Homeroom Bell: Leaving China

“The students leaned forward, as a wave, a collective entity like something from a Michael Crichton novel, trying together to understand the words in English. Brows were furrowed, eyes were closed. They were combining their energy into one unit, energy that could absorb the words I was getting tired of hearing after a week. I could almost hear the girl closest to me willing her brain to comprehend. I knew the song was difficult to understand – thanks, Ed Sheeran – but I wanted them to be challenged. I would give them a second chance to fill in the blanks, to commit more lyrics to memory, but for now I let them sweat. I let them sit in silence when I tried to elicit answers. Then, I stepped in to help. They had earned it. I was proud of them. They wanted to learn. And, I wanted to teach them.”

There were highs and lows in teaching, naturally, but there was consistency and stability as well. I had routines – and I enjoyed them. Trevor and I had our Foreigner Friday dinners. I had basketball with my students. Qingtian had the same bars and the same tables to sit at. I had my Chinese lessons and the progress that followed. That’s how I expected the rest of my time in China to go: living abroad but with a touch of normalcy, a touch of home that had taken time, effort, and kindness to create.

Winter break was a chance to shake up that normalcy, to do more and see more of the country that would, in turn, make me appreciative of the quiet weeknights in Qingtian and the regularity of teaching the same sixteen classes every week in a small city high school. Anthony, a fellow teacher, and I were traveling in Xi’an when we first heard about some ‘virus’ that was making its way around a city called Wuhan. We thought nothing more of it. That was four flights and five weeks ago.

Now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Washington DC, watching people walk by on a blisteringly cold, windy day. I let my mind wander back, thinking about the events that brought me from there to here. I had been in my Qingtian apartment, having flown back from Xi’an in a hurry as the virus spread.

I did three days alone in that apartment, essentially in a mandated quarantine, before I began having doubts about staying in China. The prevalence of the virus meant school opening had been delayed until at least February. For a ‘head case’ like me, that might as well have been an eternity instead of a few weeks.

I texted my mom about flying out of China: “If I’m going to go, even just for the duration of the break, is there any reason to wait?” We agreed there wasn’t. The cheapest flight was in eight hours. I had already semi-packed in anticipation of needing to leave abruptly. Zhejiang province had a steadily growing number of confirmed Coronavirus cases and I was concerned about Hangzhou and Wenzhou, the nearest airport cities, getting locked down like Wuhan. That would make leaving the country even harder.

In an hour, I was on my way to the train station. I texted Trevor, the other foreign teacher, and told him he could fetch the whiskey and groceries from my apartment. We’d gone shopping together a few days before. Unlike me, he was determined to wait it out and stay in China.

A few weeks before I left, I would never have thought I’d be in the U.S. again. Leaving China was entirely unfathomable, wholly unanticipated. It hadn’t even crossed my mind as we took off for Xi’an on our holiday break, as we partied in clubs without our masks, as we planned on continuing our journey into Beijing – amidst an unusual but escalating crisis. I'd even considered staying another year.

I respected his decision, but I’ve always been a ‘runner’. Leaving was something I could control, something that was up to me. I knew that if I wasn’t allowed to leave the country and things with the virus worsened, my emotional well-being would tailspin. I don’t do ‘cooped up’ very well. I would be, in fact, the first foreign teacher in my program to leave the country. All of this ran through my mind as I watched the mountains slide by on the train to Hangzhou, both uncertain if I’d ever see any of the green splendor of the Chinese countryside again and if I was making the right decision. I sweated in my mask. Of course, it was a rainy day.

The hurriedly purchased ticket meant I had a long layover in Taiwan: twenty-one hours and fifty minutes. I changed out my mask when it got damp and otherwise only removed it to eat and drink. The skin where my ears met my head was raw and painful from the successive masks cutting in. I ate twice in that time, literally scarfing my food after applying hand sanitizer and removing myself as far from crowds as I could. Was that irrational behavior created by sensationalized news? It was too early to know. All I knew was that confirmed cases continued to tick up and that I wanted to be home safely.

I’d seen the empty streets. I’d been affected the supply shortages. I’d been a part of the city lockdowns. All of that had been real. It was still real for the people I was leaving behind, something that gnawed at me as people around me griped about airport food, as I complained about being tired, as waiting passengers grumbled about the extra security searches.

Call me paranoid, if you will, but know there are coworkers and friends stuck in their apartments across the eastern provinces of China who can only leave their homes every two days and have been alone for more than two weeks. And that's not even near Wuhan. Running has always been about surviving. It may not have been running for physical survival – more than likely they’ll be fine if they stay indoors – but I was running for my sanity. I was running, scarfing, and changing masks regularly for a breath of cold, Chicago air outside the airport. It was a place I'd always found solace.

That night, as I waited in Taiwan, Trevor admitted he was changing his mind about staying. When he left his apartment a few days later, February 3rd, he didn’t make it far. Ride-sharing apps were useless, public transportation was on hold. He couldn’t get to the airport. Things happened fast after that: airlines pulled out, the Peace Corps pulled all their volunteers, and the number of cases of contagion skyrocketed.

Standing outside in the cold winter air of Chicago, doing nothing but breathing, I didn't know what any of it would mean for my future.

I stayed on my own at a hotel in Chicago that first night home. Up by 4:30am, I decided to go for a walk, as Trevor always did when he needed to get out of his own head. It was quiet outside – and freezing – as I wandered around the neighborhood. The streets were empty enough that it resembled the China I’d just left and I missed my life there already.

That first weekend was spent drinking Miller High Life and watching the Super Bowl with my family. I was wracked with guilt that I hid behind food, family, and football. I felt like a failure for giving up so fast. I’d left my friends, my teachers, my students. Most of them were trapped, some were stranded abroad.

On Monday after the 49s lost and my hangover was gone, I resigned my teaching post. I was the first to do that, too. Typing that letter of resignation took me forever. I had left without saying goodbye to anyone: to the mothers who’d looked out for me, to the students who’d made me laugh, to the people around town I’d gotten to know and practiced Chinese with. I had no idea how to translate those emotions into words that made sense. I just tried to do what felt best.

My mom always says there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ paths in the journey of life, just decisions that are better than others for one reason or another. Resigning felt better than just waiting, indefinitely, on the situation in China to improve. That’s all it came down to. I called my old boss in DC. I needed a job.

The worsening of the virus alleviated my feelings of failure. The World Health Organization recommended people leave China if they could. I had been four days ahead of the WHO. Other teachers in my program began reaching out about trying to exit the country. I advised them as best I could but there isn’t a CDC handbook on this kind of stuff and I wasn’t sure what to say most of them time. I mostly let everyone talk who needed to talk, regularly texting Trevor and others I was close with, just to give them some kind of outlet and a way to vent. I had little else to offer. It was too late. I was here and they were there.

While I wanted to stay connected to the past, there was new work, and a new life, ahead. I sipped my coffee and reopened the spread sheet I'd been working on.