"We, as Human Beings, are predisposed to long for the familiar. Not the pleasant, but the familiar. We are more attached to what we know than what we desire."
-My father, Robert A. Harris Sr.
"Are you familiar with Milton, Captain?"
-Khan Singh's response when Captain Kirk gave him the choice between exile on a wasteland planet and returning to Earth to stand trial
During the five and a half years I lived in Beijing, I came to regard the place in much the same way Obi-Wan Kenobi regarded Mos Eisley Spaceport. Not only was the city itself a run-down, falling-apart little dungheap where every street was covered in piles of, well, dung (and it didn't take more than a few days before one could spot enough toddlers taking a shit through the button-flap hole in the seat of their pants because their parents were the kind of slobs who think "diapers are unnecessary" to figure out that those piles of dung all over the sidewalk aren't from dogs), but even the air reeked of the putrid, toxic mix of carcinogenic coal dust and sweat from unwashed peasant bodies.
And speaking of "unwashed peasants," let's talk about the people. Everywhere, from the seedy back-alleys of Sanlitun to the brothels of Tongzhou and Daxing, the city oozed with the kind of lowlifes and riffraff that would make Detroit blush. The Chinese inhabitants of the city ranged from modern-day Ah-Q's (slobbering, snorting, loogey-hocking, butt-scratching, mouth-breathing, baijiu-belching, "Beijing-bikini-clad" neanderthals whose last shower was dynasties ago, too lazy to do a hand's turn of honest work but so "ready to relieve you of a sous or two" that Thenardier would be proud) to Wolf Warrior wannabes prowling the city looking for unsuspecting foreign victims to "patriotically" attack (though you should see the shocked and impotent looks on their faces when the foreigner fights back).
And the foreigners? They were typically no better. Most of Beijing's expats were the kind of flotsam and jetsam that could only wash up on the shores of a wasteland like China after being complete failures at everything back in the West. Yet they absolutely loved China, because here was a place where they could escape their lives as absolute nobodies and pretend to be somebodies. And as long as you're willing to kiss the boots of the regime and constantly tout the "glories" of the cesspool around you (and of course, have no scruples whatsoever), then you could claim expertise in any field you liked and the Chinese would throw their hats in the air for you, pretending to believe it. A "token foreign face" willing to give lengthy diatribes about how bad their life was in the West and how much better the "Glorious Central Nation" is, was worth enough to the Chinese that they'd gild your cage like a palace.
And lacing together this tapestry of travesty was a network of crooked cops, sleazy school administrators, bafflingly incompetent doctors, and two-bit fraudsters, living in a world where every credential is fake, being honest is a crime and there is no law. If that city had one redeeming quality other than easy money and cheap booze (which seems to be enough for most of the above-mentioned expats), I'm damned if I ever came within fifty blocks of it!
...And since I left that Christ-forsaken city, I have found myself sighing, looking back on it with a level of fondness I know is irrational.
Part of the reason is obvious. It's not the city I miss; it's who I left there. And putting wheels down at DFW airport just in time to turn on the news and find that the country I'd just gotten out of was being ripped apart by a bioweapon of their own making (spare me the nonsensical assertions that it is anything else), and knowing the woman I love more than life itself was still there only made me climb the walls ten times more vigorously.
But considering that the woman I was writing about is not planning on sticking around in Beijing, it's hard to think that's where this nostalgia comes from. Yet as the days went on, and I (like everyone else in the world) grew accustomed to the revolting presence of Chinavirus-19 and came to accept it as an unavoidable reality (at least until the US develops a vaccine), I started to actually (God help me) find myself thinking "I wouldn't mind hopping on my old Super Soco and taking a ride along 3rd Ring Road this evening." Or "man, I miss the view of of Liangmaqiao and Guomao from the roof of The Bell in Sanlitun." And every time I caught myself thinking this, I'd give my head a shake to clear it and think, "the fuck did I just say?!" And today, on the one year anniversary of my emotional landing in the States last summer (for the first time in 4 and a half years), I think it's time to finally lay that misplaced nostalgia to rest.
Part of it -a large part, actually- is just familiarity. That city (filthy, smog-choked, wretched pit that it was) was my horrid little home for five and a half years (August 2014 until January 2020), which is longer than I've spent living in one city since I moved to the delightfully cosmopolitan metropolis of Stonewall, Louisiana at the end of the 5th grade in 1995. "The Beijing years" were a phase of my life long enough to see me from rags to riches and back to rags, to go from a scrappy white-belt to a sempai counting down to the black belt exam... I won't bother running down the list but it was a big enough chunk of years (and changes) that my pre-Beijing life and my post-Beijing life can barely even be recognized as part of the same story.
That's long enough to get accustomed to a city, no matter how detestable it is. That's long enough for even Hell to become "home."
But there is more to it than that, and I never quite managed to put my finger on what it was... until earlier this week when I finally got around to watching a movie I'd been meaning to see for a few years: Venom... And I suppose I should put in a spoiler tag here.
Anyway, there are two moments in that movie that are really the only explanation the audience gets about the reasons for the Venom symbiote's change-of-heart from "the bad guy" to "the semi-domesticated bad guy who preys on bad guys." The first is where Venom climbs up to the top of a skyscraper and soaks up an eyeful of the city skyline, commenting, "your world is not so ugly after all," and following it up with a creepy bit of foreshadowing.
"I'm almost sorry to see it end."
I'm not crazy about drawing parallels between myself and an alien parasite, but the notion of getting attached to a place you are otherwise hostile towards, all on the basis of the serenity that comes from getting lost in a city skyline at night, is one I can relate to.
The other (and larger) bit of self-introspection this movie brought, though, comes later, after Venom explains why he decided to spontaneously go against his own people in defense of a planet whose inhabitants he basically viewed as food a few scenes prior. "On my planet," he explains to Eddie, "I am kind of a loser... like you. But here, we can be more."
...Remember in the early paragraphs, when I spoke of expats who were nothing back in their countries, falling in love with China because it was easy to pretend they were somebodies? Yeah. There's an old adage that says "in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king." It's also been said "surrounded by midgets, it's easy to feel like a giant."
And I won't lie. Competition for jobs in my field is a hell of a lot lighter in China. In America, you can't walk into a school and swing a cat over your head without running the risk of hitting eight people with master's degrees. In China, a simple "yes, I DID actually study to be a teacher" made me a virtual demigod in the eyes of most schools' HR departments. In America (at least my corner of it), you can't even get a job as a substitute unless you've been teaching for a decade. In China, principals drooled when I told them I had more than five years of teaching experience.
And in America, you're viewed as an underachiever if you don't make at least $50K a year by the time you're 35, but most teachers make about $45K, even with all the credentials I listed above.
...In China, I was pulling $52K. In a country where the cost of living is something like 15% of what it is in the US.
It's hard to go from being a leviathan to being a minnow.
It's hard to go from a place where I was one of the best in the country at what I do (without even trying) to a place where people with better qualifications than me are underqualified.
It's hard to go from being able to send my kids more than I make now, and still having money to throw around... to begging for help from people I don't even know.
And it is damned hard to go from a lifestyle where I would hop a train to a city 550 km away for the weekend just because I liked that city's bookstore, spending my evenings chilling at a rooftop bar with people from every country under the sun, to the old American 9 - 5 surrounded by people whose idea of an "exotic vacation" is Colorado, especially when they are looking down their noses at me because I don't drive an Escalade.
Don't get it twisted. I'm not saying China was great. It was a backward little throwback to the paleolithic, and there aren't enough brain cells in the entire country to make a single functioning cerebellum. But what I never realized until I left was, "of course it's primitive. That's the point. That's why it's so easy to succeed in China. Because there's no competition." I went from reigning in Hell, to sweeping the streets in Heaven.
It was nice living in a city with a thriving nightlife scene, especially having money to burn. I went from a country where I was at the top of the food chain (at least if you didn't look too closely) to a country where I'm at the bottom of it; a mediocre talent formerly surrounded by the talentless, who now finds himself surrounded by a workforce with actual skills. A one-eyed man, missing a realm where he could boast to the blind about his eyesight, and complain to the sighted about the blindness of the people around him. The life I left behind can't be considered "greatness." On the best of days, I felt like Jack Burton. On the worst... well, let's not even talk about the worst of days. On the worst... well, don't get me started. It wasn't "greatness." It was merely the illusion of greatness.
...But it was a damned fine illusion.