I told my landlord that I’m leaving today, in a month, annnnnnd it’s real.
Sat here on my balcony looking at the clay tiles baking in the direct sunlight hitting my neighbor’s roof, I wonder how many more sunsets I’ll get out of the start of Shanghai summer. I ride around, cruising on the weekends, popping my head around and peering into alleyways, wondering what treasure and other moments that I might have missed out on with the lonely and the inspiring old men and women that have lived through so much… CHANGE in the last few decades.
Sometimes at night I’ll take the longboard that Jacob gave me out for a spin. I already know the parks and places the cops will try and chase me out of. They turn more amused and lax with the “rules” once the nighttime crowds dissipate. Sometimes while exploring I carry a backpack, my speaker vibrating in it. I scroll through folk and indie music. Through the music I can re-experience being under the phoenix trees of the French concession that I’ve turned and twisted and danced about through a different frame. The locals don’t care or mind too much about the addition that this crazy American-born Chinese girl brings to the sound scape around them. It’s familiar, just a bit different from the radios that play in the alleys in the early mornings hung from bikes, asking for people to bring out their recyclable, reusable goods, or the speakers that scream next to the ear of the sleeping sick person from the countryside, wheeled about aimlessly, holding on until his next treatment in the city hospital.
My gym membership expires Thursday. I haven’t packed a single item of clothing away yet. As of now, I think I’d rather the movers do it for me. Too sentimental. It seems like just yesterday that I attempted to Marie Kondo my apartment during the eerie and quiet Chinese New Year when parts of Shanghai become somewhat of a ghost town. The migrants go home every year and the rich leave for sunnier shores, a part of the world’s largest annual mass migration of 7 million people just this year.
I play every day with my kids. I imagine what it will mean next year when I don’t have a classroom of my own, a culture of little people that I’ve shaped or grown through. I linger in the waves of laughter from every good joke. I give them the best, most playful, most humble, most focused sides of me, because this is a space where I can freely give completely. They don’t judge me too harshly. They’re forgiving, I am too when I’m with them, and I like that.
I try not to sink too deeply into the thought that may be this might be the last group of students I’ll ever teach, at least in the foreseeable future. I honor every moment I feel successful in meeting them where they are, in pushing them to see themselves as writers or as young people who can carve out space in the world to express themselves. I try to comment on every sprint that they make running towards the finish line of some of challenge or fall that grows them to being better, fuller, more confident, little human beings. I don’t want them to forget that there was once a teacher in their school lives who believed in their character despite their obvious flaws, who wanted them to burst and brim with joy and to awe at the wonders of the larger world, in their teeny, tiny, overscheduled worlds.
I’m not clear exactly what will happen next. My next role won’t follow the predictable and turbulent rhythms of a classroom culture shaping, breaking, and remolding itself over the course of an academic year. I start grad school again in September, and this time, it’s a degree that I choose, not one required as a part of Teach For America or teacher training for the state. I’m moving, to a new city.
“You’ll have to make friends all over again,” my mom told me, really, told herself, when I told her the news in February. Her voice didn’t try to mask her worrying about me.
