long overdue

I miss China. I know that's the last thing most of you expect of me, but I do, and I knew I would. This semester was really unbelievable, and mostly because of the people I met. I got to know my twelve other classmates down to the grossest, most intimate detail, and I love them. I miss them all, especially the venerable Courtney Morse, the girl with an eerily similar name and my sister from another mister. I miss Tenzin, my Tibetan host father, and Sophie, my three-year-old sister from Kunming. I miss the pigs from my home in Shaxi, and, more than anything, I miss the mountains at the edge of the world.

In China, I ate chicken eggs, quail eggs, and hundred-year-old eggs. I drank goat's milk, yak's milk, cow's milk, and warm milk. I traveled to the tropical rainforest, tea plantations, the Great Wall, and the himalayas. I lived with the Hui, the Dai, the Bai, the Mosuo, and the Tibetans. I shouted at waiters to blend into my surroundings. I pet nearly every dog I met. I went bowling. I witnessed a Tibetan bar brawl. I climbed mountains. I experienced what my classmates and I dubbed "China rage."

besides my whole, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" mantra, I am thankful that China pushed and prodded me in all these ways. Life in the countryside was hard at times, but nothing like it is for many of its citizens. Most of China continues to be rural, though the cities get most of the press. But if I didn't tell you what a fucked-up, backward, self-obsessed country China is, I wouldn't be doing my job. I don't think it would be a service to anyone except the Chinese government if I came back and didn't share the frustrations I felt, because China has a millennium to go if it is going to bring liberty and progress to all its people. I hope that everyone who reads this will keep in mind that the same country lauded for the most dramatic poverty reduction in history saw little reason not to throw thousands of democracy supporters in jail right before the Olympics.

Before I went to China, I believed the hype. I believed that the Communist Party might soon fall out of power, and that wealth was reaching everybody, and that the the consolidation of power might actually be doing some good. Now the idea seems ludicrous to me that China could ever change. Even its desire to "save face" abroad does not trump its Machiavellian obsession with greatness.

My experience in China was so meaningful because it helped me to understand that. A lot of things I saw enraged me. They made me appreciate more than ever to come from a country like the United States, which often deservingly receives a bad reputation, but which fosters discussion and diversity inside its borders.

Beijing is a nice city. I would have loved to have more time to explore it, in the way that I would like to explore New York or Hong Kong. But for all you potential China travelers out there, it would be a crime to leave China without seeing the mountains. Go to Tibet. And don't you dare let the Chinese government off the hook for anything.