And so it begins.

I sit here in my single simple dorm room in Qingdao, a sunny cold city in Shandong Province that borders the sea. Here I have no friends yet as I have just arrived earlier today off a red eye flight.

It's always a strange feeling to know no one in a place...it''s as if the fact of my invisibility hightens my own sense of myself and my thoughts. Here I have no memories. Here I practice my habit of slowly walking around a new town, getting used to each street to build familiarity, increasing my radius each day until I feel more at ease. Here I realize the Putonghua is familiar but strangely accented as I struggle to order a simple 3 Yuan meal of noodles off a menu three months ago I could not read at all. Here I'm too tired to make friends right now and too lonely to not want to make them. I know that this feeling is natural, comforting me to know that things will be fine. Here the signage is in Korean too and more than half my classmates are Koreans, as Qingdao happens to sit directly across from Seoul. A city that is used to straddling nationalities, Qingdao was once held by the Germans who were granted a concession at a time when China was forcibly opened and exploited by foreign nations earlier this century in a humiliating chapter of its history that resulted in the Cultural Revolution. Of the more positive remnants of colonialism, they behind their architecture and beer, of which one is much more popular.

Here my dorm room is so simple as to highten my appreciation for every single thing in it. I can literally count the things in it with my fingers: I have a TV, a desk, a bed, a bookshelf, a nightstand, and an air conditioner. That's it. I add my own flavor to this room with my own possessions which can fit in one suitcase, a backpack, and guitar case. "Who really needs anything more?" I think to myself.

Priori to this, I had just spent the last week in Wuhan having a love affair with a girl 12 years my junior that I had met online 3 months ago while practicing my Chinese. One thing led to another and I decided to visit her before coming out to Qingdao. She's a pretty, sweet, funny, and clever girl who sings semi-professionally a la Mariah Carey, works at Century 21 Real Estate as a graphic designer (I think), likes Lychee flavored potato chips, and has only one boyfriend before me. It occurs to me that what I represent to a lot of girls in China, is a channel for them to escape the dreary oppressiveness of old China as they struggle to sort out their own place in this country that has gone through so much monumental cultural shifts. Women have a hard life here. Actually life is hard here. Period. Girls here often comment that I feel very Chinese to them, which I take as a compliment now. From the outside looking in, I can see why they find me so interesting. The guitar doesn't hurt either. I've said before that being in China is like an episode of Star Trek where the Enterprise's crew finds themselves in a parallel universe where things are familiar yet twisted as they struggle to survive until they can find a way back. Except in my case, I don't want to go back to my former reality. Now she wants me to move in with her either here or in Shanghai but I am not sure I'm ready for that as I am just beginning a new life in a new city. A good dilemma to have I think.

So here I am, a southern Cantonese speaker who grew up in America, now in a city built by Germans and now surrounded by Koreans to learn Chinese at age 34. Life is strange. I settle in to my stiff bed to know that all that lays before me has not happened yet..that each intersection of time, place, and person still lays open and uncommitted. And so it begins.