Thirty more days

I write this as I sit on the roof of my hutong apartment in Beijing. From the roof of this one-story house, I can see into the courtyards of my neighbors where dogs are sunbathing and laundry is drying. I hear sirens and bike bells and motorcycle horns. I cringe at the sound of car horns. On a daily basis cars attempt to drive down these alleys, just as wide as the cars themselves. They push people and bikes and dogs off to the edges of teh alley; they are, to borrow the metaphor from a friend, the artery-cloggers of Beijing's hutongs. But this is a society where tradition and modern sometimes clash and other times co-exist. In thirty days when I get on a plane to the US, it is witnessing these aspects of China that I will miss.

Unfortunately what I won't miss are the times when I have to leave my role as an observer and participate in the chaos of Chinese society. I've been relaxed and secluded in Beijing and have pretty much let all of the challenges that I faced when doing fieldwork in Harbin get behind me. But there are a lot of bureaucratic challenges that a foreign researcher faces in China. There are also a lot of social pressures that one faces being a foreigner and a stranger. Sometimes I was able to work past that idea of being the foreign stranger but other times, it was a tough wall to break.

So I feel like what I am saying is that I like the environment in China where I can live in a gentrified hutong apartment and feel like I am a part of the 'old Beijing' while also separating myself when I do not want to be a part of it. I value the Chinese friends that I have made here, but to live in and participate in Chinese society on a daily basis is a pretty exhausting experience. I hope to spend my last 30 days here enjoying the things I like about China and avoiding the things I don't like.