For Patrick.

“Ok bare with me. I’m new at this whole, one on one thing. And what I ask you might sound…I don’t know…generic? But, I mean, I wanted to do this because you’re writing, what you’ve written about, China, the people, the nightlife, the teaching, the culture…well, you get it. I just want to know…everything.”

I notice his mouth progressively curling upward as my hurried justification, pre-apologetic persona trips over the words and stutters.

He giggles, his eyes crinkling so I can only see the sea glass green of his irises

“Lady, you’re fine...so shoot.”

I take a long drag on the metal mouthpiece of the Hooka. The apple smoked tobacco hovers in my lungs, cool and wet like the fog from dry ice. I exhale, part my lips only slightly so a smooth wave of blue-grey smog belly-dances upwards and over the bridge of my nose.

“Why China?”

*

I’ve explored the nooks and crannies of my own backyard, seen what lies beneath the vast spread of cornfields and farmland that can seem to stretch on endlessly, rippling every so often as if someone had stuck their finger in a bowl of cooking oil, golden corn swaying with the breeze that seems to blow only enough to push the hair past my cheeks. I know what Lake Erie looks like in the winter. How it freezes in odd mountains of ice some years, as if Moses as parted it as he did the Red Sea, the spaces between each frozen wave beckoning me to venture between them. And in the summer how the mud soup lake from spring blends into a deep midnight blue, a glints in the distance when the sunlight catches a disturbance in its movement. I’ve been to the local coffee shops where I’ve curled around myself with a garden of paper coffee cups situated around me, unable to control my addiction to caffeine and the various concoctions like toasted marshmallow cappuccino or chocolate strawberry decaf (on the days my pulse threatens to implode my arteries form being over caffeinated). I know which shops supply the appropriate cards for special occasions, or just when I feel like leaving homemade paper embellished with golden ink and witty phrases that draw a smile.

Yet between each moment of appreciation for my home state of Ohio lies the insatiable pang in the depths of my stomach. One that aches, needing to be fed a nourishment of something foreign, something unknown, a place, a culture not so…Ohio.

*

I have an obsession confession.

I love people

Especially in the context of the collage campus atmosphere.

As a freshman I made the library my sanctuary, tucked in a corner on the second floor attempting to blend in with the potted plant situated beside me as I sat reclined day after day in the chair who’s cushions enveloped me like an egg tucked into a nest. I could sit there behind the glow of my Apple iBook and absorb the flow of students around me.

I pretended I was invisible.

I noticed the color wheel of skin tones.

Bone white, but with the texture like dough that I wanted to press my thumb into

Peach, creamy and tinged coral around definite features, the rims of their eyes, the ousides of their lips, the cuticles of their fingers

Skin the color beef bullion broth, nearly iridescent in the light that streamed through the ceiling

Mocha, rich and exotic, settting of the whites of their eyes so much that they nearly glowed if their gaze happened to flicker where I rested

Patrick speaks and I come back to the dim lit room of the hooka nook.

*

“Why China?”

He exhales an answer infused with the blue-grey smoke

“I watched a lot of “chinese news and entertainment” on a shitty international channel back home in Marryland, so I was kind of already interested in tonal languages”

I immediately thing of those triple digit channels on hotel room television

Then I picture him as an adolecent sprawled on his bed, letting the Manderin dialect wash over him like the brush to ink to paper, sweeping, soakingm infusing the culture into his skin.

“ I wanted something really different, basically. I know it sounds orientalist and cliché, but I really did. I had been raised on Spanish, and I was over the whole romance language-thing.”

My professor ruined French for me last year. So much for living in Bordeux.

“I had lived in Spain briefly in high school, and I loved it, but I wanted something wild. Chinese was perfect. I ended up in Nanjing because I didn’t get into the Qinghua Daxue program in Beijing and I’m SO glad, because Beijing is a shithole..

*

Even now at 21 I still do it.

People watch.

Whoever my eyes flit to is at the mercy of my imagination, fabricating a history like they are figurines in my hands. Sometimes I find myself on the edge of my chair, the balls of my feet jumping up and down impatiently, wanting to approach them.

But what would I say?

“Hi…ok so I know this is weird and random…”

Blank stare

“But it’s a small campus and I see you around sometimes…”

Inch a step back from me

“I mean, you just seem so…interesting…I’m fixated on who you might be…where you came from…where you’re going”

Puckered brow and cold shoulder

Try and start a conversation with a complete stranger?

That’s a good one.

*

My shyness can be paralyzing.

Patrick changed that.

“I told you I wanted to know everything about China so tell me everything! Ready…GO.”

He laughs and tells me I’m adorable for being so interested.

The tile floor is predicting my contact with it from sitting so far on the edge of my chair. My toes keep balance. I know I need to be more specific, tap the mouth piece against my teeth, weave the tube wrapped in bright string around my fingers.

“Ok, ok, top two. Give me your top two.”

He doesn’t even have to think about it.

“Traveling to western China”

I anticipate, lean forward, chin in my palms. I cant miss one detail.

“I had never seen Inner Asia before…it was amazing to feel like I was leaving home for somewhere completely foreign and different all over again.”

The concept boggles my mind

A forgeiner feeling foreign in another forgein place.

How? Can an American really become part of such an contrary culture?

I always hear of citizens of other countries thinking we are selfish, greedy, taking our lives for granted.

He made a home for himself in Nanjing. Just as he had come vulnerable, naked, to China as an American, he entered another region of Asia where he could experience that again.

“Nanjing had become my base, and I left it for a WILD trek into the predominantly Muslim, white region of Xinjiang. The people have blue eyes…it’s insane. I went all the way to the Tajik border, and I learned so much about what it’s like to be a foreigner, and then a REAL foreigner…I realized it when I got to Xinjiang, and suddenly my mandarin was useless in the face of the Turkic languages spoken there.”

He was a chameleon.

*

“Teaching—the teaching experience was awesome.”

I think back to his workshop piece.

About the student he was paid to teach American slang

About the ivory faced cherubs who “beat the shit out of each other.”

I laughted at that recollection

“Yeah you remember don’t you?”

I think he likes that I remember his piece.

“It’s helped me tremendously in dealing with kids here. I work with an autistic boy every week in Columbus, and I think the way I handle him has changed after having had to deal with a bunch of unruly ADD kids in Nanjing, Haha”

*

He cast a spell on me my freshman year.

I was drawn in by the slightness of his figure, the way his back arched slightly above the spot where his jeans slug around his hips.

The fingerless gloves cut at each knuckle that exposed his nimble fingers

How they drummed against whatever surface happened to be close by

Cornsilk hair cropped closely to his scalp and paled complexion, flawless and silken like the pressed power I dust over my face each morning

I was drawn in by people that surrounded him.

The girl with the celft like eyes, centers like opaque marbles, olive skin the texture of a ripe banana peel. I’ve heard them speak in broken phrases, words hanging in symbols in the air, his breathy tone soothing like Oolong tea down the back of my throat and her words, flowing with the mellowness of acoustic guitar chords, utterly entrancing, transporting me to the corners of Nanjing that I’d read about in his eccentric writings of his life abroad.

*

I miss him now, his stories, his eccentricity that oozed from his pours. He graduated and I did as well, his presence now just a orange-gray shadow on the back of my memory, the rements of a sunset.