Goodbye, Beijing … my time is up, and I must fare thee well
Three years is a long time. Or, three years isn’t a long time. It all depends how you look at it, really.
When I first arrived in China, I had no idea how long my stay here would be. All my wife and I really knew was just how different everything seemed from the previous lives we’d led in the Middle East and the United Kingdom.
It took some time for us to adjust, as it almost always does in such circumstances, but eventually we found our groove and settled into our new lives here in Beijing, or the “Northern Capital”.
Sadly, for reasons I’m afraid I can’t enunciate here, those lives are soon to end. But I know deep down we’ll always remember Beijing, and China, with a fondness that’s hard to describe.
Since moving here, we’ve learned so much. I’ve seen sights I never thought I’d see. From the gargantuan Great Wall and Guizhou province’s kaleidoscopic karst landforms, to the majestic Himalayan foothills in far western Sichuan province.
Indeed, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit vast swaths of this capacious country during my time here and meet people from all walks of life, thanks to the filming work I’ve done with China Daily’s new media team.
China, I’ve realized, is a much misunderstood place. Though in a way, that’s hardly surprising given the dearth of Westerners willing to engage with its language and culture.
As venture capitalist Ben Harburg pointed out in a recent commentary piece for Fortune magazine, China sent more than 328,000 students to the United States between 2015 and 2016, while only about 11,000 journeyed in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, somewhere between 300 million to 400 million Chinese students are currently learning English, yet only 200,000 or so people in the US are studying some form of Chinese right now.
It’s hardly much better in my homeland, the UK, where just 4,104 students took Mandarin during their high school exams last year.
These numbers speak volumes, I think. Certainly, as a native English speaker, it’s easy to be lazy. Yet they also reflect an underlying ignorance of China that’s hard to justify in this day and age.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I knew little of the country before I arrived, save the misconceptions so many of us have about the places that we’ve never been.
But I did my best to approach the experience with an open mind and curious disposition — a technique that has always served me well in the past. Happily, the people I met along the way returned the favor, by and large, helping make my time here especially memorable.
Those memories, of Beijing and all the other cities and provinces I’ve visited, the people I’ve met and the insights I’ve gleaned, will stay with me forever. I’m sure of it, for they all hold a special place in my heart.
I’m almost done now. But before I go, I’ll leave you with this thought — only partially purloined from the late, great cosmologist and communicator Carl Sagan, who no doubt understood much more about the nature of humanity than I ever will.
Bilingual: Chinglish
They say the past is a different country, and people do things differently there. But to see things differently you need only visit another country to discover that all our pasts, presents and futures are irrevocably interwoven in a pursuit far greater than any differences we may have.
Our survival, as a planet and a species, relies on us recognizing this, as we all hurtle through the vast emptiness of space — inhabitants of a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.