Choose Strong
For Tim.
I came back from the Chinese New Year vacation on the last flight of the last day
of Jan 2020. UA 890 shot across the Pacific in under 10 hours. It was also the
first time I didn't need to fill out a form for customs. "Have you visited Wuhan
during your trip?" was the only question for me. "No. Sir. I stayed home in
Beijing all 10 days." "Welcome home." He greeted me with a smile and I passed in
record-breaking time. They didn't even take my temperature. Perhaps they
thought, correctly, that the Chinese side had done enough of that. It was only
6:40pm when I got off the bus at Milbrae for the next south-bound train.
The past two weeks had been a slow torture ended with a rollercoaster ride. From
the day I arrived at Beijing, the novel coronavirus situation had gone from bad to worse.
Entrances to villages were blocked and I couldn't go to see my aunt. (I could have
walked but guessed that it would only bring her trouble.) We were penned in all
day long watching TV, mostly news of decisions from the great leader, experts'
insightful analysis, reassuring progresses, praises from other nations and the
United Nations and the heroic deeds from doctors, nurses, and other common
folks. Government people came regularly to ask about returning family members
and to take our temperatures. The US embassy sent out increasingly alarming
alerts and evacuated citizens out of Hubei. Folks urged me to leave early.
Meanwhile, the first of the two flights of my return trip, from Beijing to
Shanghai, was canceled.
Among all the turmoil, however, I was able to keep cool. (I probably worried for
one hour in total.) I spent a lot of time reading the dictionary and taking
notes, writing down in English whatever struck me, and surprised myself by doing
yoga and lifting weight in the frosty outdoors, everyday. On Jan 27, I read a few
poems including Psalm 23:
The Lord is my sheperd; I shall not want.
...
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I fear no evil; for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
...
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
and a couple of paragraphs on Buddhism from Harrari's book Sapiens, and of
course remembered this gem from Epictetus:
Don't seek to have events happen as you wish,
but wish them to happen as they do happen,
and all will be well with you.
I felt thankful and blessed.
I kept to the original plan in spite of evidences suggesting taking early
actions. I told my cousin that it would be fine if I died there. There were a
few hiccups on the last day: the battery in his car died just before he
picked me up for PEK, I tried to switch to an even earlier flight to Shanghai
for the first leg, I had to take a 50-min shuttle from SHA to PVG, and once
there United Airlines couldn't find my record in their system. We went through
them one by one and overall, things went much better than I feared.
Back in Mountain View, the greetings from my own family were lukewarm at best.
The school was alarmed, I was told, and I had better stay away. I went to the
new house only to gather stuff for the following two-week voluntary quarantine.
It felt like an exile, the kind that Seneca or Napoleon enjoyed. I didn't even
get to see Tim. What I took the initiative to do must have turned me into a
monster in their minds. Munching on a hamburger and fries at MacDonald's at
10:30pm and feeling lonely for the first time in a long time, I checked my
emails and paid the bills online. At 11:30pm, tired, feeling abandoned by the
tribe, and with a lump in my throat, I drove across the bridge and got back
to my old place in Fremont.
Most household items had been moved out in the past month, the floors dirty, the
rooms littered with unwanted stuff gathered over the years, but my old home
still felt welcoming. It was here I won my financial freedom for the first time.
This house had brought me nothing but security, prosperity and peace of mind.
I left the heat off, got into a sleeping bag on my Jiu-Jitsu mat, slumbered for
about four hours, and the next morning the air felt Alaskan and me Dick Penneke.
I made coffee and it suddenly dawned on me that I was being blessed with a new
kind of freedom and I was up for it. It was a breakthrough. Not feeling sad or
angry, I was going to practice living when even those I had been devoted to
might not care about me out of ignorance and fear, which I could not imagine
until now.
Thank You!
”远离家人是应该的“这个我明白，although I was less prepared for 家人远离我 :-(
It was educational for me and one more motivation for getting strong.
Thanks for visiting.