A testimony

Here in China I am finding that I am able t think more clearly than at any other point in my life. Sure I’m still pretty confused about this whole business called life, but I think we all are, it’s just many of us pretend that we’ve got it all sorted.

Something particularly unusual keeps happening to me actually. Often before I go to sleep I have some sort of problem or dilemma that utterly perplexes me. A few days ago it was ‘Why should I learn Chinese?’ I mean on the surface the answer is simple. You live in China so if you learn Chinese you will be able to get on better with the locals etc. etc. But actually, I’m finding that I don’t really need the language to get by. Exaggerated hand and facial gestures have been aiding me immensely.

Now if you ask me what the advantages are of not learning Chinese they are more free time, less stress and most importantly the fact that I want to not understand what people around me are saying. I don’t want to know what they think of this or that foreigner. I don’t want to face the reality that the happy, smiling people I see in front of me may be harbouring malicious thoughts (although I don’t think that they do on the whole). I don’t want to be in the same position as I am when I am in Egypt – an inbetweener – a foreigner on the outside but a fully certified singing and dancing Egyptian on the inside who can hold her ground in a swearing match any day

In summary therefore, I am happy living in ignorance of what people around me think. To those that really know me this will sound like I have had a refrigerator dropped onto my head in the last few days. I’ve always been the ‘culture vulture’ fascinated by other cultures and languages, forever saying how I want to learn at least as many languages as I have fingers on my hands. But in the last few days I have been able to prioritise what is most important for me at this point in my life, and learning Chinese is not one of those things.

What does make it onto this priority list is world knowledge. After completing my GCSE exams (at 16) I placed myself onto the scientific path, studying science at A level and University. Of course as a good, obedient student should, I immersed myself in my studies, leaving everything else to take second place. Without my history lessons at school and without daily exposure to worldly ideas and concepts, I began to grow less and less knowledgeable about real world matters. I also didn’t realise the vacuum of knowledge that was being created inside of me. In short, I had not equipped myself with the ability to self-teach, to learn for the sake of learning rather than for a scholarly reward or outside praise. So for 6 years this continued.

Here in China I am finding that I have quite a bit of time on my hands. But this was the same at University, I had a lot of time on my hands. The difference is that here I am happy. I have a job that I enjoy, I work with kind, caring people and best of all I categorically do not belong to this culture.

Let me explain this last point in a little more detail. All my life, culture and identity have been things I feel I have had to constantly battle. Half Egyptian, half Irish, living in England, with no one else outside my family with a similar set of circumstances, meant that I was (and still am to a lesser degree) incredibly unsure of myself. At England I looked like and English/Irish person on the outside, but on the inside I felt like an alien in the country, unaware of much of the country’s culture since it was not passed down by my parents to me. In Egypt, I felt like an Egyptian inside – the values, beliefs and the sense of humour, for example, are all an integral part of my fabric – but on the outside I looked like a foreigner. Comments I heard about me on the street would get to me more than they should have, but I always lamented the fact that there was an inconsistency between my appearance and how I felt inside.

So now, back to China. In China I look like a foreigner on the outside and…. I feel like a foreigner on the inside! PERFECT! And I really do feel at ease here. Added to that the fact that the Chinese people I have met here in this city, have pretty much without exception, been overwhelmingly nice, kind and hospitable, I am feeling that this point in my life is where serious damage control will take place.

The one main area I have realised that I need to focus my attentions on right now is world news and world history. I need to learn more about this world that I’m living in, I need to be able to form my own balanced arguments, I need to be well-informed, so that I can hold my place as a responsible member of society.

I realise that I do not need to learn Chinese because I do not need to develop my language learning skills at this point in my life. I know that my language learning skills are already more developed than I know, since I am bilingual from birth (Thank you mama) and I was good at my French studies at school. After a month at an Italian language school I was able to understand 70% of the Italian I heard and I had an hour long conversation afterwards. If I need to learn Chinese in the future I can, but even if I did learn it now what use will it be to me? I had been thinking of learning it as another ‘just in case’ card, as my whole life has been up to this point in time (do science A levels, just in case, get a chemistry degree, just in case, be a swimming teacher, just in case) but now its time to start living my life for what is really important, not ‘just in case’.

Although I have virtually no substantive worldly, factual knowledge, what I do have is good reflective skills. This is why I have been able to analyse myself as best as my ability allows, and I have been able to discover new things about myself. I was forced to develop these self-reflective skills during my second years at University, when I may have been depressed, but I certainly woke up every morning with a disgust at where I was in my life – studying a subject I hated at a University I considered didn’t get the best out of me. It was the second hardest time of my life (the first being when Dada passed away) and what made it worse was that I had got to it from what seemed to be my own free will – so this part of my life had a copious amount of self-hatred dolled on top. But during this time, I discovered meditation, I learnt a lot about my inner life and my decision-making processes and I analysed much of my life up until that moment.

In Steven Covey’s Seven Habits he talks about the need to maintain four areas of human life to increase happiness –physical, mental, spiritual and social.

During my school years all four areas were being sufficiently developed (although from secondary school onwards the social side of my life has ALWAYS taken a back seat and I have found it hard to convince myself why I should invest more time and energy into it). At school I studied many subjects (before I specialised in science at 16) and I excelled in all of them, because that is how I found my self-worth by getting the highest grades and beating as many people in my class as I could. Physically, I was a competitive swimmer. I swam 7 sometimes 8 times a week, each time usually 2 hours. And the training sessions were by no means a walk in the park. I specialised in butterfly, so training in butterfly complicated matters since the stroke demands incredible strength from the core, arm and leg muscles, not to mention the aerobic demands. So I was fit.

Spiritually I had been raised Muslim and in my younger years I was rather passionate about the religion, but the passion eroded away with time.

The challenge I face now is to re-build the crumbling towers if physical, mental, spiritual and social development, but this time without external pressures – it all needs to come from inside – so for that I’ll need a good helping of will power.

I still find it hard to convince myself of the importance of the social side of my life. I seem quite content reading, exercising, exploring on my own. The up-side is that I don’t have to worry about what to say or what not to say to who. But I realise that my lack of development in this area comes from a myriad of insecurities – my mixed culture being an important contributing factor. In short, I’m afraid to be who I really am, for fear of being judges and disliked. But what I’ve come to realise is that there will always be people that dislike me, just as there are people I will always dislike. That’s human and natural. We usually dislike people who do not share our values, people who are different from us. If I can truly internalise this concept I think that is where I can find my freedom.

Something I’ve realised today is that although 2 cultures have very much shaped me, I am on the whole ignorant of both. I have realised therefore that I need to educate myself in my own cultures, and when I have a better grasp of them, I will also have a better grasp of myself.

This takes me nicely onto the mental part. I need to try to establish some sort of routine, perhaps modelled on my time at school, where I give myself sufficient time and space to learn about current affairs and history. I think once I get into the swing of things this shouldn’t be so difficult to master.

Moving on to the physical. Yes I do find it difficult to motivate myself to exercise, despite my swimming background. I tried Muay Thai here in Jinan, and I am considering yoga, but I think I need something more aerobic. I am therefore considering joining a gym and doing yoga practise at home.

The yoga would tie in nicely with spiritual development – and I don’t find it particularly difficult to sit on a cushion and meditate, so this area is often the one where least motivation is required.

An annoying habit I have is thinking about my future a lot. Making plans, etc. What I know full well is that I change my mind a lot (something that drives my mother insane. Her primary concern is that I will decide to have a family then when all the kids have popped out I’ll change my mind and do a runner. But she’s assured me that in that eventuality she’ll raise them herself). But I believe I change my mind a lot because I change at a person at a very fast pace. I constantly embrace change. I sometimes feel akin to water – moulding myself to whatever the situation demands. This has caused me personal problems in my social life because I subconsciously try to mould myself to the person in front of me, therefore losing my integrity and my identity in the process. Anyway, as I mentioned before, I think my time in China could be seen as a sort of ‘Life Rehab’ and this tells me 2 things. The first is that I don’t think that teaching English will be my permanent career, I see it more as a stepping stone. The second is that I don’t think I will make China my permanent home.

But here I go again – this habit of mine really drives me insane. Who am I to know what is around the corner? May be English teaching will be my permanent career and maybe China will be my permanent home. Who am I to speculate? I’m going to try to work on this habit of making plans for my future because with plans comes rigidity and limitation and as I’ve previously eluded to, that is against a major part of my character.

Next post will hopefully be something little lighter, but I had a lot I needed to get off my chest. Over and out.