In our new house, many appliances still get their power through a travel adapter. Eight years in China was long enough to not only put down roots and settle in, but also for everything we owned to end in a Chinese plug: my MacBook, the coffee machine, the rice cooker, the baby monitor. The appliances made it to the Netherlands — the sockets they belong to stayed behind, 8,000 kilometers east.
One by one, they’ll be replaced as they break down. And I know I’ll have to go through the same process myself. I’m happy to be in the Netherlands, but it doesn’t cancel out the loss of not being in Shanghai. The two feelings run parallel to each other. I miss the street life and the shops that never close, the villages and the mountains of Zhejiang.
But I’m also wary of writing about nothing but China on this blog, and warier still of living here while turning every conversation into a comparison with Shanghai. That’s the saddest type of ex-expat — the one who never moves on. Still, I understand it. In Shanghai I was a foreigner who spoke Mandarin, and there was pride in that, not least because I knew it came after well over a thousand hours of learning. But here, who am I?
Eva and I walk on the heath between Heerde and Epe. After endless overtime, business travel, a pregnancy, a baby, a house move, and a renovation, this is our first date in two years. We’re alone out here. The wind rushes over the heather and I let it take all of it.
At night I dream about the streets of Shanghai. Not the skyline or the Bund, just the small roads where I cycled and waited for the lights to turn green. I ask myself what a memory is worth. One of my best is our trip to Cambodia with Eva. It feels physical, like something I can hold and cherish: a gem I keep close, turn against the light, and look at from different angles. I’m going through the 35,000 photos from eight years in Shanghai, and I feel sad, but I also realize how much I’ve seen and felt. I’ve bought a stack of books about Shanghai, so I can go back that way too.
Our boxes from Shanghai arrived this morning. I opened the first one and take out a pan, wrapped in a plastic bag from Dingdong Maicai (叮咚买菜), and there it is again, the feeling of loss. Instinctively, I want to put some cups back in the blue cupboard, but I realize it’s not in this kitchen. The boxes mean our move is over — physically. But as I turn on our rice cooker again to make dinner, and it works the way it always has. It just needs something in between.
