Jenny’s mom is visiting from Oregon for about 10 days...and while the highlight of her visit is the, y’sknow, visiting, part, we’re sorely glad for the haul of loot she brought with. A lot of this stuff is from our storage cache in her garage, some she thoughtfully provided new: shoes, jeans, books, climbing gear, oatmeal bars, hot chocolate and fifteen pounds of whole bean coffee. And a french press.

So last Thursday I brewed my first cup of coffee in China. Yes, I’ve had espresso drinks at the local (overpriced) java shack, but I can’t get it immediately upon rising, in my own kitchen, while I do my daily sudoku. Like so much I’ve missed from Oregon, I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I had it again. (This is why I don’t want to visit Oregon for the Christmas holiday.)

Funny how this little helping of stimulants can affect me. Life seems a little bit brighter now.

Jenny was out of town this weekend for a swim meet in Beijing. (She coaches the XIS HS swim team, such as it is. And no, they didn’t do so well.) I spent my Saturday running errands (grocery shopping, which is a daylong effort in China). After walking the dog Saturday afternoon I showered and went to a local dive for take-out...I had a big evening planned alone with my 007 box set.

As the afternoon turned to night, I had the sudden and really random desire to hear Fiona Richey’s Thistle and Shamrock. I like Celtic music well enough, I suppose, but I could hardly call myself a fan. I don’t even own any Celtic music. But it makes a nice soundtrack to an early mid-autumn Saturday evening in Oregon: puts you in the mood for fish and chips and heavy ales. I lack the entire package: long blue twilight, cool damp air, fine heavy food, an evening out at the nightspot I really know.

That was my Saturday evening package for 10 years. Now I have to adjust to a new one. Sudden tropical sunsets replace long northern twilights, heat and dust replace fog and rain, oily stir-fried pork replaces fish and chips, Tsingdao replaces Black Butte Porter, black-market 007 box set replaces second-run movies at Laurelhurst theater. I never particularly cared for Thistle and Shamrock, but I guess I don’t yet have a replacement, so I miss that too.

We’ve been back in Xiamen for a week now. This set me to thinking about my own peculiar notions of what constitutes “home.”

First (and this is kind of obvious), we went away on a vacation, and while we were on vacation, we were thinking and talking about “back home,” meaning Xiamen.

The second thing is a little harder to pin down. It occurred to me while I was talking to Peter, a British expat, at the bar on Friday night. He’s from Manchester and proudly so. He’s the kind of person who, when talking about where he comes from, lights up. His whole demeanor kind of rose when speaking about Manchester. Simultaneously, he has a kind of adventurous attitude about Xiamen. I said something like “I think that knowing where you come from makes it easier to move somewhere else.” I know that, no matter where I live, or how long I live there, I will always be an American. Specifically, a Western American, with frontier notions of individuality, anti-snobbery, and self-sufficiency. I could live the rest of my life in China and those parts of my personality will never disappear.

Third, I have always kind of carried a homelike mental space around with me. Maybe I get this from my parents. For example, when I was a kid and we’d take vacations, my parents were in the habit of calling whatever hotel we were staying at “home.” So we’d be out looking at museums or waterfalls or whatever, and when we started to get tired, Mom would say “are you ready to go home?” which we understood to mean “the hotel.” I took this attitude with me in the two years before I started graduate school, when I was doing archaeology and living out of a backpack.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying I simultaneously have many “homes,” and I love them differently.

So maybe it’s like this:

I come from Nebraska, but I haven’t lived there for 11 years. I love Nebraska the same way I love my parents. I don’t live with my parents any more, and I wouldn’t want to again, but I always feel at home when I’m visiting them. Furthermore, if something happened that I couldn’t ever return to Nebraska, that would excise a major piece of my identity. I would be really sad, but I don’t know that it would destroy me emotionally.

I also come from Oregon, but it’s not the land of my birth. I chose to be from Oregon. I love Oregon the way I love my wife. In the long view, I cannot imagine ever not living in Oregon. Being separated from Oregon generates a kind of romantic longing for me. If I never returned to Oregon, it wouldn’t shred my self-identity (as with Nebraska), but it would exact a really heavy emotional price.

In Singapore and Malaysia we found ourselves saying we are “from Xiamen.” No one took this to mean anything other than what it was: Xiamen is where we are living, but not where we’re from. I love Xiamen the way I love a really great co-worker, or maybe a friend I’ve had for a few months. It’s a relationship with potential, but I don’t have a lot of myself invested there.

p.s. I bought a bike today for about 1800元 (US$220). It’s a Giant mountain bike, with what would be bottom shelf components in the U.S. Still, I reckon this bike would cost around $300 or more in the States. I rode about two hours today and covered a lot of ground. I saw about 3 new neighborhoods. I really regret not buying a bike sooner.

• driven a car
• eaten a burrito
• bought a book
• listened to a radio
• ridden a bicycle
• drank a draft beer
• seen my family
• read a magazine
• used a credit card
• toasted bread
• visited a dog park
• comprehended a billboard
• worn a sweatshirt
• seen a movie

The first few days after our arrival feel like a lifetime away. We have our own apartment now, jobs that keep us busy, a gym membership, and favorite restaurants. Oregon feels like a recurring dream I had as a child...or is China the dream? I really miss the bike, the burritos, and my family. Everything else...I could take or leave.

Xiamen doesn’t smell funny any more.

48 hours until the plane departs...and we're having to cancel last-minute goodbye breakfasts with old friends because every hour is now accounted for. Problems have arisen with the dog's "health certification," which may necessitate a (literal) eleventh-hour trip to Salem on Monday morning to procure Official Stamps and Seals. Also: packing the bikes, re-packing the four giant duffel bags, coordinating parents' final visits to town.

So: I expect the next post will be delivered from China. Goodbye favorite people, goodbye Multnomah Village, goodbye Portland, goodbye Oregon, goodbye America, goodbye Western Hemisphere, goodbye everything I've known for 35 years. We love you.

Parting shot, taken from Neakanie (sp?) mountain, facing southwest, across the Pacific toward Cathay and The Fabled Orient. Taking one day (Jenny's birthday!) off to be with ourselves and the beach proved the kindest and cruellest goodbye yet. Oregon said "goodbye" right back.