Take Me Home

John Denver’s would-be backup singers.

They all knew “Country Roads” – at some point the Chinese translation had been played throughout the country. Now my students wanted me to learn it in English, most likely so they could impress their colleagues in karaoke.

I’d taught them a few English songs already, but this one they wanted to belt at the top of their lungs – and in a hall of cinderblock classrooms with no carpeting and high ceilings, that was a wee disruptive. Since they weren’t strong on the verses, and were especially weak on the fast-worded bridge (“I hear her voice in the morning hours, it calls me …”), I hushed them by repeating those lines: “Wait, no, not the refrain, we’ve got to practice that bridge again, we still didn’t get it right.”

Then class ended and I let them at the refrain. They were so loud other students in the hallway crowded our door to watch them: sixteen students crooning, at the top of their lungs, their undying, nostalgic loyalty to the hills of West Virginia.

Why “Country Roads”? Perhaps it was the song’s longing for home: “Take me home to the place where I belong.”

Home was a serious value in China, even moreso than in America. Nearly every person I met was sure to tell me where he or she was from, even if it was a backwater. “My city makes excellent vinegar,” Helen told me of Taiyuan. “Perhaps you have tasted it. It is excellent.”

“Yes, yes,” her classmates affirmed. “It is the most excellent vinegar. You must taste it.”

Vinegar. What a bizarre claim to fame. But she was serious: returning from a weekend trip home, she brought me a bottle of vinegar. I tried it on my jiao zi and yup, it was vinegar. My American taste buds must have lacked the proper connoisseurship.

In the spring I traveled to Taiyuan myself, visiting some fellow teachers. The city was industrial, brown – somehow even browner and more industrial than Beijing: dull, crowded, exhaust streaks everywhere. I couldn’t imagine living there a year, much less a lifetime – but it was Helen’s home, and she was fiercely proud of it.

College students spent a good deal of time away from home, so at major holidays the train stations were jam-packed. A few of my students who couldn’t return home pitched themselves headlong into something like a morally-justified depression.

In late September families gathered for the Moon Festival, a sort of Chinese Thanksgiving with a large meal and delicious little moon cakes stuffed with nuts and dry fruit. The students I found moping in the canteen that weekend taught me a Moon Festival poem, which I’m sure lost a degree of eloquence as it was translated over bowls of rice. Still, as I wrapped up my first full month in Beijing, and as some of my students bemoaned their absence from home, this poem resonated for me with a sense of just how far America was, and of just how long an entire year could be.

The moonlight comes in through the window
     and touches the foot of my bed.
Lift up your head,
     look at the moon.
Lower your head,
     look at the shadow of the moon,
          and think about home.

Read Chapter 3 ->