“How do you survive in a place you don’t know the language, people, culture?” People often ask me.
July 7, 2007, I packed carefully for my new life. Too many clothes, Indian condiments, and a pressure cooker. The pressure cooker was non-negotiable. A piece of home that could make anything familiar again, no matter where I found myself.
We were moving to China. I had read about China, had formed views and opinions about it, imagined my life in it, but nothing had prepared me for how I would experience it.
We arrived in Dalian, tired, disoriented and luggage-less. Perhaps that was the first lesson China was trying to teach me. Leave what you are carrying. See, feel, experience, not with a borrowed lens of knowledge and opinions but in far more real way.
When you lose the garb of language and culture, you discover with your senses. You communicate with your instinct. You adapt and you learn. The same process which you followed as a child instinctively, now as an adult you discover it consciously.
The initial sense of adventure of knowing and discovering a new place gave way, quietly and without announcement, to a loneliness I had no name for. I could not read a single sign. I could not ask where the library was because I did not know the word for library. My eyes moved constantly, searching for something familiar to rest on, and found nothing.
So, I walked. Small trips to the tuck shop around the corner, close enough that I could find my way back without fear of being lost. The shop smelled of boiled tea eggs and morning commuters. I walked the aisles, picking things up, putting them down, trying to locate myself inside a world that offered curious smiles and warmth in return.
I could not read a single label. Standing in that shop in Dalian, surrounded by everything unfamiliar, I reached for the one thing that my hands already knew.What I bought, on that first visit, was a Chinese fountain pen and a small bottle of ink.It was the kind I used in school as a child. The messy ink blots, the tissue papers we carried until we learned to hold the pen correctly. I had not held one in decades.
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I bought it, took it home, and discovered that I had to learn all over again how to use it without making a mess. It was a quiet understanding that beginning again, relearning what I thought I already knew, was not a defeat. It was, in fact, the only honest way forward.
My address card, which carried my home address, in a script which was alien to me, was my most precious possession in those early days. I navigated the city not by signboards, but by trees. I learnt to discover the rhythm of the place before I could name it.
My moving to China gave me a life I had never fathomed. An experience I had never asked for and a lesson which changed me over time. Slowly, incrementally and unconsciously.
After spending almost two decades in China, to that question, I answer. “Pretty well.”
