Holly – China
From a Facebook post written September 23, 2020
It’s an odd feeling, getting the news that China will finally allow anyone who had a valid work visa as of March 28, 2020 to return as soon as September 28, even if their work visa has expired. It’s been 8 months since I left there, and I’ve been anxiously waiting to return. A trip to the nearest Chinese embassy with some paperwork could buy me entry back into the country.
And yet… I have been waiting with bated breath for the school holiday that lasts from Wednesday, September 30 through Friday, October 10. As excited as I am about the prospect of returning to my life in China, what I most want is a week to sleep, to walk, to ride a bike and go for a hike, to see interesting sights, and to eat delicious food without an agenda or purpose.
You might think, after all, that I have had plenty of that during the pandemic – time without agenda or purpose. Scott and I spent 24 hours a day in a beautiful Malaysian apartment from March 18th through August 29th before quarantining in a South Korean hotel room for another 14 days. Our days in Malaysia were amazing, but from February through June I was in constant learning-to-teach-online mode. I would get excited about technological possibilities to support student learning, spending hours of research and planning around them, only to be thwarted by Chinese internet constraints. Then I had to scramble to present lessons.
Scott and I taught summer school, and it began the Monday after the regular school year ended on Friday, without even one work day to prepare. Two days into teaching summer school we were told we might not have jobs in August. If we did, they would come with a 20% reduction in pay. Queue the instantaneous and dramatic job search – cover letters, rewriting the résumé – all in panic mode while finishing the three-week summer school course we hadn’t had time to prepare before it started.
Overlap the third week of summer school and full-on job search with a 4-week online class for teaching an IB Spanish class. Overlap week 4 of the online class with a second-language institute for 9 hours a day (or night, because of US hours from a Malaysian address), and another week-long institute to prepare me for this year.
All of this ran straight into the new school year with 5 preps – 5 different classes, trying to implement all of what I learned during the hurried summer months into new courses. Two of those courses will culminate with high-stakes testing for the students, but with the pandemic what those tests might look like is a moving target. Oh, and I shifted to an entirely different course than I had planned after meeting the new students in the one class I thought I knew better than any I had ever taught.
This happened while knowing our Malaysian visas were coming to an end, so we were scrambling for permission to enter a new country within a reasonable time zone from the students we teach. Three weeks into that new school year with a group of classes I’ve never taught like this before, we jumped from one country to another for a 14-day quarantine while teaching online. We were not experiencing the pandemic as a time without agenda or purpose!
Finally, they released us. I began to feel human with a visit to the hair salon, a walk around town, and dinner in a real pizza parlor. After a workaholic meltdown and permission from my bosses to slow down, I can taste a real vacation. To take a break from problem-solving, to create in my journal and call a friend, to sleep in without guilt, to push the school to-do list out a few days so I can address the secondary to-do list of bills and taxes and teacher certifications that are equally as important but not as visibly urgent. Ah, the sweet relief of a 10-day respite…
…sliping away with the Wednesday afternoon news that what I have wanted most, to return to China where I can teach in a classroom with my students rather than across a computer screen, can happen in just a mere 5 days. But moving will steal the sweet nectar of rest. Going back quickly without a vacation means getting back into the classroom that much faster, returning to a normal life after another quarantine in which I spend all of my time problem-solving and planning and thinking, and little time resting and meditating.
Just another 2020 struggle. What I want most, to return to my classroom in China, collides at the last with what I need most, time to rest. As soon as I know what is happening, I feel sideswiped again. Desperately wanting to be back, and yet desperately wanting a break, and wishing more than ever that one did not mean foregoing the other. I suppose I am still not ready to write the lesson of 2020, but it is percolating into a Holly-original fine art piece.
And with all of this missive, I haven’t touched on my biggest stressors of all, the chaos in the United States. The abysmal response to Covid, the racial protests, the presidential and congressional election season, the death of RBG, the stressors of my children as they navigate the 2020 landscape.
What an experience. Just working at coming to terms with it all. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for processing with me. If you haven’t, I don’t blame you. This note is for me. Sometimes on Facebook we write the romantic moments, and this year has brought many. This, though, is an honest coming to terms with what it has all meant, a processing of what has been and what is yet to come, a sorting out of the most important and most urgent decisions to be made while honoring and remembering a lived experience. Perhaps I will make better decisions as a result of writing it all down. Perhaps it is just a diary entry. Either way, God bless you, 2020. God bless those I love in the United States. May our future decisions be less weighted by stress and more buoyed by compassion and concern for our fellow man.