A. Christian Van Gorder
When we arrived, the fortieth year anniversary of the 1949 Liberation was being celebrated under the backdrop of the four-month anniversary of the Tian An Men Square massacre. All the foreigners had left. It was a great time to arrive.
My students and I fell in love at first sight. We met together over Yeats, Maya, Angelo, Eliot, Kipling, Dunbar, Melville, Heaney, Whitman, Cather, and Vonnegaut. I introduced them to Chief Hupnawatnaka (Joseph), Dr. King, the Statue of Liberty, and Teddy Roosevelt. We cried together at Wounded Knee, Nanjing, Hiroshima and Selma and laughed together through the Roaring Twenties and the moon walks.
And all of this in the backdrop of a crushed student human rights movement. Our mail was opened and read, and questioned at police stations ("I am sorry sir, but it is not my fault that Thomas Jefferson was a decadent bourgeois imperialist."), etc. Nerve-wracking, but very enlightening. When my contract was completed, it was hard to leave. Further studies beckoned.
And all I have to do is close my eyes to see those narrow lanes filled with bicycles, humanity, magical sounds and entrancing sights. I still taste the green tea. I still savor steaming hot bowls of noodles on frosty mornings. Part of me will always be there and I will carry part of China with me wherever I go. Her cacophony of wide-armed need and wonderment was my Lorelei. I was ground on the rocks of being needed, being wanted, and giving out until there was nothing left to give.
From utopian socialist red to fresh, careless green. From clogged alleys to the country lanes of County Down wandering ramshackle down to the Irish Sea.
The very first night we arrived in Northern Ireland I got lost in the most "policed" part of Belfast. Thank God the Chinese restaurant was open. So, there I was at midnight in the middle of a war zone in Ireland taking directions in Mandarin from a shopkeeper from Hong Kong.
Our two years in Eire, however, turned out to be a warm and cozy time. The doctoral studies at the Queen's University of Belfast were filled with Islamic theological concepts and discussions of Vedic soteriology over repeated cups of black tea served with shortbread or scones.
The family thrived in Donaghadee by the Sea. In the January after we arrived, Brendan Daniel was born at home with the help of grandfatherly Doc Ferguson. Patrick, our eldest, had the chance to play knights in actual castles 800 years old and Stephanie took up playing the Irish drum (the Bodhran) and a bit of step dancing and painting as well. We left many friends behind and a host of new songs, steps, and proverbs for life's grab-bag of treasures.
Tonight, when I talked with Stephanie about the Netherlands she cried. She said she felt lonely while I worked for a year at a church-based human-rights organization called "Open Doors." She spoke no Dutch and survived by taking the kids down to the flower shop just to get out of the house.
In telling contrast, I had a great year. Bicycling to work every morning, catching a train that was never more than a minute late, going to an office with delightful people, learning, researching, traveling throughout Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.
When our little girl, Kegan was born everything had to change. The pace did get better, slower, and more balanced. We even turned down an invitation to relocate to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan! Instead we decided together to return to our beloved Yunnan.
What we thought would be perfect for us turned into a perfect nightmare. Our plan to return to Kunming and live for the next eight years needed to be hastily whittled down to a more manageable eleven months.
American Literature, American Multiculturalism, Twentieth Century History Through Literature; it was a great year professionally at Yunnan University's graduate and undergraduate foreign language department. Directing the University's English Drama also gave me a chance to fulfill a lifetime dream. I was finally Fiddler on the Roof's Tevye, but it was a bit odd to play it in a Chinese Anatevka! Our Rabbi was Tibetan (and probably not too kosher). Our troupe also staged scenes from The Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew! Zui Hao!
At 3 am on December 15th, Stephanie went into labor and we rushed to the First People's Hospital. What an ordeal! The nurse told us to come back at 9 am. She then said she did not know where our doctor, and her department head, actually lived, but she would try and find out, and then send someone out on a bicycle to find her. After much insisting, we were finally taken to a birthing room. The sanitation was atrocious, with blood all over the sheets from the last one billion births. Fortunately, our child waited until regular working hours. Unfortunately, the doctor was busy so a European language student (whom we had met the day before ) and I ended up delivering Sean Michael Theodore into the world.
The stress was high. It soon became apparent that retreating and regrouping was the better part of valor. When classes finished in July at our beautiful Yunnan University, we returned to the United States.
For the next months I worked as the interim pastor of the High Street Community church in Conneaut, Pennsylvania. When that fascinating year was completed, I joined the faculty of Messiah College teaching world religions and missiology. Besides teaching Islam and Taosim, I was able to travel to Southern Africa, South Asia, Central America, Europe and East Asia. We found a home near a quiet lake in a historic village outside Carlisle called Boiling Springs. The town had been a stop on the Underground Railway. We became members of the Harambee Church in Harrisburg.
Harambbe is a Swahili word for "lets all work together." This church, founded by Dr. Louis T. Tait, Jr. brought great blessing to our family. In spite of being blinded by my euro centricity and participant in a Chrisitianity avoiding seeking justice in a country avoiding its history, or family was (and is) accepted.
I have realized again anew and afresh that we are all one race, the human race and one people, the children of God. Instead of race, we must celebrate culture and ethnic legacies. To live in America means to confront racism against African Americans and the first nations (Native) Americans. But all of us need to learn from each other, help each other and, most or all, respect and celebrate and love each other. Learning, Listening, Loving, Caring. This is the way ahead for all of us and for our children.