Coming Home

Thank you all for your well wishes for my journey home: I had a delightful last weekend in Beijing, a good flight, and since arriving home at about five yesterday evening have enjoyed a takeaway Indian meal with my family, a shopping and lunch trip to Brighton with one of my closest friends and cat adoration, all of which I badly missed in China.

Before I readjust to England, I wanted to record how my hometown, Worthing, looks through ‘China eyes’. On the way home from Heathrow airport, the first thing that struck me was how sedate the motorway traffic was, compared to the honking and weaving and constant near collisions of Shijiazhuang.

Then I noticed how intensely green southern England is at this time of year: it seemed like someone had poured a tin of green paint over the countryside.

And everything is so quiet. When I first moved to Shijiazhuang I thought the noise was going to drive me insane, but I’ve gotten used to the constant honking, the trucks going over speed bumps that rattle my apartment windows, the school bells and announcements, the noise of students, my neighbours banging their doors and yelling at each other on the stairs – and did I mention the honking? Now Worthing seems eerily quiet, the streets too deserted – where is everyone?

Walking to the train station today, the near silence actually started to make me feel quite oppressed and anxious.

I’ve always thought of my town as nothing special, and certainly parts of it are scruffy and, like so many places, it is blighted in spots by ugly brutalist rip buildings and unimaginative apartment buildings. But as I walked down the main street I realised how beautiful some of the buildings are, how blessed the location and how little anyone appreciates what we have here.

Oh, and I’ve had to restrain myself from spitting on the street, smiling at random children, saying ‘xiexie’ instead of ‘thank you’ and putting rejected food on the table in a restaurant.