of the dog, and we could speak a little Mandarin. We also hired her through our vacations even though it wasn’t necessary. Yesterday we paid her a bonus and let her have her pick of our remaining (i.e. non-Oregon-going) possessions — all of which she took. Including some of Jenny’s old jeans and boots. We think it’s fun that there's a maid from the countryside in Xiamen wearing $100 designer jeans. Afterwards, Jenny and I were shocked to realize we didn’t even know if she had children. It’s hard to believe such an ephemeral relationship could be so affecting.

The beautiful weather in Xiamen deepens the melancholy. The air is hot and vivid. We took our last walk over Huweishan (the hill behind our house), through vegetation that seems daily to grow more tangled. Jenny pointed out a bird: what kind of bird is that? I was ashamed we didn’t know; hell we never even tried to know. We’d seen those birds every day. It was small, with a black hood and white collar, kind of sparrowy. They live only in the trees on the hill; we never see them around the apartment.

After tomorrow, Heaven willing, we’ll be gone. Bismarck and Jenny and Paul and about 100 pounds of possessions will be leaving Xiamen. We probably won’t ever again see Yalian, or the little sparrowy birds, or the perpetually-hungover couple in the corner shop who sell us bottled water, or the street cleaning vehicles that play “Happy Birthday,” or the albino beggar and his haggard uncle, or the Aussie who runs the best coffee shop in the neighborhood, or the mangey puppies in the gypsy camp on the hilltop, or the old guys playing Chinese chess at the teashop, or our travel agent, or any one of a thousand people we’ve seen every day for a year. We won’t see them again, but they’ll still be cleaning our neighbors’ apartments, or in the trees in the park, or at the corner shop, or driving up and down Hubin Beilu, or on the curb in front of the Marco Polo, or in the coffee shop, or hanging around the gypsy camp, or sitting on plastic buckets on the sidewalk in front of the teashop, or answering phones at the travel agency.

I have a little trouble measuring the emotion we’re feeling right now. We’re leaving a place that never felt permanent, but that did, finally, come to feel comfortable. Xiamen has been the site of the hardest year of our relationship, and the hardest year of my life. I never knew I had this much in me; I never knew we had this much in us. I won’t miss it soon, but someday I’ll miss Xiamen.

I hate saying “goodbye.” I don’t mean that I never want to leave places I know I should leave, or part from friends I don’t want to part with. Those things have to happen, they’re part of life. Ending and leaving and quitting and parting are the bitter notes of life’s ephemerality; if you live your life honestly and with clear eyes, you find that the sweetness comes from knowing that all things will end, so you’d better enjoy what’s immediately at hand. I hate to leave or be left as much as the next guy, so in the same sense that everyone hates saying “goodbye,” so do I.

No, I hate the actual word “goodbye.” I hate the business of leaving. My favorite exit is the French Exit. I like to think that, if I attend a party for example, about half an hour after I’ve left someone is asking someone else, “hey, wasn’t Souders here? Where is that guy?” That’s the best-case scenario. The worst is when you start saying “goodbye” half an hour before you actually leave, with lots of this-has-been-great and see-you-next-Tuesday and thank-you-so-much and other parting chitchat.

This reluctance comes, maybe, from my midwestern aversion to overt emotion. Or maybe it’s just denial. Certainly some of it comes from not wanting to make a scene.

I kind of hate saying “hello,” too.

With the end of the school year comes night after day after night of farewells. One last coffee date, one last Doggy Play Date, one last night out with friends. We’re not the only ones leaving, so this isn’t all about us. But I’m finding it all a little tiring. Two nights ago damn near every expat in town was at the new club in Dongdu park. A Farewell-a-rama. I clearly drank too much (although when I count it up it couldn’t have been more than 6 beers — Tiger beers, at that); yesterday I was too hungover to make the beach-themed doggy goodbye Jenny arranged with our dog friends. In fact, I slept (more or less) until 3 pm. But frankly, I was glad for the day off. Too many goodbyes.

Years ago, a friend who was studying Lakota claimed that the Lakota translation for “hello” was “what do you want?” and goodbye was something like “well, OK then.” This smells like an Urban Legend to me but I like it. I wish English had multipurpse words like “salaam” or “aloha” that express a warm sentiment without getting specific about temporal directionality.

Jenny completed, in the span of two painful days, the paperwork necessary to transport Bismarck out of the country. It was horrible. Thursday night Jenny was in tears. Mercifully I was busy with work and thus not very involved. The large hangup in the end was over Bismarck’s health certification. Which required (by Jenny’s) count, seven trips between the customs office/cargo agent, and the city-approved veterinarian. Contrast with the health certification we obtained at literally the eleventh hour in the US, wherein the USDA vet met us at the airport for an inspection.

The reason this is so painful, by the way, is that Chinese bureaucrats don’t want to do anything they haven’t done many times before. This isn’t just a fear of novelty, it’s practical. The first person to advance a piece of paperwork is then responsible for the final result. If Bismarck winds up transporting the Canine Flu to America the vet in Xiamen is now responsible. Processes in China are intended to diffuse culpability, so no one is responsible for anything. When there is no process (for example, the first large dog shipped via cargo out of Xiamen, ever), the bureaucrats express their reluctance by passing you back and forth. The buck never stops.

The flip side is that, for highly routine tasks, the paperwork is surprisingly efficient (because the process of responsibility-diffusion has developed completely.) We witnessed this at the emergency room when Jenny hurt her foot running, or when we registered as resident aliens. (This efficiency, however, does not apply to banking, where simply making a withdrawal will consume one or two hours.)

At any rate <knocks wood> everything is good to go now, so come Wednesday we won’t have more than a few hours of bureaucratic pain as a prelude to our 35 hours of airports and airplanes.

We’re entering the pre-move period, familiar from a year ago, when we are no longer excited about leaving but rather just want the whole damn thing to be over with already.

Leaving Xiamen is not like leaving Portland (only in reverse). For example, I am not often struck by emotions of bittesweetness: “I sure will miss this...” Which is funny considering the likelihood of our ever returning to Xiamen is pretty low So when I think “this might be the last time I walk through Shiting Lu,” it really is the last time I will walk through Shiting Lu. On the other hand, yeah there are things I actually will miss from our year here. Off the top of my head: Huweishan park, the noodle bar, our maid Yalian, travel to Hong Kong, learning Chinese, the romance of living the expat life. But the hassle of moving (read: “the hassle of moving Bismarck”) and my psycho-crazy last week at work kind of swamp both the bitter and sweet.

Xiamen is putting on its best face for us before we leave. We had a couple of farewell events this weekend: a doggy play date at Dongdu Park with all of Bismarck’s dog-friends, and a surprise party at a fantastic wine bar owned by a Malaysian couple. The weather is brilliant. Saturday was fiercely hot, clear and sunny in a manner unprecedented in our year in Xiamen. The air had a startling clarity, such that you could make out the second mountain range on the mainland (about 30 miles away), something that has occurred only once previously in my memory.

In the clear air, distances seemed shorter (or rather, more like my sense of distance and scale from back in America). I had noticed the reverse of this phenomenon shortly after we moved here. Huweishan (the hill just behind our apartment) seemed impossibly tall when viewed from the lake; my sense of scale was that it must be at least as tall as the West Hills in Portland (500' to 700'), and correspondingly farther away. In fact, it’s only a little more than 300 feet at its tallest. To my eyes (accustomed to clear American air), the thick air makes even relatively small, nearby landmarks seem larger and farther away than they actually are.

In the last year I generated a hypothesis about global attitudes toward shit:

“A person’s aversion to fecal matter is inversely proportional to their cultural distance from England.”

Most of Asia smells much of the time like shit. Even spick-and-span Singapore. I don’t know how many times I’m sitting with a group of expats and a few locals at an outdoor eatery when a rich aroma of shit wafts in from the [ sea | gutter | lagoon | river ]. The Anglo-Saxons — stereotypically the Brits — take this almost as a personal affront: “How dare this rural city in a developing country smell like shit! Don’t they know there are English speakers living here?” Aussies, Kiwis, Canucks and Americans grit their teeth and pinch their noses. Continentals and Asians are utterly nonplussed. “Of course it smells like shit. Doesn’t the entire world?”

It’s interesting that the stereotypical Peace Corps project is digging a well. NGO fieldworkers often use western-style toilets as a barometer of a project’s boondoggleness. That is, if an organization is installing privies or flush toilets in a teeny village, you can be pretty sure they don’t know what they’re doing. Because there are so many other things that the villagers would rather have than plumbing. Such as mobile phones, electricity, satellite TV, and Internet access. Probably in that order. Thus vast slums in which everyone craps in the gutter while chatting on their mobiles. When my grandparents modernized the farm in the 1930s, I bet they added telephone then electricity and then indoor plumbing.

In terms of relative value, you gain much more from a mobile phone or even satellite TV than sewage treatment. A cel phone is cheap, reliable, disposable, and provides enormous social and business benefits. Sewage treatment is expensive, centralized, and requires massive maintenance, without which it rapidly becomes worse than the non-system (ditch-crapping) it replaces. And its benefits are diffuse and abstract. Yeah, I’m less likely to get cholera at some unspecified point in the future, but with the mobile phone I can talk to my mom in the home village right now. If you only have a little money to spend on self-improvement, where will you put it: pool it with everyone else in the slum and get sewage treatment sometime next year, or buy yourself a mobile phone now?

This is one reason the Information Revolution is not going away, Peak Oil be damned. The corollary is that, in the long view, information work is much easier to outsource than manufacturing, and more likely to stay outsourced.

Other fun Asian sewage facts:

• Asian sewage smells different from American sewage. More cabbagy and ammoniac, less eggy.
• The solid bits in sewage turn liquid really quickly. When I was first confronted with open sewers I expected them to be full of chunks but, what the hey, it’s all liquid? And not actually brown but kind of an algal black?
• Asian plumbers don’t use gooseneck gas traps. Ever! This is because they don’t vent the exhaust to the roof (as in America). Squat toilets, urinals, and the open drain in our bathroom are pretty much open pipes to the city sewer. In our bathroom we fight this odor by pouring a little bleach down the drain.
• It’s pretty safe to eat fish caught near sewage outlets. Cook the hell out of them first, though. Fish caught near industrial waste outlets? Not so much.