On China

Jacob and I share the same first name and briefly the same bed--I slept in it Fall '06, he in Winter '07. The bed in question was in an apt. complex in Anqing, Anhui Province, People's Republic of China, just about a 10 minute walk away from Anqing Foreign Language School, where we both taught English to Chinese middle-school students--again, I in the Fall, and he taking my place after the New Year while I returned to school.

While our times there did not overlap, we both walked past the exact same farmer's market on the way to class each morning; since it was the same school year, we taught the exact same students in the exact same grades; taught from the exact same text books; played the exact same guitar; worked with the exact same teachers, befriended the exact same students, watched pirated DVDs on the exact same TV, ate out at the exact same restaurants, and wandered around the exact same city. We both visited Beijing, both stood on the Great Wall, we both hiked Huang Shan and saw the view that inspired countless poets and artists before us; in the middle of the most populous country the world has ever known, we both stood in awe at intersections where all walked at once--old women, children, rich, poor, fast, slow, all together with bikes, mopeds, cars, trucks, and buses, and somehow all knew at once how to walk around each other, obeying an order out of chaos alien to our narrow Western consciousness.

Nevertheless, as Jake and I caught up this last weekend and compared notes, we quickly discovered that our Chinese experiences were utterly foreign from each other--he stood on the old, collapsing Great Wall, while I stood on the one restored for the tourists (and we each envied each other because of it); I was in Beijing in the Fall, he in the Spring; I hiked Huang Shan with a friend in the rain, he alone in the sunshine; our friendships and relationships with students, teachers, headmasters, roommates, so on and so forth, were miles apart.

It was good to realize this as we swapped stories--for a few years there I'd begun to gently dismiss my Chinese experience, as something unoriginal, even derivative, for countless English majors and others have made the same pilgrimage over the Pacific as I had, to engage in the exact same occupation. Not that I'd gone to be unique or popular--I went to see something fantastically foreign and boy did I get it--but I confess to feeling slightly embarrassed to have engaged in an adventure that was, after all, rather "pedestrian" after all.

And yet, if ever two Chinese experiences should have been carbon copies it should have been ours, yet though mere days separated my departure from his arrival (and none separated our sheets), our experiences of China were fundamentally different. If these two Jacobs should be see the Middle Kingdom so differently, how much more have I seen China differently than all the other countless Americans who've gone before and after me--and they likewise from me?

My experience was unique, for the exact same reason that all I do is unique--because no moment ever repeats itself, and my experiences and knowledge and perceptions are unreproducible in another. China was consequently reborn to me, and I could treasure that experience once more.

Jake and I's conversation caused me to remember the bright, Sunday morning, a brash young 21-year-old, reporting on my mission to the Stake High Council of the Centralia, WA stake. They asked questions, I answered truthfully and candidly, yet all along I could see in their eyes that these men, these full grown men with knowledge and experience beyond what I could comprehend, had no idea what I had just gone through! Their eyes even spoke silently of how they were then remembering with joy their own missions from years past, yet even as their eyes spoke their minds remained fundamentally inaccessible to mine, just as mine was to theirs'.

Many Post-Modernists found reason to despair at this epistemological/ontological alienation of one from another; but long before I ever learned the names of Derrida and Beckett, I already knew that this separation was cause for rejoicing, for exaltation--for my common experience was inexpressibly singular, unique, separate from the world and therefore beyond its reach. Take all I have, but you can never take me from me.

I said many Post-Modernists, not all--a professor of mine last semester discussed her book, God Between the Lips, wherein she posits that Post-Structuralism, a theoretical framework constructed to dismantle and deconstruct religious assurance, nevertheless having to utilize a religious vocabulary, one of faith that a world exists beyond our private perceptions. Such was the project of my mission itself--we gave a book and begged the Puerto Ricans to read it and have an experience for themselves, something incommunicable, un-transferrable, inaccessible even to ourselves, for mine was mine alone, and theirs was theirs alone, and therefore was ours and none else could take it from us. Thus an experience we desired all to have was inexpressably singular, unique, to each of us, a treasure beyond appraisal, a pearl without price, worth the world and inclusive of it all.

Fortuitous, I suppose, that I had this insight on China, for the Buddhist prayer beads, which I had bought as mere tourist kitch at the foot of Huang Shan yet was wearing when the fog lifted over Yellow Mountain and revealed the view the rain cloud and hidden from me (one of the few times in my life when the beauty of a thing brought me reverently to my knees) has recently snapped and scattered. I'd often worn that bracelet, not devotionally per se, but as a reminder that the cloud will lift for me alone and reveal things always there yet new and everlasting.

An end of an era, I'd supposed when it unceremoniously snapped on a Monday or Wednesday morning. But like the old women wandering around the buses in the seeming chaos of an Anqing intersection, the world does indeed flow much more intuitively and perfectly than we are willing to realize, and I'd soon received an invitation from the other Jacob to come spend the night, where we discussed China deep into the night.

Our experiences, like all experience, were singular, unique, ours alone, mine alone, yet these same experiences brought us together and connected us in a manner that happened only when our experiences were allowed to be alone, apart from the world. We had walked those intersections as well, as unique and alone as every other person crossing with us, yet we were altogether, all one, and flowing into and out of each other as ineffably and really as the cloud over Huang Shan, as the flight plans that intersected two Jacobs in space and time, as the Holy Spirit shedding it's light upon the hearts of man--