32 flavours and then some

so it's my birthday. so we're gonna party like it's my birthday [on saturday], sip bacardi [bubbly] like it's my birthday.... right now i'm over-caffeinating like it's my birthday! tonight's festivities involve a mellow supper and then some live music with friends. the singer tonight is a soulful young jazz musician named natti vogel. all 22-year-old sweetness and big eyes. this birthday recalls for me the ani difranco lines 'i am a poster girl with no poster, i am 32 flavours and then some' - thus the subject of this post. because really i am 32 flavours and then some. or at least have felt that way of late.

my relationship with birthdays has varied through the years. from the sublime to the surreal to the sad. this is not surprising given my propensity for over-thinking. i recall excitedly writing about the 'epiphany' i had on my eighteenth birthday. it involved some combination of the following: beauty = love; yearning is our most propelling emotion; never give up. i believe i spent my nineteenth birthday mostly in tears and hiding in the bathroom. i was stressed out that i was growing old so quickly and still had accomplished so little. (thankfully now i am old enough to no longer hold fast to the idea that i shall accomplish anything.) birthdays for me often become a time for self-reflection. every so often i can omit that portion of the program and simply have fun. this, however, is rare. i perhaps did this best on my 30th birthday which was an amazingly special, fun, loving, outrageous, raucous affair (affairs, really, there were a series of celebrations) during which i simply had a wonderful time and glowed and didn't worry about the fact that i was unemployed, or living with stinky boys as roommates who stole my towels, or unmarried, or not able to do a headstand in yoga without being filled with stomach-clenching fear about breaking my neck. no, i just drank champagne, ate cake, enjoyed being with, embracing and being embraced by my family and friends, and danced until dawn. it was spectacular. there were even pink m&ms with my face on them involved at some point. and a bottle of madeira from 1837 opened in my honour on a beautiful farm. my twenty-fifth birthday was the first (but sadly not the last) time i decided to extricate myself from the emotional turmoil of a relationship that was my five years with my ex-fiance. it was awful. 31 was another low point. i didn't feel i deserved a celebration after all the feting of 30 and it also marked the beginning of the troubles with and eventual denouement with little trouble, who didn't come to beijing for it.

and now i am 32. to borrow from mary oliver* - and still in love with life and still full of beans. this year, and in particular the few months leading up to this birthday, has involved a lot of reflection. but not at all in a fraught sense. rather it's been a rather positive appreciation of where and who i am. where i have been and where i am going. what matters and why. thankfully, i have been pleased with both the results and the processes of these ponderings.

what i've realised through that (over)thinking is that i came to china for love. not love in any conventional sense. i did not move here for an individual person (though some implied that i did). i did not move here because i love china (though others have interpreted that way). and i did not know that i was moving to china for love when i made the choice to come back to beijing. of course, there is at present no happily ever after to my story. not in any conventional sense. yet.

when i moved back to beijing, i was madly in love with a boy who here who was madly in love with me. but i didn’t move here for little trouble. i had started the process of looking to come and continue my conversation with the northern capital before we even met, and he has since moved on physically. and i have emotionally. i hope he has too. beijing is the city i spent my most formative years in, where i have lived the longest, and whose streets on which my inner scripts are most wholly my own. and yet, i do not love china.

i sometimes almost feel guilty saying that. i marvel at those who fall in love with china and, in particular moments, have wished that i were one of them. but i’m not. i never chose this place. my father moved our family here seventeen years ago. although saying that is not entirely accurate, because i did choose to come back. so i chose it this time. which wasn’t, i now realize, about choosing china at all, but about choosing love. myself. loving myself.

(i know, i know, this all sounds so trite and cliched and the intro to some hopelessly sappy adventure travel spiritual feminist memoir. which maybe it is. wait, if it is, maybe i should roll with it. hmmmm. ok, a birthday indulgence into a self-indulgent memoir-esque self-love journey introduction. just play along with me.**)

my family moved to beijing in 1993, part of the first wave of expatriates to flood into china after the post-tiananmen exodus in 1989. i sometimes feel as though China and i have grown up together. of course the chinese civilization is ancient, but the people’s republic is not. when we arrived, i was young, an unruly and raucous teenager, and so was modern china. we were gangly in the 1990s – all flailing long limbs, clumsy in statures we had not quite grown into and reeling from experiences we were entirely unprepared for. the world was watching china, as she soared and as she stumbled. i watched her too. mostly, she was my playground and my playmate. at once holding me captive and becoming my catharsis.

in the early 1990s, china was piecing itself together after a period of seeming calm after decades of upheaval under Mao and during the Cultural Revolution was destroyed by the party’s crushing its own people during the tiananmen massacre. i could relate. not long before my family moved to beijing, the innocence of my fourteen years was undone one swift and terrible experience of sexual aggression. china’s wounds, and my own, were deep and raw, yet unspoken. china and i both resigned ourselves to silence about our assaults. as if by not speaking, we could erase them. but something shattered inside me that night, so i arrived in china somewhat broken and trying to avoid the shards. teenage china was in the same place.

china’s party line of silence has arguably been more effective in erasing the past, but there are some shards that cannot be so easily swept away. my own silence only led me to turn on myself, becoming ceaselessly self-critical. i looked outside myself for love, relying on a string of men as sustenance. china has perhaps similarly avoided reckoning with unpleasant aspects of its past, focusing instead on astounding economic growth and increasing global influence. of course, i loved myself in moments. and i loved china in moments, especially in the early morning. but neither was sustained or sustainable.

rather than heal my wounds, i achieved my own version of unprecedented economic growth. also like the people’s republic, i operated on five-year plans: a year at the training school for the chinese foreign service, four years studying international relations at a prestigious US university; a year back in china, a year in the middle east improving my Arabic, three years of law school. there was even that a five-year relationship which had me engaged just before my twenty-eighth birthday. i was always moving, and almost always attaining some sense of self from a lover. if only looking at the statistics, however, it was impressive. below the surface i was not yet whole or whole enough, more precisely, not wholly myself. i sometimes wonder if the same is true of china beneath the numbers.

i broke of the engagement. and ran out of five-year plans. so i fled across the world to be embraced by china (again). i took the first steps toward returning when i was at a breaking point – both professionally and personally. my arrival last year, ushered down a gleaming six-lane highway into a boisterous beijing bursting with post-olympian pride, couldn’t have been more different than my family’s, which involved bumping along a dirt road and being stuck behind a donkey cart. of course i arrived only to get lost in love (again). although my most authentic intimate relationship to date, perhaps encouraged by being in china, our love unraveled and I was shattered.

and so i began the process of reconstructing myself (again). in so doing i’ve accepted that i don’t love China and wondered why i am here. i have no plans, five-year or otherwise, and no love. but rather than look outside myself for love (whether in a man or in china), i’ve chosen to look within. and been awed. and while i never thought of my coming back to china as healing – the pollution literally makes me sick – i believe that’s what brought me back to beijing. there were certain conversations with myself that were begun in this city when i was that broken young girl, and i believe that they (perhaps inevitably) need to be concluded here. being immersed in those conversations over the last while, i have been endlessly surprised by beauty and joy. and feel incredibly blessed, full of lightness and love. and, who knows, as my conversing with myself and with beijing continues, maybe i’ll even come across a conventional happily ever after along the way....

for now, i am grateful, present, in love with life, and full of beans. here's to 32.


*Self Portrait by Mary Oliver

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor
no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch

though I’m not twenty
and won’t be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.


**the best thing you've ever done for me, is to help me take my life less seriously; it's only life after all.