How to Spot a China Day and other Useful Information

Most of my blog posts tend to be on the informational side, as in “we saw this, ate here, went there.”  But, this post is pure emotion.  As I’ve mentioned before in some of my previous posts, we learned in our cultural training that living overseas brings “higher highs and lower lows”.  Sometimes those lows include a “China Day.”

Everyone’s definition of a China Day is different.  Mine can include one or more of the following:

Tears (my personal favorite and spiritual gift)

Frustration with the language/local customs/performing day-to-day tasks

Homesickness or loneliness

Lack of patience when an easy task suddenly turns into a major ordeal

Experiencing changes, new people moving in and old friends repatriating to their home countries

Lack of sleep, it just makes everything a little more dramatic

China has a lot of people...waiting to go to
the top of the Pearl Tower in Shanghai.

Most of my China Days seem to sneak up on me.  For example, I was trying to book our hotel for Hong Kong Disney last fall and couldn’t get our credit card to work.  Disney is supposed to be one of the happiest places on earth and the poor woman at the hotel thought I was having an emotional breakdown on the phone (oh wait, I really was) because they couldn’t take my credit card and blamed it on the credit card company and vice-versa.  Or, the time I was walking through the Japanese supermarket alone before Christmas and heard Christmas carols and just about lost it by the Nutella aisle.

We did make it to Disney!

That said, I have not cried about China in a very long time, but I think I feel one on the horizon.  How do I know?  

I have been a little teary-eyed (but no full-on bawling…yet).

I have not been back to mainland US in about 10 months (enough said).

I really, really want to see my grandparents (sometimes Skype just doesn’t cut it).

Friends have moved, are getting ready to move or new friends have arrived and it just means lots and lots of changes.

I don’t know if we’ll be able to go home at Christmas as a family.

I suddenly have an urge to run, a lot.  I got on the treadmill yesterday and my personal best after starting to run again 3 weeks ago was 2 twelve-minute runs.  I just went full-on and ran 21 minutes straight and could have kept on going.I also may or may not have a strong desire to raid my secret stash of dark chocolate.

It's always good to have a secret stash!  Click here to
read about the start of my chocolate stash.

What has kept me from coming totally unglued is my foundational beliefs which are built on solid ground and not shifting sand (catch my drift?).  I also completely understand that even if we were in the US, I would have crummy days.  Life would catch up with me and there would be days where I would feel stressed, tired, emotional, and changes would continue to happen all around me.

My friends back home have asked if it possible for them to have a China Day, too.  The answer is yes! Claim it, own it, and move on.

P.S. I wrote this post about 2 1/2 weeks ago and to cure the impending China Day, I got to go back to the US!  More about that visit to come in a future post.