There’s this moment I think about a lot.
I’m in a cab, going down Yongjia Road, crossing the Shanghai Culture Square and Maoming South Road. I’m on the way to J+S. And then I start sobbing.
I’m leaving China in two weeks. It’s 45ºC out. I’m sweaty and I’m devastated.
It’s one of those moments that’s etched in my mind forever when I think about leaving China. I lived with J+S my last two weeks in Shanghai, because my apartment felt too hollow and too empty. But really, it was almost a rite of passage to stay with them before leaving China. A soft landing to the hard landing of what we all assumed to be a one-way flight out of the country. And out of our lives as expats.
I remember rolling down the cab window, because I was feeling nauseous. It happens to me a lot in cars now. Most of my things were packed by then and on a steamboat to London (okay, it wasn’t a steamboat, but i’m allowed to romanticize it). I fought back the nausea and the tears even as I carried my 32kg rolling back to J+S’s Ruijin road gates
I’m writing here to procrastinating writing what I’m actually trying to write. Like my blog entries, I am good at the first sentence. Then it all falls apart and sputters out to some sort of dumb, banal ending. My fiction writing is that way as well. I write a great premise. I include a heart-wrenching opener, but I just don’t know how to close it.
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