Sticking it to the Man

Our flight out of Beijing had a layover in the coastal city of Wanzhou. As we went through security, I was once again pulled aside and brought to the security desk where the security guard handed me over to his supervisor. He placed my Chinese farmer’s bamboo shoulder stick on the counter. The supervisor picked it up, smiled, and shook her head. I started to protest, but realized my efforts were futile. My bamboo shoulder stick had made it all the way from Dali to Lijiang to Xi’an to Beijing. We had hauled it all over China. My daughters had taken turns lugging it from one city to the next. And now it had been confiscated on the very last leg of our journey. I guess my future students will not be carrying buckets of sand from one side of the room to the other. The loss of my bamboo stick put me in depressive funk for the for the first hour of our flight home.

Lost cameras and bamboo shoulder sticks aside, it had been a fabulous journey across the expanse of China. With seventeen days we had barely scratched the surface of the world’s biggest country and her 1.3 billion people and her 3,000 years of uninterrupted history. But we had gotten to see China past and present from the south to the north. We had been able to clomped through her mountains and felt her rivers pulsating in our chests; we had wandered the countryside, ambled through villages, and immersed ourselves in the hustle and bustle of her cities. And we had met some amazing people along the way and managed to learn just a little bit of their stories and where they had been and where they were going.

It made us hungry for more. Seventeen days had only served to whet our appetite. But, alas life in Hong Kong –and beyond that, life in back in the States- was beckoning.

We arrived back in Hong Kong where we no longer had a home. Staff housing was now being prepped for all the new staff that would be arriving in a few short weeks. As we settled down into our seat on the upper level of the A-41 bus from the airport, Julie rummaged around in the bottom of her purse for the keys to the apartment where we would be flopping while our friend was back in New Zealand for the summer. We were going to spend our last five weeks in Hong Kong once again living out of a suitcase.