Friday, April 26, 2002

From: Meg Thomsen meginchina@yahoo.com
Subject: The Year of the Horse

Dear Friends and Family,

This week, a tornado has hit Sichuan. Not a real tornado, of course, but a mind tornado. Three volunteers left Peace Corps this week, all for very different reasons. My close friend Rachel is one of the ones who left. My mind feels stretched like silly putty, and eventually it will snap back into place. I'm not sure why this week is so crazy. Ramy's theory is that it's April, the year of the Horse.

When someone leaves Peace Corps, naturally, it puts questions into all of our minds. All of the loneliness, the times of not being able to express oneself properly in Chinese, of being sick from the food, of being so far away from one's family and friends- it can so easily be left behind with a simple phone call. I could sign a few papers, get on that big silver bird and in two days, be at home in Boston. I could get on the red line and go back to live in Somerville, to work at the library, to get a cup of coffee at Diesel on my way to work. There are days when every non-masochistic bone in my body tells to go home. But I'm not going to go home, and here's why.

In my own bizarre way, I've found happiness here. If I left, I'd never see the mynah bird outside the Peace Corps office that screams "Zazhi! Zazhi!" in Sichuan dialect. I'd never get to see if Han Lu will pass the examination that will get her into Chongqing University, and I'd never get to see the students perform their plays in our upcoming Earth Day Drama Festival. When Li Yi, my Chinese teacher, came over to my house recently, she brought sour cherries, and the taste was so raw, so beautiful, that I couldn't concentrate on learning the characters for "bamboo raft" and "ambush". I want to eat those cherries again. I want to ride a boat all the way to Shanghai, and I want to learn more Chinese.

Last week, in preparation for watching "Erin Brockovich" in class, our class had an environmental town meeting. The students settled a toxic torts case. They acted as lawyers, mayors, townspeople, factory workers and doctors. They did something that I had never before seen in Chinese students: they got mad. The lawyers started to yell at each other. The mothers started to yell at the mayor. And slowly, their personal stories of living with environmental degradation came out, "In Panzhihua, the water made all of our skin turned yellow, but we couldn't move.", "In Zigong, my father could swim in the river but now the wastewater makes us sick.", "In Pengzhou, on cloudy days, the sky turns yellow from the SO2." We had an Earth Day Lecture this week, and the students streamed in. They were piled on benches, sitting on each others' laps. There were too many for the classroom, so many were standing outside in the rain with their heads poked inside the classroom. They all wanted to know, "What can we do?" And this, this is what I stay for. For this is the hope of any kind of environmental change happening in China. Individuals noticing. Individuals wanting to change. Individuals hoping for something different.

He Yumei is a fourteen-year-old girl in Dengguan. Everyone says she's a little bit crazy because she spends her day skipping around the street. She has a two-year-old son, an alcoholic father, and makes a living selling tea-soaked eggs on the street. If she finds a path to happiness, than who am I to fault her for being a little bit crazy?

Perhaps Peace Corps volunteers are almost the same. One spends a lot of time alone as a Peace Corps volunteer. All of us were told, rather laughingly, about a volunteer in Africa that had not called the Peace Corps office in a long time. They visited his site, only to find him industriously making donuts. There were thousands of dusty donuts, piling up all over his hut. Needless to say, he was immediately "whack-evacked". However, all of us have our ways of coping. Some immerse themselves in studying Chinese. Some drink too much. Some lose themselves in the company of others. Some crochet. Some play the guitar. Some participate in all of the above. Personally, I bought a Backstreet Boys CD (the only Western music available in Dengguan) and have been nursing an adolescent crush on Ren Chenxi, a Taiwanese popstar.

And where will the chaos lead? Well, I know that this is April, the Year of the Horse. If this is true, I can toss that BSB CD in the trash next week when Ashley and I head off for the May Day holiday. We're going to Tiger Leaping Gorge, a place where we can hike in sunny contentment for a few days. And I can bask in the knowledge that it all comes around right. It really does.

Whether you are in China, or America, you are always with yourself.

Meg