House and Home

The failure of my plans to blog is not entirely my fault, and in fact I have been writing entries from time to time. I haven’t yet posted them because of the general difficulty of accessing the internet while traveling and, at least for the last two weeks, the unique way in which the Chinese government regulates the internet. For foreigners there is considerably more access than for natives, but restrictions apply across the population and to many internet sites, especially those which search for and find articles that may cause damage or perceived damage to the ethos of the Chinese government.

Like Google.

And Blogger.com, which Google purchased a few years back. Blogger provides its clients with space to post so-called “weblogs” (blogs), which usually include text and pictures and links to other sites, etc. These are personal postings, usually, and so you can imagine how reticent the Chinese government is, with its monolithic tendencies, to allow access for its citizens to a means of publishing concerns, complaints, and a billion little individual truths, which might contradict the official position.

So Blogger.com has been down, and my stop-gap measure for keeping in touch is Facebook.com, a site that provides mostly university students with a means of communicating with friends, finding friends, and making friends. It’s much better than Route Y ever was at researching and stalking crushes. I hope you’ve had a chance to visit the site and view the pictures. If all goes well today at this coffee shop in Moscow, you’ll see pictures from China, too.

Now that I’m in Russia—soon to be in Ukraine—blogging should return as a viable option for general updates on what I’m doing and where I am. In the meantime, here’s that general update:

As you already know, I’m sitting in a coffee shop (coffee “house,” technically, which when transliterated directly into Russian, as many store names are, sounds comically guttural and forced, with no claim to the phonetic warmth that the word’s denotation requires) in downtown Moscow. It’s a rainy day, and a cold one (remember how Italians fly North for August? If they come here, they’ve come too far North), so I don’t regret spending a few hours of my few days in Moscow writing letters and otherwise convalescing.

From what, you wonder. From traveling, in general, I think. Though I feel more comfortable in Russia than perhaps anywhere (because it seems instantly familiar), I’m tired of being a tourist. I’m tired of looking at historical buildings and wandering the halls of museums and, frankly, of taking pictures of everything that presents itself as even just possibly photographable, and of living from out my suitcase, and from asking directions for everything, and from feeling the weight of total anonymity, and etc. I say etc. because the list, though it goes on, already feels somehow repetitive, as if it could all be summarized into one easy sentence, maybe even one economical word, like outsider.

Adam and other expats in China feel most keenly, it seems to me, this particular deficit of living abroad. I emphasize their complaint because it lends itself to the question of home (or the guttural transliteration of house that I find so antithetical to the cozy idea that the word is meant to present). As a temporary traveler, a sense that home is at the end of any itinerary tempers the psychological strain that being an outsider puts on a person. As an expat, that sense of being outside everything, despite efforts, has no such consolation. This conclusion puts sense into some of the gratuitous and superfluous vent sessions that I witnessed expats have in China.

My first ranting occurred in a private room around a table in a typical Beijing restaurant. In the exclusive company of American expats, all of whom had been in China for some time, the conversation in retrospect could not but help turn to the frustrations innate to living abroad. Paul, a usually soft-spoken kid from Kansas and a master of Chinese in his own right, prefaced his criticism of “how they pour concrete” with the disclaimer that he doesn’t really like to complain about China. John, a two-year veteran of living in China, felt no such compunction. He turned his frustrations over the behemoth bureaucracy and the collective mindset into global attacks on Chinese people themselves.

After dinner I complained to Adam about what seemed to me unfair criticisms of China and its people, who no doubt experience the same if not more severe frustrations with the government and the living conditions. But looking back I can see, as Adam attempted to point out, that every complaint had its root in the irremediable sense of being always already on the margin, without the hope of integration. For the Chinese, at least, these frustrations are tempered by the concept of inclusion.

It’s a little different, maybe a little worse, for expats in China because of the immediate physiological distinction as well as the latent insularity of Chinese culture. Here in Russia people don’t stare as much, or at all, until I open my mouth and give away the secret, so closely kept, of being an outsider.

When anyone leaves her homeland for a foreign country, the concept of house takes on that cacophonous, prickly sensation that keeps the expat always to some degree away from home. Any effort toward fluency in the native language is nothing if not an attempt, sometimes a futile one, to mitigate the barrier between the expat and the resident country.

Difference seems at once to be at the heart of a traveler’s intrigue and of her joy in returning home. For the expat, the joy I think of living abroad is in the asymptotic baby steps she makes toward integration. At this point it seems my thoughts should turn toward the immigrant, the exile, the refugee, all of whom have fewer options for returning home than the expat has, but as it is all this thinking of home is making me homesick.

So much for philosophizing. I take the sleeper to Kiev tonight and arrive tomorrow at the main train station, where Oksana should be waiting. Despite the usual doubts about my future and my choice to stay in Ukraine for a while to make a go at writing (or at something), I’m looking forward to returning to Kiev after five years and a lot of personal change. I think the familiar setting will contextualize the trajectory that I’ve taken over the past years and help me plot a satisfying if not successful future. Wish me luck.