Reflections

So I've been here almost four months now. I'm a month passed when serious homesickness should have started setting in. To be honest, it's not there. At least not in any way that I imagined. I miss my family and friends, sure, but I feel like there's supposed to be distance right now. It's been my plan to move away for some time. I'm also pretty bad at staying in touch when I'm at home, so in a lot of ways it's not all that different being out here. There were certainly month-long stretches where I wouldn't see my Dad or sister or a certain friend and I wouldn't even notice. I'm bad like that.

That said, I was awed about an hour ago showing my Chinese roommate, K., photos of a Jacksonville sunrise. I did a Flickr search and just browsed through all the seagulls, sand, and waves that align perfectly almost every morning in north Florida. I remembered my first day back home after my first international trip, a month in Europe, and walking on the beach jet-lagged as the sun rose and dolphins swam beside me. And I miss that. I miss the beach. I miss thunder cells developing against a blue sky over open ocean. I miss the sound of waves. I miss the smell of salty air. I miss the acoustic guitars and conversations that happen at night on the beach waiting for the sun to rise. I miss the marshes. More than the people, that's home to me. Florida.

My old Spanish professor asked me in an email if I could ever settle down in China. My response was that I couldn't. There's an aesthetic that's missing here, cultural and natural. You can't just sit back and watch the clouds because most days a blanket of carcinogenic gray pollution hangs over everything. Some days I can make out the mountains of Hong Kong from my school, which sits up against a bay I can never see.

There's a deeper cultural aesthetic that's also missing. There is no underground or independent music outside of Shanghai and Beijing. There is no art "community" in Tianjin or Shenzhen - cities both larger than NYC. There are no slackers who just want to sit around and draw, or play guitar, or take photos at the cost of not making too much money. I'd be glad to have more kids doodling during class, but I don't.

You can blame it on the Cultural Revolution - which I do - or Chinese society. You can hope, like Dr. Echols does, that if "[it took] 30 years after WWII for Japan, and 30 after the Korean War for S.K [to develop an art scene], so if you take 1980 as your starting point for China, then maybe that would put the sprouting of an interesting music scene around 2010."

You can hope for the future, but it's not here now. For now blue skies and clouds are hard to come by, independent art is even rarer. You know my roommate has never seen a sunrise before? I think that is what I miss most.