where is the green fish?

final exams are over. i am 1/2 way finished with my final grades, i should finish them this morning. i am packing up and moving out of my apartment, and preparing to travel for two months (yikes!). i am getting ready to move to seattle and looking for a job there. i have been so busy, it has been relatively easy to push the fact that i am leaving wuhan out of my mind. it is not an easy thing to think about, i will miss everything here so much. i can't believe i have lived here for 2 years. i have really built up a life here, and it is going to be very difficult to leave.

i have taught at the same university for the past two years. foreigners are celebrities here because we are such a novelty, but if you stay around for more than 6 months then everyone at the whole school knows who you are. i have been very fortunate to be here because i have built up a wonderful community and amazing friends. i don't know how i am going to leave this life behind. duff and i certainly have a large community of foreigners (not nearly as large as last year), but this year we have spent more time on our campus and with chinese people. there are people (esp. office workers and food vendors) i have dealt with everyday for two years. i will leave my friends and my students and neighbors.

the little girls that walk me home from school everyday, i will leave them. i keep forgetting that we are leaving in 4 days, and i think to myself that i should invite them over, or we could play in the park. when they met me, i had my hair down and i was wearing a green necklace. when i came to china, i was worried that i would never be able to tell my students apart. when you aren't familiar with a culture, people can tend to look the same. while this is no longer an issue for me (i know everyone uniquely by their appearance and their personality) the little girls who i meet are still thrown. they always run up and yell my name. sometimes they don't believe that it is me. if my hair is up, they make me take it down, then they start believing. then, the secret question: where is the green fish? i guess to them my necklace looks like a green fish, even though it is just a large green bead. if i am not wearing it, i put it in my bag so i can prove my identity to them.

we will have to say goodbye to all the food vendors who have kept us alive, and most who have never given us food poisoning. we go to the same people, the same restaurants every day. i have been going to these people for two years, and for duff, a year. i fondly remember the reception i got at my favorite restaurants when we came back in the fall. i shouldn't have been surprised that they remembered me so well, but i was pleased and flattered. i have my favorite fruit seller, and vegetable people, and there is the person i always buy tomato paste from.... there is the bao zi woman who i would swear worries about us if we don't come for our breakfast. in town, there is the beer lady, who has a restaurant by the bowling alley. last year, the bowling alley didn't sell beer, so we would buy it from the beer lady (for 25 cents) and take it in to the bowling alley. then, the bowling alley started to sell beer, but for quadruple the price. now, they also sell 2 kuai beer, so we don't go to the beer lady for beer anymore, but we eat at her restaurant once a week.

saddest to leave will be our chinese friends. my chinese teacher, amy, i know i will miss the most. i think she is having a little bit of a hard time with it too. i want to come back and see her soon, and someday i will have her come to america, but that doesn't make leaving now any easier. amy is certainly my best friend here, and she has done so much for me. she has taught me everything i know about china's people and language and culture. she has helped me out of a million jams. she has taken care of me when i was really sick (a few times), and shown me some amazing and beautiful places in wuhan. and so much more.

last night, she and her husband and son took duff and me to the asia hotel in hankou. at the top of this famous hotel there is a revolving restaurant. we got there just before sunset and we could see the chang jiang (yangtze), the han river, and the three parts of wuhan. we watched the blazing red sun set (thanks to the pollution of a rapidly developing city of nearly 10 million) and the lights flicker on around us. it was beautiful and wuhan's size never ceases to amaze me. it is hard for me to remember how big this city is, i am so involved in my own little life with my friends and students on our campus at the far south end of town. we tried, but failed, to show our gratitude with gifts. i am terrible at presents, but they loved them. we gave long long a frisbee, a flaying plate. i guess he's been asking amy to get one for him for weeks, so we got her off the hook.

i guess it still hasn't sunk in that i am leaving. i really don't want to. i could be very happy here for another year, or even longer. if i had had the same students this year that i had the first year, i am almost sure i would have stayed. my first group of students and i were so close. there were only 47 of them and i saw them for 24 hours a week. i could really make them work and we made so much progress together. if i had had them again this year i am confident we could have made that much progress again. some will go to canada soon. i love seeing them on campus. they call me kayt-he, and always say it twice, really fast. even though, by the end of last year, the could say my name perfectly, they all still say it they way they did when we first met. this year, teaching was far more frustrating and not nearly as rewarding. i am thankful i had my first year, had i only had this year i don't know that i would recommend teaching in china. this year i had 400 students and saw them for 2 hours a week. they never come to class and when they did their behavior was terrible. i don't feel that i have made much of a difference in their lives, but i have noticed improvement in their english. still there are a few star kids who i became close to and i will miss very much. thank goodness for e-mail!

i realize that i won't be able to do everything i want to one last time before i leave. there isn't enough time to see everyone that i love, and not enough time to eat all my favorite foods. leaving snuck up on me because i was just living here, and now i have to go. i guess i will just have to come back to china!

AND....happy father's day, dad!!!