Beijing to Urumqi, Urumqi to Bishkek, Bishkek to Naryn city. How’s that for an exotic itinerary?
Beijing, it turned out, was a city both very similar, and very different to the one I left in the spring of 2008. Where in many ways, it hadn’t changed at all: big buildings, impressive sights, lots of cars, great subway; I found myself not recognizing much of anything. Beijing, while technically the same city, was all but foreign to this former resident.
But I still have friends there. My old business professor, an eager entrepreneur when I left him, was sporting two locations, 40 employees, a new wife and a very fancy car. I have two classmates who stayed, and they described watching the city change before their very eyes (and sometimes with surprisingly little warning.)
In the end, all the traveling, all the language practice, all the conversations, they pinnacled to one single two hour meal: I went back to my old host family. It was the quiet, safe environment that my language had flourished in its fullest, and being there again, it came right back. I walked right back in to our 16th floor apartment, there across from the Bird’s Nest stadium. Their first words were simple: “you got thin!” We looked at pictures, we caught up. We had dinner and a beer, and talked politics, just like the old days, (though now, I had to explain desperately what on Earth I was doing in ‘Ji-ar-ji-si-tan’) And they were delightfully unaware of the changes I just couldn’t get over. “Nothing has changed in Beijing,” they said, speaking more of their own needs than anything else.
“Yes, we have a subway station nearby now, very convenient.” But still, they just wanted to talk politics, and comment on the heat. I gave them a picture, and they gave me hugs. The food was wonderful. And then, just like that, we were off, China long behind us.
Where I had previously been overwhelmed by the mess they were making of the human rights of billions, this time, it was through the developer’s eye that I looked at the place. There are banks, folks, banks just everywhere. There are public toilets; free ones. I said to my friend there, “boy, in China, things get done. They say a year, they mean a year.” “Sometimes,” he replied, “they mean less.” But it was also polluted. With all the massive and beautiful buildings in downtown Beijing, I could seldom see more than have a dozen in any one direction on account of the smog. “They know it’s a problem,” my friend had said, “they say they will relocate all of the plastic factories here to an island within two years.” In America, you couldn’t even suggest such a thing; in China, it will happen.
And with that, we took the cheap, fast and clean subway to the airport, spent an overnight in Urumqi, and found ourselves back home in Kyrgyzstan, a place I was more than happy to see again. My friend, Matt had left us, one day earlier, in a manner fitting for two urban boys: in a subway station. Of my glorious summer break, only Corey, my fellow volunteer and I remained. At the airport in Bishkek, we pushed off the taxi drivers, and took a marshrutka into town. Home again, at last.
