Back in the USSR! I mean USA…
However, being here in the United States feels as disorienting as going to the USSR in the 60’s. After living in China for six years, being back in North America feels incredibly strange. Aside from the obvious, things being more expensive, people understanding what I am saying when I am speaking to my husband in the street and the fact that it is easier to find a taco than fried rice, the whole vibe is different. People are larger, more outspoken and more concerned with what strangers think of them. People seem more confident and are expressing themselves through their clothes, their accessories and their opinions. It’s only now that I am back that I can see that living in Communist China is much more different than what we see on the surface.
In China it seems at times that people do whatever they want, when they want. Stalls are set up illegally all over the place, the rules of the road are respected only occasionally and people have become experts at hiding things from government officials, with little fear of retribution. But there is fear. Now that I am back I now see how fear is always present there, no matter how people behave.
The fear of no social safety net. The fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and having the police show up at your door because you typed something into Google search that you shouldn’t have. The fear of disappointing your family and being banished from the social group you have known your whole life. The fear of not being able to find a job that will help you feed your family. The fear that in a country of 1.3 billion people, you are, in the end, disposable.
I was was not immune to that fear. The fear that one of your Chinese friends may ask you about a subject you know that you should not talk about. The three T’s (Tianamen, Tibet and Taiwan), the Dalei Lama, all subjects that if talked about openly, heard and reported by the wrong people, would have me deported in under 24 hours. Talking to another foreigner about it was not a problem, but “brainwashing” a Chinese national held rather serious consequences. For me, that would mean never being able to return to a country I have come to love almost as much as my own, filled with a people and culture that I respect and care about more than I thought possible.
But back here in North America, I can say and so as I please. I should be feeling a sense of relief, but a new kind of fear has taken the place of ChinaFear: the fear that people can say whatever they want, no matter how incorrect, hurtful and even hateful at times, and there is no one, no one to stop them.
People and societies in the world have more in common than they are willing to admit. There is a nameless “fear” in every country. Every place has it’s scary and confounding elements, the trick is to learn how to navigate them and have a happy life, free of fear.
So I am going to embark on my new adventure without fear. I will approach this new place the same way I did with China, head first and ready for anything. In the end, the only thing to fear is fear itself.
And whatever they put in those tacos and fried rice…digestion issues are also something all societies much eventually confront:)
Tea Gal in China 
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