pantsfarm

When I meet a new person here, there seems to be a few questions that always get asked.

Where are you from?
The US, and if they’ve got some common background, I’ll get more specific
How long have you been in China?
2.5 months, about
What brought you to Shanghai?
I took a job with a software company here.
Where are you staying?
I’m staying with some family near Jing’An Temple.
You speak any Mandarin?
No, my Chinese is terrible. I studied a little but I’ve forgotten it all and haven’t made time to study yet.

Those are the more general questions that always come up along with the mostly true answers that I deliver every time. Sometimes there are additional little questions on semi-related topics, like what does my company do, or if I’m mixed (half Chinese), or whatever, too.

There is one other question that seems to get asked a lot though:
How long do you think you’re going to be here?

And this one I’m never sure how to answer. Usually I say “At least a year I hope” because usually when it’s asked, I read the asker as expecting some sort of enthusiastic response, and because I think most of the people I know here have either been here longer than that, or, if not, give a similar answer.

But honestly, I have no idea. I don’t have that much of a plan. Is this something I should have thought about more? Is this a question I should have a ready answer for?

What does it mean, that I haven’t thought about it? Another topic I’ve been wondering about lately is whether or not I’m just, well, coasting, for lack of a better word. Maybe treading water would be a better metaphor, I’m not sure. And only now have I thought to link the two ideas.

One thing I’ve heard from a couple different people is how the life in China is accelerated. Everything is always moving faster, people changing jobs, moving in or moving out, the city itself is hardly immutable. With constant construction, I feel like if I didn’t see the daily changes, I wouldn’t recognize my street from week to week.

And so in this frenetic pace, it’s easy to lose track of time, to get caught up in the flow of things. I’ve been here for 2.5 months, but it feels like it’s still the first month. At the same time it feels like I’ve been here for ages. My sense of time is shot, I’m confounded by the ever-changing pace of my surroundings.

I worry that I’m just floating, that I’m not really directing my own progress enough.

I’m in this stream, right, and that stream is my career path, and I’m sitting here treading water where I am, learning a little something here, a little something else there, but it’s not directed, I’m just trying to keep afloat. Up ahead, I think maybe there’s a fork, where I will have to consider if maybe I’m better off pushing in another direction, and I’m just going to float on by unless I start swimming. Maybe I want to backpedal, swim upstream, so to speak, and force my way back into some other path I already passed once.

I’m tired of this metaphor, but I do feel a bit unsure of what it is I’m doing, what I’m working towards. I feel like I’m still operating without a strong sense of direction, without definite goals, not that I really even know what kind of goals I want to set.