the tether of time: a mind map of china travels
hello my dear world. I’m finally back after two months of traveling China and the US, and tending to a variety of external obligations that completely overloaded my psychic system.
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I drew this map of my mind while on a 9 hour plane ride from Beijing to Istanbul, because I didn’t want to forget all that I felt, sensed, and thought about my time in China. this was my first visit after 6 years, during which both of my grandfathers died, and I felt waves of what can only be called “homesickness” for a stranger land I never fully knew, or felt that I belonged to.
it’s a map of deep encounters that will take me weeks, if not months to truly untangle, lay out, and examine. I didn’t write it as a list, because it’s all connected to each other, and experience is rarely linear, but instead, intrinsically connected as rupturing clouds in the mind.
in looking at this map now, I see that the spinal cord of my experiences are centered around the notion of time.
perhaps in no other country and in no other world do I feel the simultaneous sharpness and dull drip of time, so acutely that it hurts. in no other country am I so tethered by time and memory — both the personal and collective; that is, look how much China has changed, become unrecognizable — even after 3, 4, 5 years. then, there’s the generations of family history that I’ve only become interested in, now, in unearthing. there is my own early childhood history, like fuzzy polaroids in my mindscape. I return to China and see what remains of my family — my grandmother, my uncles and aunts and cousins — and I realize that I’ve seen them less than ten or fifteen times in my entire life. I look at old family photos from the 90s as if they were taken three weeks, because in my experience of time in China, they were. but now everyone is grown, old, or gone.
I keep thinking of how the starting point of every story — is also the ending point. how the end contains the beginning, and vice versa. and if that were the case, then it would be meaningless to write about my years of slow traveling the world, my twenties paid in blood to NYC, my childhood suffocating in small town North Carolina, my present day life in Istanbul — without writing about what came at the beginning, even if it is so hard to look at that it hurts, like a strange disease; like inexplicable, compulsive, sudden bout of sobbing. that is China for me. which means I must write about it.