So, How Was China?

I've been home from China for just over two weeks now.  Everyone keeps asking me, "How was China?" So far I've found the question impossible to answer.  How can I put what China meant to me in one pithy sentence, in a quick, engaging answer?  Other people even answer the question better than I do, as though my China experience is clear to them when I'm still having trouble defining it.

My co-workers in China told me many times that I was brave, that they admired me.  I never knew quite how to respond.  In fact, I admired the teachers I worked with, and it was strange to hear that they admired me.  The teachers at Baoding Eastern Bilingual School care deeply about their students and their families, they work hard and are infinitely better teachers than I ever could be.  My friends Ada, Miss Liu and Miss Bi are all so confident, so sure of what they want, so good at their jobs, I can't help but admire them.

Since I've been back, many people have mentioned how they noticed a change in my pictures and blogs.  They said that over the ten months in China, I seemed to become more confident, happier. And they also call me brave.  

Of all the adjectives I've ever used to describe myself, I never would have used brave.  I think back to my first lonely, terrifying night in my Baoding apartment, when I slept with the lights on, and I don't see myself as brave.  I think about my first time exploring Baoding on my own, when I was thrilled to buy myself an ice cream, the only thing I felt confident enough to ask for with my rudimentary combination of hand gestures and poor Mandarin.  I think about the time I had food poisoning and didn't eat or go grocery shopping for five days and when I finally tried to make myself some noodles, I accidentally poured them down the sink and broke down sobbing in my empty apartment.  I didn't feel brave then.  

When I was in China, I had difficulty answering another common question- "Why did you want to come to China?"  I just wanted to, I would think while trying to think of a better answer.  Now I think one of the things I couldn't really articulate either then or now was that I wanted to feel brave.  I wanted to have an adventure, but more than that I wanted to be an adventurer.  

So maybe everyone's right.  Maybe I was a little brave.  Maybe traveling alone was brave.  Maybe singing Celine Dion in front of the whole school was brave.  Maybe wearing a blue wig to class for April Fool's Day was brave.  Maybe riding my bike at night through chaotic traffic when it was raining was brave (and really stupid, don't tell my dad!). 

Living in China for a year gave me a deep understanding of a country I and most Americans know little about.  I made many wonderful, life-long friends, and learned about the things that matter to them.  I came to appreciate simple things like clean air, fast and uncensored internet, and unlimited grilled cheeses.  I had the chance to teach and befriend a thousand bright, creative students and to think critically about both their education system and our own.  I felt alternately homesick, joyful, lonely, thankful, angry, confident, shy, and brave.

 I still can't answer the people who ask me how China was.  All I know is that, as they say in China, "it will live in my heart for forever."