Thanksgiving in China

11/24/2010

It’s the middle of November and Thanksgiving is just a day away. It seems appropriate to make an entry into my travelogue. It’s been nearly three months since I arrived in China. I’ve experienced a lot. I’ve met a lot of people, seen a lot of things, and heard a lot of stories. I’d like to tell one of my own. Over the past few months, I’ve developed a good friendship with this kid who works at my campus as a security guard. He’s a year younger than me and comes from a poor and fractured family. His mother, formerly a cocaine and other hard drugs addict, is the only family left in his life, and even that relationship is stressed. But whenever we talk, we talk about his dreams of getting a lot of money and having no worries and how life would just be so much easier. We sit in tea houses and talk endlessly of business ideas and dream up how we could make money together, everything from starting an import/export business to starting a restaurant in Laos where he has some distant relatives and the cost of living is much lower. We talk as though we were from the same mold. So I decided to go with him and visit his mother who’s cooking he swears is the best in Sichuan. The usual conversation carried on all the way there. Upon arriving at his house, the conversation stopped abruptly. His mother’s house, little more that a shack, was in deplorable condition. There were dead vegetables rotting in baskets in front of the house, random chickens clucking about, a mangy dog staring absently at us. His mother emerged, a woman bent from years of hard work and drug usage, haggard features, surly hair pulled together into a equally surly knot, and managing a gappy smile. In that moment, the both of us just stood there, staring. Nothing but the ice cold reality of the gulf between us existed. The fact is, that he is from a poor family in China, and I am from a working class family in the U.S. That means everything. What I have been able to do in my life may have been beyond my wildest dreams, but it is beyond the scope of dreaming for him. I think in that moment, the both of us realized this. It remained unspoken. We proceeded to enjoy what indeed turned out to be the best meal I had had yet in Sichuan, and promptly returned to Chengdu to our normal lives. But I will never forget that feeling of thankfulness of being blessed to be born in a country that allows you, if you are willing to work hard, believe in yourself, and have a dream, to achieve almost anything. For that, on this Thanksgiving, I am thankful.