Belonging Somewhere In Between

A reflection on place and space

Photo by Quan Jing on Unsplash

Above: a hutong.

In 2019, I wrote the following reflection on dislocation after something like my 17th move in twenty years. I was experiencing reverse culture shock and trying to sort through my memories of all the places I’d lived.

In August of last year, I flew to Beijing. It was the first time I had seen the city since leaving it six years prior. I stood on the sidewalk at the Dongzhimen exit from the subway, surrounded by traffic, after the taxi driver told me he would go no further. “It’s rush hour,” he said. “Traffic is terrible. I won’t go.” He meant he wouldn’t move, so there was no point in me staying in the vehicle. I might as well walk or cram myself like a sardine onto the Line 2 trains beneath us.

I got out and stared at the brick path stretching past the embassies down toward Dongsishitiao. I remembered an old woman picking the green onions growing in the garden on the corner outside the walls of the Russian embassy, pulling them out of the earth in bunches. One day, the garden was patchy and bare. The next, there was a hand-written sign: DO NOT TOUCH. THIS BELONGS TO THE PUBLIC. I thought if the old woman saw the word public, she would say the garden belonged to her and she could take what she liked. She is the public.

I crossed the street to the east side of the Second Ring Road. I walked in the bike lane that runs next to the canal, where I once heard a foreigner on a bicycle snipe at a local to get out of the way. “This is China!” the pedestrian shouted after him in English. I followed the lane past the Oakwood Estates, where the editor of the now-defunct journal I’d worked at had lived. Where I once spent a winter evening with friends and a powerful man, an old China hand who sat near the US President at state dinners.

Everyone I’d known then had left the city. It was as if I had never walked that path, never passed by the hotel I was now staying in on the way back to my flat. Had I even lived here?

I know I lived here once. I remember Chang’an Avenue, wide without the security fences. I remember crossing freely from west to east across Tiananmen Square, unencumbered by endless security checks involving x-ray machines and opened bags. I remember peeking into peaceful Zhongshan park next to the Forbidden City, long before lines of tourists snaked in front waiting to show identification to cross underneath the avenue and enter the square.

For a few months when I first moved to Beijing, I lived outside the Third Ring Road west of the city. One morning, I got up early to travel to the centre and watch the changing of the guards somewhere in front of the Forbidden City. I think I would’ve forgotten I ever did this had I not snapped a photo of my own reflection in the glass in front of the train that morning. I still own that coat, those big snow boots, that hat. They were here, too. I have proof.

I remember the Starbucks located a three-minute walk from Dongsishitiao station. I remember listening to language-learning podcasts and filling page after page with characters. Stroke by stroke by stroke, line after line. I remember working in a café on the second floor of Ginza Mall, my focus fragmenting from the sounds of both Chinese and French conversation. I remember where I sat as I wrote a research proposal, deleted it, and started over. I remember the two thieves at the table across from me whispering to each other before one stood, grabbed my iPad from where it lay behind the raised screen of my laptop, and ran. I remember looking at my watch and my laptop on the table and wondering whether to run, too.

I ran. I chased him down the escalator to the first floor of the mall. He was fast, his jacket billowing behind him as he moved through the crowded space. I hung in a moment of indecision, glancing back at the remainder of my untended possessions. I returned to the cafe, afraid to find that his friend had been busy. I remember relief flooding my senses when I caught sight of my laptop. It held the proposal, my pathway forward.

Later, at the police station, the policeman insisted I was lucky. “These thieves are not Beijingers,” he cautioned. “They are waidiren, outside people. They will stab you.” Petty crime in Beijing was always committed by waidiren. He took my statement slowly, satisfied that he could hold a passable conversation with me in Chinese. He told me what he would write before he pressed each sentence onto the page with the pencil in his hand. Stroke by stroke, line after line filled with bold graphite characters. I watched, reading the characters I could and guessing at the ones I couldn’t. He looked up, waiting for my approval and marvelling when I appeared to understand.

I remember how the coal dust in the cold winter air tasted tangy. Sometimes I could feel a sting in my lungs. That final winter in Beijing, coughing fits kept me awake for weeks at a time. During Spring Festival, in a hotel in Laos, I opened a Lonely Planet to a map of Vientiane. There was a British embassy, but no American one. No Canadian one. I rode my bicycle to a clinic near a hospital two blocks away and asked for some antibiotics. I searched for more several days later in the sleepy town of Si Phan Dong, stopping in front of a porch where a group of older Laotians sat in rocking chairs. Excusez, Messieurs. Savez-vous s’il y a une pharmacie près d’ici? This time, I was the one who marvelled when they appeared to understand. Oui. C’est là-bas, pas loin. We reached out across time and space, connecting through a language that was not our own.

I again bought antibiotics. But my wrist grew a strange lump and my cough would not go away. I tasted blood on the back of my tongue. When we reached Sihanoukville, in Cambodia, I walked from my hostel down a busy street to a clinic. A Russian doctor waited in the examination room, greeting me in a whisper. He avoided looking into my eyes. He placed the stethoscope on my chest and asked me to inhale deeply. I felt his touch, and it was cold. I wondered why he was here. Everyone knows foreign men come to Cambodia to abuse children.

“Your lungs are not okay,” he whispered, studying the x-ray screens on the wall. “You have acute bronchitis.” He wrote me a script and I filled it, receiving bottle after bottle of pills. That night, I sat on the bed in the ground-floor room of our hostel and swallowed the pills one by one. I noticed moving black spots sprinkled all over the white sheets and sighed.

Slowly, my cough receded. Cambodian sunshine seemed to chase the damp from my lungs. Back in Beijing, in the cold, I told myself I would not stay one more winter in this city. I could smell the coal, feel it blanketing my skin.

But was I ever here? Did I live in this place? Did I not paint the labels of empty wine bottles red and place them around my sparsely decorated flat? Did I not walk through hutongs in Jiaodaokou around Christmas, listening for laughter and English or Spanish so I might know where to find my friends? Did I not sit on the loveseat covered in crushed red velvet that I hated, looking out the wall of windows in my flat at Lama Temple and the taillights of the cars driving westward on the Second Ring Road, and cry when I learned that my grandfather had died? Did I not hate, and worry, and laugh, and bite back words, and choke, and sweat, and shiver on these streets? In that bed? On that floor? Behind that glass?

Each move is a dislocation. I am wrenched from one place to another like a limb being pulled from its socket. I step onto a plane here, and then I arrive there. It was cold and dark. Now it is warm and bright. Winter fades in the span of a few hours. Time bends. Accents change, even as mine stays the same. I do not watch a city fall away, skyscrapers giving way to residential compounds, then industrial works, then villages, then grassland. I simply exit one life entirely to re-appear in a new one, then wonder who I was before I came here. Was that life real? Was I ever really there?

When I started this Substack, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of being caught between two worlds. As a culture, we tend to celebrate the outsiders who enter new worlds and return to tell us about them. We remember Marco Polo, who traveled through China and wrote a chronicle of his adventures. We don’t remember Matteo Ricci, who stayed in China, who bridged West and East to identify commonalities in Christian and Confucian thinking. We champion the person who reveals the new world, not the one who takes a critical look at his own in order to forge connections and fill in the spaces between worlds.

I suspect many of us feel caught between two places, two points in time. We haven’t yet arrived where we thought we’d be, yet whatever world we once lived in is no longer tying us down. We want to make sense of this space where we now reside, somewhere between an old and a new world.

More and more, I find myself wanting to claim that I was there. This year has forced me to give up any pretence of convention, any capacity to blend in with everyone else my age. I’m not like the other parents, or the married couples, or the single people, or the coupled up pairs. Nothing marks me as typical: no home ownership, no job to indicate the career(s) I once poured my time and effort into, no conventional struggles with parenting or marriage. Who am I? I’ve often wondered, sometimes obsessively. I know who I was, but who am I now? Where can I belong?

In this place where I am now, there is both possibility and a grounding that comes from self-discovery and knowledge, a sense of belonging that comes from within. I was there and now I’m here and this in-between place, this is home, too.