Experiencing the hardness of the heart is a humbling experience. Since being here in China I have not felt like my normal adventurous self. I have felt a bit anxious and at times, paranoid. Mostly, it doesn’t have a lot to do with China but rather, my transition in life coupled moving to China. I have been living over the safety net of various educational facilities my past four years and my travels have typically been backed (though not always) by my university and some mysterious dream team known only to students as, the International Programs office. The IP office promises a number of things from insurance anywhere to a standard of safety in any and every country a student visits or resides. Granted, students like me (along with others) bent those guarantees as much as possible and took a few side trips that were largely or completely unknown to our university. But still, this is different. No one gives us any kind of safety papers to sign for life. No one tells you to promise you will do your best and be creative against all odds because the reality is, people leave their environment of encouragement and growth only to become apathetic and without any real encouragement to tackle some seemingly impossible things. This reality poses an irony to me because it seems clear that people are always drawn to sail to new worlds when they haven’t gills or fins, fly when they have no wings, expose great mysteries of the universe in a single equation only after failing math, stepping on the moon when it is roughly 238,857 miles and some galactic space away, and in an extreme case, die for people who are beyond redemption. Our desire to reach impossible is rooted in our veins and reinforced by our creator. So, with that I begin a new quest to live life for impossible reasons and illogical leaps. I suppose we all have to live by the memory of the garden that once cared for our every need and continue to recreate the garden for others as we remember it. It may keep me from living “securely” but what is security if you sacrifice fullness of life for it.
In an update of our current situation, one of our group of four has started teaching and that one is Rachel. The rest of us, Jared, Miriam and I will not start teaching until September 20th! This means we have almost a month still. No need to worry, we took the liberty of enrolling ourselves into an intensive mandarin course at a language school down the road. Now we have two hours of mandarin a day and homework too. This should be helpful considering that no one speaks English and everything is written in Chinese characters, which makes sense because, you know, we live in China. Also, we do see that teaching is a great opportunity to meet people, but in all honesty, meeting people hasn’t been too difficult and we send up thoughts daily that we will continue to build relationships with people.
My apartment mate, Jared, has been insistent on visiting what is commonly known as a Chinese Bathhouse. The bathhouse experience started with questions to our new friends about what they are and what one would participate in if one were to go. Those questions grew into an obsession for Jared who had a previous Japanese bathhouse experience teasing his mind with the frills and delights of cleanliness and relaxation. The experience sounded promising – show up, get cleaned, massaged and then sleep, a seemingly easy task.
When the big night finally came, Jared and I packed a few items, met up with our friends, Wesley and Peter, and headed for one of the many tucked-away bathhouses that litter the alleys of Harbin. When we arrived there was little time wasted on formalities. We were escorted to our lockers and the nude liberation of all the men around us was too contagious to overcome. After a brief second of consciousness about being naked, the reality is quickly embraced and could even lead a man to feel that it is his masculine right at any time if it were not for certain social restrictions. Anyway, we then made our way into the shower/hot tub room and I don’t mean the normal, backyard suburbia hot tub, we’re talking about a pool-sized hot tub with various functions of underwater, turbo jet massage. To intensify the setting, imagine men lounging about unashamed as if to reclaim the secrets of Eden and then you may harness a glimpse of the experience we had. And please, don’t be deceived in thinking that this is where the experience ended, it isn’t. After the hot tub room, we spent a few minutes in the hottest sauna I’ve ever experienced and then it was on to the deep scrubbing. With certain hand scrubs and a total disregard for socially acceptable realities, Jared and I were scrubbed with the deep scrubbing of our lives and that is a story in and of itself. From this point, the journey led to a very large bed area where people are being massaged, sleeping and/or watching television. Our night ended with a massage and plenty of laughter as Wesley and Peter observed awkward foreigners way out of their comfort zone…but I suppose that’s what life is all about sometimes, getting out of our comfort zones because one day when we look back, perhaps they’ll be the only memorable zones we have.
~Johnny Young
~Johnny Young