I've moved into my apartment on beautiful 衡山路 (Hengshan Road) that I can't really afford yet. I decided that when people come to visit me, I want them to remember that Shanghai has trees, and my street is lined with them.
Life continues as normal here: desperately trying to wake up for class on the weekdays with sporadic spurts of creativity/desperately-working-on-my-portfolio. The weekends are entertained with random dates with random guys and the occasional club hopping followed by 4 a.m. dim sum... which is, today, followed by 1 p.m. dim sum as well. For the time being, my desire for the cute, fun, attentive love of my life is placated by the fact that half-naked images of Rain, Edison Chen, Nicholas Tse and Jay Chou are plastered over every single Pepsi can I buy.
I cook in my apartment, but neglect to clean... hense the pile-up. Whether I listen to american music or chinese, it always attracts a comment on msn messenger.
Last night, I walked on my street past the many bars filled with foreigners and locals drinking it up to meet my friends at Bon Bon. And it makes me wonder if whoever wrote 夜上海 (Shanghai Midnight) back in the heyday of jazz in China, was reveling in the lively nightlife that is only recently on it's way back... or if he or she simply loved walking the quiet sidestreets as I had been doing. I guess if my chinese were better I could listen to the song and have the answer right now, but... eh.
Back when I lived in the Wilde House, this guy Jeff once told me self-esteem issues were bull-shit. I assume he was talking about the very specific type of self-esteem issue that we both owned. It's not exactly about you feeling bad about yourself... it's more about not feeling good enough. It's about feeling shitty that you're not this or that much better than other people. Hmm, now where did I get that from? Could it be the fact that my parents were always comparing me to other kids who were doing better than me at a certain thing. I guess I grew up believing the only time I will be loved is when I'm better than everyone else.
Which brings me to a country. China. In a city. Shanghai. On a street. See above. In an apartment. About $200USD over budget. It's been an interesting couple of weeks. Between dates that always fall flat and being groped (again) at the sauna in my gym, I'm finding that not only do you only find a boyfriend when you stop looking... apparently it's the only time you can find yourself as well. I've lived in three different cities in pursuit of... myself. And now when I stop soul searching, I find myself realizing things about myself and my past. The only thing I haven't discovered is how to summarize my feelings into a blog.
This week, I felt pretty bad about myself. But not in the way that sends me running to my local therapist for another set of pills. Not in the what-am-I-going-to-do-I'm-not-good-enough way, but in the wow-I'm-kind-of-a-loser way. I've fallen from the pedestal I built to try to reach my parent's love. I realize being here, struggling with my Chinese, struggling to find work and income, struggling to find someone to love... struggling, struggling, struggling... that while I may have some good qualities, and some amazing qualities... I have a very many bad ones.
For the first time since I started trying to succeed, I feel normal and average. I'm not one of those rank 7 kids who has only 6 more to shove aside. I'm in the hundreds, and every corner that I turn there's gonna be someone taller, funnier, smarter, stronger, more creative, more endearing or more successful than me. But there is no one on this whole world who has the exact balance of all of those things that I have.
I called home last week to ask my mom for money. It's not like I've never done it before, but in the past 5 years I've always been able to say I have this much and I need that much. Now I have nothing. And as I prepared the excuses and explanations, the transfer of funds came about effortlessly, and not just because we both belong to Bank of America. Has my mother given up on expecting me to be a super-child? Or was she all-along only trying in her fucked up traditional chinese way to make me as super as I could be.
So here I am, on the other side of the pacific. Happy for this communist country, because an openly lesbian lesbian from Beijing just released her first album; because I actually had to sit in front of a TV to figure out if the winner of the american idol equivalent was a guy or girl; because a license auction for the hunting rights to exotic animals was actually pulled by the government after the internet reaction; and because blogspot has finally been unblocked by the censors here. And because I realized you actually do get chances in life to remake yourself... and they come when you least expect it.
