It looks like we’re going to be here in Shanghai for a while.
Doug has just signed a three year contract with his school; I have another year left on my two-year contract.
We own a slow cooker, a full set of cutlery and several potted plants (which are somehow still alive), including one rather large near-tree. I have a banjo. Doug has his PlayStation3. On recent trips around South East Asia, we’ve been buying artwork for the flat. We have a few very full book shelves. We have Gerald The Bear and two rather large Ikea plush mammals, Miss Shimahippo and The Elephant.
Shanghai is starting to look like home for the next few years. We, the previously nomadic and unsettled, are starting to look quite settled and domesticated.
Back when I was living in Turkey, this is what I had sought after, year after year: in my 6 years there, I bounced around constantly, trying to find the right mixture of job and flat and environment so I could finally stop running and just breathe and find my center. The energy was always wrong though, something always needed to be changed so I changed it. Regularly.
Between 2002 and 2008, I lived in 5 different flats in two different cities, in Kayseri and in Istanbul, on both the European and Asian sides of Istanbul; I worked for three different schools, but never in the same position for more than a year and sometimes in non-consecutive years for the same school.
At one point around 2006, I spent a year entertaining serious thoughts of packing up and moving back home to Canada- I wanted to live in the forest, baking bread, raising chickens and goats. I wanted to be able to go barefoot without being informed by everyone around me that bare feet would surely lead to getting sick and dying. I thought it might be nice to get a sensible, stable job stocking shelves at Ikea.
I quit my very good university job in Istanbul, gave up my beloved 3 bedroom flat (with one of the rooms decadently dedicated solely to Lola’s litter box), sold all my furniture, gave away a lot of my stuff, booked a flight to Vancouver (with a special provision for carrying my cat) and then changed my mind two weeks before I was meant to leave. I moved in with a friend who had a room to spare and started looking for a new job.
Within months, I had new plans battling in my head: I’d go to Dubai, I then decided, and get married (my then-boyfriend was working there)! Or Oman. Or Syria. I’d move to Yemen and study Arabic! I always kept one hand on the exit door. I was more than willing to make rash changes, to change my mind at the last minute, to completely uproot and start all over again from scratch.
I had been doing that since 1994, when I first travelled on my own to Europe at 19. You say want to go to Ireland tomorrow and you’d love for me to join you? Sure, why not. I’ll call my job and let them know I won’t be in. You need a sound and lighting techie for your touring theatre show in South Africa next month and you’d like me to do it, even though I’ve never done that before and it’s in Afrikaans and I can’t speak the language, aside from dirty poetry, swear words and a few folk songs? Sure, why not? You’re going to Ghana in two weeks for a month and you’d like a travelling companion? Let me just quit my job and pack my bags and get my yellow fever jabs. No problem.
Impulse control when it comes to life paths is not my forte, nor are plans. Or rather, I have plans– millions of them! Billions and billions! Infinite numbers of plans, all clamouring for viable space in my future. Each one more outrageous than the previous. My life, it seems, has unfolded according to the whim of the plan with the strongest upper-cut, or perhaps, more accurately, the one that was able to sneak past while the others were caught in a furious dog-pile.
On Sunday, one of my good friends here asked me – nay, persuaded me with the vigour and perfection that only a seasoned lawyer can muster– to join her in Italy next month, where she’ll be completing her Master’s degree. Italy! In Florence! In April! With a flat already arranged! I could write and sleep and eat and finally get my head together! Marvellous!
Sure I have a job here (with a 2 year contract) that gives me 4 months of paid holidays a year and a 4-day work-week and a ton of autonomy. My students are, generally, nice kids. My boss is so hands-off I haven’t seen him since sometime around December when we held our last staff meeting in a bar, moderating essay scores over pints of beer and games of billiards. I earn enough to live quite comfortably, to save quite a bit for hypothetical rainy days, and to be able to spend several months a year travelling around Asia and going home to Canada for a visit. I’ve got a lovely flat with a beautiful 16th storey view over the tile roofs of the French concession. I’ve got Doug. I’ve actually got it quite good. Objectively speaking, it would be quite stupid of me to casually toss it all away and run off to Italy for three months- I’d lose my job, and with that my ability to legally live in China. I’d still have to pay my share of the rent on top of half the Italian rent, all with no income. And poor Doug would be stuck alone working in Shanghai with me out galavanting in Italy. Not good!
So tempting!
And yet, objectively, so very unwise.
So I said, with great reluctance, no. No, I can’t. If this were, say, 1997 or 2003 or even 2007, I’d do it in a flash– I would be in Florence before her, scouting out the new neighbourhood, my previous life left in a puff of smoke. A vanishing act.
It’s different now. My life has a lot of parameters that are not easily dismantled– not that I’d really want them to be dismantled, if I thought about it carefully. I kind of like the stability I’ve found. It may be the stability I’d been searching for. By the end of my current job contract, I’ll have been in this job three whole years! A record for me. If we stay in this flat, I could have a stable home for a few years, not having to uproot myself and start all over again every year (or half year or month or whatever) as I had done for the first decade and a half of my adulthood. I’d have to give away my crock pot and coffee maker. I’d have to leave Gerald the bear and the Elephant and Hippo behind. I’d have to stop taking pictures of Chinese mops. That would be unthinkable.
Does this mean I’m a grown up now?
Leave a Reply