Dear Aimee,

I walked and walked during my last days in China. You know the feeling, Aimee. You walk out in all kinds of weather… the acid rain drenches, the sun scorches, the frozen mud oozes through holey, dreadful boots. You go to see. You can’t help yourself. You commit memories to images that unexpectedly appear after you’ve left as you open the mail, buy toothpaste, make dinner. Something reminds you and, then come the unforgettable images… smells… tastes… perceptions. You’ve walked and walked, committing every detail to your memory… that sense of flow and peace. Mostly the images remind you of that… just expanding… just being.

I walked down the hill toward Rat Street one day. We had called this lane Rat Street, because, in the fall we had begun to hear the rats scuttle through the leaves in the thick Pa Shan Hu vines growing over the high stone wall. I thought it was just the rustling leaves in the wind at first, but after a while, I accepted that it was rats running through the dried leaves. I remember thinking that, if I had stayed in China one more year, I might have run after a rat with a pot and a cleaver.

It was a hot day out in the sun… that wall of heat in a summer’s furnace of China. I loped along with my eccentric straw hat. Do you remember it… the one with the purple raffia bow and a wood flower? I turned into Rat Street. The street was full of people shopping for vegetables and fruits. There were cages of chickens that sounded like they knew their time had come. Soon there would be the grab of a hand, a twist of the neck, a whack… then dinner… bony chicken pieces… greens stir fried with entrails… chicken soup with quail eggs if the diner was lucky.

 I continued walking… ruminating in the busy street… cars blowing horns, motor bikes, Bus 68 belching, the rattle of Bus 61. I was shaken into the present by the crowd of Chinese standing in shock with their mouths open. What was going on? Then, I saw it… a camel picking its way through the traffic. The camel had a cruel spike through its nostril attached to a screw under its lower lip. They say camels bite, you know. I would have bitten, too. He was old and skinny. He had bare, hairless patches on his hide. He hobbled along arthritically through the crowded street. He was loaded down with old blankets and the stuff of travel. I was sad and angry for the beast until I saw its owner. He looked just like the camel… old and dirty, poor and hobbling.

Where had they come from? Where were they going? I am not sure the answers to those questions are important, but how could I ever explain what I saw… the feeling of it, the scope of it, the breadth of it, the meaning of it, the appearance of it, the smell of the air that day, the taste of the dust in my mouth… how to express that moment that I experienced that camel… the sheer amazement of that moment… the sheer amazement of China. How to, indeed… except to someone who has lived in China.

You know how it is, Aimee. Your friends analyze you when you move back to where you came from. Why does she not want to kiss the ground of her native land? Why does she still long for China? How could she so completely mourn the loss of those people she knew for such a short time? I don’t need to list the questions for you, Aimee. One more China story from me will send my long-suffering friends over the edge… but, they have never been to China… they do not know how the places we’ve lived become part of your skin… part of your bone without rejecting the legacy of your native land that has allowed us to travel whereever we have desired across the earth. Straddling life in multiple places ensures that neither of us will see things in the same light again…

… and, then, there is the violet tea… sitting over the street and watching people… the contrast of hot China nights eating yang rou chu’ar from old bicycle spokes from straight over the coals and the heavy, blackened pans of steaming pot stickers in Muslim quarters along the streets and canals followed by French restaurants in gleaming hotels… the conundrum of our nutty boyfriends in a strange land… and a host of nuttier friends… a Kunming street lined with sycamores and red lanterns… what can be described that cannot always be understood. You know how it is, Aimee… you know how it is in the place where there is a space where we were.