homesickness

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.

Think you might be homesick? Unfortunately, expatriate life in China means living with constant homesickness, so gauging the severity of this emotion is essential to regulating your well-being. We have devised the following test to help in this regard. Please circle one statement that best represents what you miss from ‘back home.’

1. “I don’t miss anything at all. Everything about China and our lives here is an improvement over Oregon”
2. “I miss items specific to our particular lives ‘back home’: my Vanilla bicycle, our Subaru Impreza, my friends and family, etc.”
3. “I miss aspects unique to my hometown and state: Stumptown coffee, Powell’s Books, long empty beaches, spruce trees, etc.”
4. “I miss generalized features of life and culture in my home country, such as American landscapes, American shopping malls, and pale American faces.”
5. “I miss exposure to any non-Chinese place or cultural artifact. For example: Croatian wine, Hungarian architecture, Singapore.”
6. “I miss the year I lived in Los Angeles.”

Scoring

The number you circled indicates the severity of your homesickness:

1. You are not homesick at all. You have probably been replaced by some kind of replicant or alien pod creature.
2. You have acute homesickness. The application of appropriate local substitutes such as Qingdao beer and Szichuan food may temporarily relieve your unhappiness.
3. You have chronic homesickness. Local substitutes may not prove effective. We recommend locking yourself in your apartment all weekend and watching giant-robot cartoons from your childhood.
4. You have terminal homesickness. A vacation away from China may provide a temporary improvement in your condition.
5. You have reverse homesickness. There is no cure for this condition other than total removal from the Chinese environment. Even remaining locked in your apartment will prove futile as you’ll realize your appliances and furnishings are all constructed in that particular half-ass way where they appear to be of a fine quality but said “quality” was applied post-manufacture, like some kind of electro-plating, and that only Chinese people would be perverse enough to make things like this.
6. Be afraid. Be very afraid.