Note: This piece was written just prior to high school graduation in 2017, reflecting on the passage of time, and using the theme to look back on my three weeks in Beijing, China the previous summer.
“Nǐ hǎo! Huānyíng dào běijīng shǒudū guójì jīchǎng!” Hello! Welcome to Beijing Capital International Airport!
Wow. What am I doing here?! Like a suddenly above-average tall, Caucasian alien from Wisconsin, I step off United Flight 851 into the chaotic terminal of China’s sprawling metropolis and am greeted with a scene fit for another planet. One might wonder what a seventeen-year-old with no prior knowledge of Mandarin and limited ability with chopsticks is doing alone in the world’s second-busiest airport, and at this moment, 3:32 P.M. on July 11, 2016, hit with the full weight of being 6,539.9 miles away from home, I would be as bemused as them. But, in fact, I was there for a reason, one that I had been planning for and dreaming about since the dreary days of January, having just arrived for the start of a three-week environmental service summer abroad trip; a journey that I, if not my slightly anxious mother, had been champing at the bit to begin.
The time is now 4:45 A.M. I’m hiking up a mountain known as “The Thumb” in the rural Zhangjiakou region, several hours northwest of Beijing. The past two weeks have positively flown by: language classes, cultural attractions, and environmental service projects making up the brunt of this hectic, but memorable, highlight reel. Our small group has been dutifully trekking up a weathered, overgrown dirt path for nearly an hour. I’m hot, sticky, sweaty, and mustered only three hours of sleep before the hike. Yet, I’m on cloud nine (which may or may not be made of smog due to China’s crippling pollution issues…). We are nearing the highest peak of the Great Wall in the area, just in time to watch the sunrise.
Suddenly, without warning, the path ends, and the trail that has snaked ruggedly up the wild, untamed mountain gives way to one of the most beautiful sights I could ever imagine. We have reached a small platform next to an ancient, squat guard tower, which modestly looks out over the vast expanse of hills and valleys profiled in the pre-dawn haze. I’m inspired, and humbled, by the manner in which man and nature have a clear connection here — if not juxtaposition — and I am once again awed by how small this Wonder of the World really is — a single calligraphic stroke across the paper of land. With my backpack strapped tight, and wanderlust coursing through my veins, I cannot help but wonder if, in centuries past, a young Chinese guard ever took a break from his post atop the mountain and sat like myself, feet dangling off the platform, looking out over the endless landscape and wondering simply about his place in the world.
10:59 P.M. Several days later, on the eve of our departure, I find myself sitting once more — this time on the windowsill of my Beijing hotel room. With newly-made friends crowded around inside, I take a moment to look at the night falling quickly on this city — and country — that I’ve come to love. I would have no way of knowing that, upon being asked on my return, “So, how was China?” I’d be left speechless, mouth agape, thousands of images, sounds, feelings, and emotions flitting through my mind as fast as China’s famed bullet trains — unable to sum up the experience in a sentence, a conversation, or even the blank canvas of this page.
If our trip follows the arc of a story, we have reached the resolution, our metaphorical, and literal, journey ending with our imminent homecoming. And if it’s true that one’s initial impression of another takes only seven seconds to form, it’s true too that genuine friendships need no more than three weeks to do the same, making the unavoidable zàijiàn’s more difficult than any other goodbyes I’d experienced. It became easy to forget that we all had busy, real lives back home, many of us soon becoming preoccupied with school, jobs, and college applications. Before we knew it, the days, weeks, and months began to melt away, not unlike time had those three weeks in Beijing.
The time is now 1:57 P.M. on June 4, 2017. A series of figures runs through my mind, like a numerical checklist: 329 days since my departure for China, 307 since the return; 1372 days since the start of high school, 4 until graduation…
It is so often said that time flies by in the blink of an eye; that one day you can be halfway around the world from your own home, trying fried scorpion on a stick and feeling caught somewhere in that beautiful place between curiosity and bliss, while the next you’re slipping on your cap and gown — believing that it was only yesterday you did the same with your light blue CIEE shirt, nervous but beyond excited to take off for the greatest 21 days of your life.
But really, is life not simply an endless cycle of beginnings and ends, take-offs and returns, some as significant as closing the chapter of childhood, others as simple as closing the chapter of a book?
As I prepare to turn the page for the next great adventure, I know for certain that I will not only forever look back to my abroad experience for nostalgic musings, daydreams, and purely happy memories, but also to guide my life’s path. Although I may never again work at the Gaya Organic Farm in Beijing, or implement environmental surveys with the Chinese NGO “Friends of Nature”, I can act in their inspiration as I prepare to pursue Global Studies and Environmental Sciences in college, and hopefully embark on a life forever ingrained with travel, learning, helping, and healing. So that, at least in my own mind’s eye, those three weeks I spent in China as a bright-eyed, chopstick-fumbling, Mandarin-mumbling seventeen-year-old, will never truly come to their conclusion.
Jake Marble 