Moon Landing

The countdown is on. The countdown is real. 18 months after arriving in this crazy little huge metropolis I currently call home, I find myself preparing to pack up my bags and head back to London, that other little huge metropolis I call home. I won't leave until mid-June, and even then, I've got a summer of travels. To Hawaii, to Japan, to Malaysia and Vietnam. 

Nevertheless it’s bittersweet. Shanghai has been nothing short of provocative and every adventure, every travel has been tinged with a surreal this-isn’t-my-life kind of feeling. In China, I’ve never felt like I remotely fit in. But it’s funny how you learn to deal with and then, later, embrace that feeling. You become a curious Other, looming on the fringes of a society you will never understand and, often, care not to.  

I’ve read a lot of articles on the matter of expat life and the continual exodus of people, of changing faces—the exit, re-entry, as if we’re a group of people contemplating the moon landing and subsequent return to Earth. Never having been to the moon, I can’t say with any certainty this comparison is apt. But I can imagine that China and the moon have a lot in common; the moon and expat life, even more. There’s a metaphorical zero gravity I can’t quite put my finger on.

Perhaps part of this weightlessness is the notion that, in the teaching world at least, you give two terms notice (a cool eight months) before you’re set to leave. So for eight months, you gear up and gear up and build up an angst between I-know-I’m-leaving-but-I’m-still-here-trying-to-enjoy-the-present. And you build bucket lists with a group of people who've become your Shanghai family. People who, two years previous, were faces on a website and names on a list. More depressingly, people, many of whom once you leave this place, you will never see again.

With these individuals you experience a gamut of day-to-day that, in reality, is rather mundane but to the outside world is a feat larger than life. The sighs and pauses from friends and acquaintances: “China…phhhhh…I could never do that. What about their human rights? Don't they eat their pets?’ You laugh and dispel myths as the ambassador for your adopted land. But niggling at the back of your mind is a question: how do you leave the moon and ever return to the real world?

I’m hoping the answer to this is with a list of adventures to return to. In London I get Paul, I get sausage dog ownership, I get ukulele group lessons, I get British citizenship.  And I prepare for a mission to Mars; somewhere in the distant sky it looms.