MEGATON

Okay, so this is the part where things get interesting. I’m in China. Again. Jeez, when will this ever stop?

Right now, I’m at the Wujin Star campus in Changzhou. My apartment is huge. I have a kitchen and an office, a TV and a DVD player, a computer and a washing machine, a queen-sized bed and a bike. Oh, and some mosquitoes. It’s a nice setup, although the shower nozzle broke the first time I used it, and now I take my baths with a hose.

I am told there will be another foreign teacher come September, a guy from Egypt. September is when I will actually start teaching here, too. I’m only at Wujin Star this early to work out my residency papers before I move downtown for the summer training school. This is the part that has me the most worried. The training school’s schedule is more rigorous, and I’ll be living in a hotel. Maybe I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to leave Utah.

One thing that is making this transition difficult is the image of my two nephews. I’ve spent a lot of time with them in the past, so it was hard to say goodbye. We stopped at their house on the way to the airport, and the younger nephew, who is seven, came up to me with a stack of paper plates that had pictures painted on them and said, “You can take one of these with you to China.” I picked one with a pumpkin on it, then flipped the plate over and saw a message on the back:

I will miss you
Clark
Its
a pumkin  Noah

“How did you know I was going to pick this one?” I asked. He showed me the back of the other three plates; they all had messages, too.

During our brief stay there, my nephew said to me, about three or four times, “I’ll miss you!” I never really heard anybody say that until then. His voice still rings in my head, and every time I think about it, it makes me sad. Suddenly, the weight of a year contract sinks in. Suddenly, the idea of taking on additional contracts after this one ends isn’t so appealing, not when there is a little kid back in the U.S. who needs me to beat Wolf on Super Smash Bros. Brawl for him.

24 June 2008 | China | Comments | Home

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