No. 1

Date: Sept. 13 & 14, 2015

Status: Flying to Shanghai

              Totally unprepared and perfectly destined, before sunrise I step out of the minivan of my poor, worried mother. She somehow finds more advice to give me before I leave, even though the past two weeks have been nothing but planning and advice. But Lord knows I need every word of my mother’s advice—if not for the information, for the comfort of knowing she cares.

              I have to get going. I’ve never flown alone before. I think if you’re flying alone, you’ve got to be extra nice and ask a lot of questions of a lot of people using your best plaster smile. And eventually to get to all the right places in Milwaukee and you make your connecting flight in Chicago even though you waited in the wrong lines twice at the gate—and those signs were in English! And pretty soon you’re on a flight to Shanghai where you’ll be picked up by a man, who doesn’t speak any English, called Mr. Chi. And you’ll have to trust him to take you on a two to three hour drive to the “small” Chinese city of Yangzhou, home to approximately 700,000 people, most of whom know less of your language than you do of theirs (you assume).

              Here I am, somewhere above Russia, trusting that God will likely keep me alive, at least.

              Having slept as much as my body will allow, I’m trying to concentrate on reading a book of short essays by a man who experienced something similar to what I expect to experience. This man, Bill Holm, author of Coming Home Crazy, is my closest friend at this point in time. He, too, is a product of the American Midwest, of European descent, who spend a year teaching English in China, though it was a different time—the late 1980s.

              Bill assures me that, although he can’t possibly explain it properly, I will surely go crazy if I manage to spend a full year in China. His first essay, from which the title of the book is taken, tells of a time before he became overwhelmed with the conflicting ideas of East and West.

              His anthropologist friend told him, “ ‘In Asia…you either lose your inner moorings, start to sink, go some kind of crazy, and just let it happen, or you will leave sooner than you expected and not learn anything.’ ” 
              Bill scoffed at this, thinking himself too grounded for insanity. But the rest of the essay explains how wrong Bill was. Not wanting to repeat my friend Bill’s mistaken assumption, I am determined to come home crazy.