Synthesizer

PHAST China trip 2008 … a surreal dreamy blur. Any trip worth taking, leaves you with a rippling effect of synthesizing information. It’s easy to get caught up in daily life upon return – deadlines, duties, demands – and, in effect, make such trips that were rich in educational and cultural exposure dreamlike in quality. Dates and activities and names and faces all blur together. It takes mental effort to process all that is seen and learned, and log the trip, mentally, verbally or in written form.

Amidst mid-terms and other demands, I’m attempting to put down, in one form or another, my experiences in China. It was definitely a trip I’m proud to have been a part of, from the people I traveled with to the members of CDC and health facilities in China. I’m not sure how it will play out in the future, we often don’t. But, I know my bank of life experiences is richer because of it, and I look forward to being able to look back and say, “Oh, now I see.”

Missing China...

It has already been over two days since we returned to AA from our whirlwind trip to China. I have to admit these first days back at the daily grind are not easy. Jetlag hit me harder on this side of the trip. During the first days in China, I adjusted rather quickly to the sights, sounds, and smells of China. I fell right in step with the pace of Chinese life. Granted, I did go to bed earlier than I have in years (10pm is a record for me.) I miss the sound of the city outside my window, the reflections of neon signs that I cannot read or understand. While in China, the excitement and novelty of the experience kept me going during the long days even on little sleep. I was always eager to see what adventure was next, what another day in China would hold for us. Sharing unique experiences, forming lasting friendships with our Chinese hosts, learning something new, provoking more questions, seaking answers, and making new SPH friends.

I have the privilege to continue to explore the amazing Chinese culture and learn about China’s public health system in more depth this summer. In May, I will return to Tianjin to intern for the Tianjin CDC for the summer. Along with two other students from SPH, I will spend three months in Tianjin learning, observing, and practicing public health work. This spring break trip was a sneak preview of what the summer holds for me. I am very excited to go back. As I said, I miss it already. It was an amazing experience. Now all I have to do is get through the rest of the semester...

What lingers

After a 30-hour odyssey of cancelled flights, a reroute to Chicago, and a bus to Ann Arbor, 36 UM SPH students and staffers are back from China. Coming home is about clothes washing (with smoky smells lingering from coal-burning furnaces), distributing souvenirs to friends and family, and starting to sort through hundreds of photos and impressions. While acompanying Tianjin CDC hosts for a week to urban and rural sites, the UM contingent had amazing access into China's health and environmental infrastructure. It was an exchange of information and ideas, but also of curious stares--and smiles.

Mic Check yee er, yee er...

Mic Check Yee Er, Yee Er…

So I’ve been halfway expecting to wake up with a plastic placemat stuck to my cheek at the Fortune Cookie on South 7th to be served some variation of Lo Mein with a side of collard greens with hot sauce and a plastic cup of red Flavor Aid. But somewhere between the smells of rice flour and air pollution, sewage and green tea, the feel of the Great Wall beneath my feet, chopsticks between my fingertips, fish lips on my tongue, and the symphony of traffic horns resonating through my tympanic membranes…I’ve realized that this is real. Not a movie on the theater screen behind my eyelids, not a nap at the Fortune Cookie owned by a white man, run by a Vietnamese family. No pajamas and men flying through the air, not cliché music to strike emotional chords for a Shaolin showdown. Not this tune…

I’ve been tapping my finger and my feet to the heartbeat of a different composer, a new aarangement. A curiously familiar yet unknown scale, a heterophonic composition of senses, yet still so syncretic. Not a line or a curve, a predictable progression of chords, novice notes fit to induce auditory narcolepsy. Not this tune. Rather, it emanates without defined measure from cruising bicycles, construction cranes with mechanical calls, and afternoon market exchanges that leave an assortment of shellfish and fruits pressed to the pavement with footprints. It manifests itself in smiles and head nods, bounces from soccer balls kicked through broken brick-paved alleys, rises with the dust stirred by buses, by rickshaws, a breeze…dances down neon billboards and melts away into the horizon, blending with industrial exhalents and orange sun.

This is China…a piece at least. A very small piece, indeed, but ask the 28 million people whose air I breathed and they’ll convince you of its grandness. At least some…perhaps most. 28 million notes on a three dimensional page, inked in an unpredictable but perceptible pattern, revealed in unmetered metrics and unrhymed rhythms of respiration knitted with red…Script down high rises wrapped along rivers, banners in windows, lanterns above doorways. Luck, happiness, and wealth exhaled on streets, on beats… Skies that make you think you have tinted eyes, smoke blotting sun, hands rubbing particles deposited by a gust of PM born from growth—son of industrialization, daughter of a global economy that produces still water the color of winterfresh Scope, outlining those on the margins. An intermixing of old and new (like “nold” or “oew”?). Like a cover song, a sample of historic majesty panning left to right from towers with more floors than Home Depot: concrete speakers of a new generation, a new era built around a bassline heavy with hope and inequality that lingers like a Taj Mahal reverb…

It’s where 70 year-olds on bicycles play chicken against the flow of oncoming rush-(24)-hour traffic, where crossing the street is a game of human Frogger. It’s where Bally Total Fitness is on street corners right next to salons and dumpling stands, almost indistinguishable from the playground across the street where the little ones race to see who can burn the most calories and contract the most microbes in the Mouth Exploration/Taste Testing Olympics (which I won in 1986, by the way). It’s where I ate until my stomach greeted my diaphragm, where 18 dishes spinning on a glass table is the perfect recipe for great, thrice back-translated conversation, taste bud euphoria, and a nap (and carpal tunnel for those new to the chopsticks game). It’s where the Bar Stucks sandwich I ate in the Beijing airport was the most offensive thing my mouth and stomach encountered throughout my endeavors. It’s where I realized I have random and intermittent ADD, my people watching and observation tendencies getting the best of my neck (but I suppose that could have been the 16 hours of flying, the 37 20-minute naps in a pressurized coffee canister with wanna-be Laz-E-Boys and progressive BO and bad breath)…

But my attention was, in fact, paid…in full (shout out to the R). A balcony seat to witness a score with more than one kid of movement. Captivating like an improv beatbox on a crowded city bus or subway car, a freestyle session derived from some random word on a neon sign, or a breakdance in Tiananmen Square. It’s where I spent 8 days without music and never missed a beat, where breathing and being provided the only soundtrack. An of course I want to return for a remix. But until then, I’ll just sample tracks from my memories (pls. post photos, thanks.), and tap my finger as long as the rhythm remains, rhy-rhythm remains, rhythm-rhythm remains, remains, remains (fade out here), remains….

peas,

r to the...