Run, Running, Runner: When is it Time to Go Home?

I laugh at my own jokes, clap for my own productions, and read my own writings.

Here's the thing.  People will always encourage to you follow your bliss or chase your dream or whatever other awful one-liner they feel compelled to offer you 'cause, after all, that is the correct thing to say.  We tote it when someone does something "uncommon" and we want to support them. It's nice.  In the very next breath, however, and I don't want to speak like I represent everyone who has ever chosen to live in a foreign country, but most expats have been kindly reminded by the folks back home that they will always be welcomed back whenever they want.  "So, you are earning $24,000 a year?  You could make that at any minimum wage job back in America."

Yes, but not every job requires me to vacuum or clean toilets in a suit.
So, you know, there is that.

Every time someone implies that I can "return home" whenever I want, I just hear, "why are you doing this," and I feel compelled to defend my lifestyle which means I hear myself trying to defend a place I don't even like sometimes.

From general to specific now.  I live in Beijing, a place I never planned on visiting much less living in, and we are in Day One of our second Red Alert pollution day.  Yes, it's smoggy out there.  PM 2.5 today is 165 in my neighborhood.  Honesty, I don't really know what that means other than there is bad stuff in the air that shouldn't be there.  Some people are going to go to hospitals and clinics because of respiratory complaints.  My asthma might act up.  Okay.  That sucks?  I was chatting with my mom on Skype a bit ago and, after mentioning my few years in Japan post the Fukushima incident, she asked about my retuning home.  That is a very difficult thought for me to even attempt to handle.

Okay, yes, the entire city is in the Red or Purple.  Not GOOD but not radioactive?

I've written before about the concept of Home.  Maybe it is because I moved a lot as a kid or just something about my personality, but I don't have a Home.  My parents do.  My dad has a Home with a capital H in Virginia, and my mom has one in Las Vegas.  They each have this... structure that they have furnished with various goods that is familiar to me and I pretty much know what it will look like before I open the door.  Their Homes are these, pretty much, unchanging and dependable places that they are part of.  I don't see my dad ever moving out of his Home.  My mom, mmm, she might, she might not.  Either way, this idea of Home doesn't extend to any of the places I have lived in myself. I like visiting my parents in their Homes, but I don't have or want one for myself.  Right now, anyway.  So, if I do leave China in July or whatever, I wouldn't be "going home," but I would be going to someone else's home, at least as a foothold while I tried to get my shit together.

This white building will probably always have a red door.

Certainly, life in China has brought me little joy.  I haven't had that feeling of wonderment, that feeling of joy I felt when I was living in Japan or studying in Turkey or England.  I am not enraptured by Beijing the same way I was by Sydney or Kuala Lumpur.  It's a city.  It's fine.  Beijing is a bit gritty and, somehow, very dull, but I have certainly felt extremely safe here (and isn't safe just alternative spelling of "bored"?) and the people, while a bit aggravating in their manners (read: the bad driving, the spitting, the snot rockets, the pushing onto trains and subways), people are, basically, good and kind.  Ugh, is there anything worse then a gross but kind person?  It's like 14 million mostly well-behaved five year olds with colds.  I've been content, though.  I don't have fantastically interesting friends with an life completely different from my own 'cause, basically, I only hang out with two other American women one of which I went to high school with.

Why drink beer with Americans in America when you can drink with Americans in China?

Content.  Safe.  Other American women.  (sigh)

We had a runner last week.  Actually, we had a Runner quit her job and run back to America. So, this chick comes to China to, I gather, basically make her boyfriend realize how amazing she is and beg her to come back so he can marry her.  Well, he didn't beg her to come back, and the job was more difficult than she expected. She told her roommate that she was going to go hiking on the Great Wall with some friends but instead secretly went to the airport with MOST of her stuff.  Her roommate panicked when Teacher A didn't come home that night, wasn't there the next morning, and then stuck her nose in Teacher A's bedroom looking for a possible explanation or clue. What she found was a 2.5 page, single-paragraph letter explaining that she felt bad she couldn't tell anyone what she was doing but she was afraid of the consequences and felt she had to flee the country.  Now, I did a dramatic reading of this letter at the meeting we had that afternoon just because it was so ridiculously crafted like something out of a cheap novel it needed to be shared.  Great lines like, "Can I ask you just one more favor?  ...maybe, give me a head start?"

Wait.  What??? You're quitting your job as a 2nd grade teacher not running from the mob.  It was amazing.

You know what we do to English teachers who try to go home?

Another one of my acquaintances who ran from home and a marriage two years ago recently headed back.  She was planning on just a few weeks/couple of months abroad with a passport set to expire, but then decided she didn't want to go back and, instead of returning to America, caught a flight from Europe the other direction to Oceania. I have a couple of people still making a life in Japan, but at some point, most of us do have to head back from whence we came.  I've gone home a couple of times now.  Flying back into Vegas always just feels like stepping into the dying grounds of some lost-cause war.  As I think about Teacher A the Runner, or Passport Renewal the Runner, or of three of the best people I've ever known, Andrea, Valerie, and Allison, who all made a rather seamless and lovely transitions back to America, I wonder how did they know it was time to go home and how did they do it?

In the end, home is where your posters are.

I am going to have to make a decision about contract renewal pretty soon here. How fast a year goes by, and I am not sure what I am going to say.  Do I love China?  No, obviously not, but I don't feel called to anywhere else and the idea of returning to America just feels like surrender.  The pay is a bit low, but it is kinda like living with your parents when you were in middle school.  All your bills are paid and my "paycheck" is more like an allowance for pocket money.  The vacation time is generous and the potential to make extra cash under the table is there. It's... it's fine. There is something nice in the known and next year has the potential to be very comfortable, but maybe I do need to press on to the next place.