“Why?” everyone asks,  “Why are you going to China of all places?”

 

Five years have passed and now I am the proud owner of two Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and English; I would imagine it shares similar feelings to owning your first high-grade, name brand sports car:  You threw down the cash, the paintjob is nice, but the work under the hood is lousy.  But what has this changed?  I was living in a second rate apartment with one co-graduate and one about-to-graduate, working one backbreaking, tiresome, and probably ephemeral job hauling appliances as well as a pain-ridden phone survey job.  The consequence was an unyielding cycle of tedium and throbbing night-sleeps, sore jaws, as well as a bruised self-esteem.  Try hauling refrigerators up three flights and then immediately running to a cubicle on the other side town just to get squawked and cursed at by passive-aggressive individuals all over the country, with nothing else better to do and the lack of intellect than to answer an unknown caller during their suppertime, day in and day out; your precious summer melting away; your eyes sinking in:  another 11:30 pm, another 8 am.  And, this was after I graduated with two Bachelor’s degrees. 

 

One job always seemed to climax as the other began it’s throbbing anew.  The only thought that surfaced in my college educated, liberal-ideology-pounded head was betrayal.  Where was the cushy desk job?  Where was the “kudos on the smashing golf pants, lets finish up this back nine?”  Where was the immaculate conception into the “real world?”  I had learned to think in double spaced pages of 12-point font and 500 words just like the next lemming didn’t I?  I wanted to plunge from the fallopian tubes of college, straight out of the uterus, the protected barrier, and into a real job:  Mum said I would change the world.  Where is that change?  In Middle School, I learned my ideal job would be a social worker…a social worker.  With my patience, I would be the only social worker with a .45 for those beyond redemption in the top drawer of my smokers-stained desk.  My reality became an insurmountable heap of contempt, the final culmination being graduation day.

 

It didn’t require the special crafts of a seer, an oracle, to wake upon the insight that this was the bland reality of higher education, that it’s a sweet baked and laced with salt.  I befriended many upperclassmen and first-handed witnessed their social decline instead of ascension.  “I’m going to law school after I graduate; I’m going to apply for the FBI; I’m going to try to get into grad school; I’m going to become a consultant for X firm, making X number of 0’s a year with X.5 children, X for a ‘beautiful’ big-titted wife, in an X roomed house, with a good mortgage rate, retiring at 65, living my life out on a farm, X grandchildren visiting on the weekends, with X, the family dog sitting on my lap, reading the X paper.”  Diatribes unrealized: the penultimate downward thrust, second only to the futile discourse on the graduate degrees they will earn, and the expensive car they will drive, and where they are going to be in X years.  Who said, “I’m going to be washing dishes in 10 years,” or “I’m going to be in the same town, settling down with a third-rate life in a boring city?”  Was this precognition, this predicted, fathomed future the result of an untapped parapsychological talent or was it merely the realistic statistics hiding amongst the bracken along the paved road of college education?  “What are you doing now?”  I inquire.   “Oh, I’m sitting at my Mom’s house, drunk…putting out resumes, though!’” 

 

But, why go to China?  Why not?  What else is there?  I did what I was supposed to do, what I was expected to do.  I ran with the ball, I scored; I got screwed in the after party:  someone else went home with my date.  It’s feasible that I could have landed some entry-level piece of boredom occupation and fought upwards amongst the sharks and serpents, slowly gleaning “experience”.  But, why should I continue to do as I’m expected to do?  I got screwed enough firstly, didn’t I?  I’m sore and in need of lubrication.

 

Why not?  Like a patient lover, a job was waiting for me in China; the only requisites were “be foreign and speak English.”  It’s a scam:  I’m exploiting my nationality.