Twenty days is a perfect amount of time to spend on a vacation home from China. The first five are used up fighting jet lag and being spoiled by friends and family who haven’t seen you in ages. The last three are devoted to shopping, packing, and squeezing in last-minute visits with people. That leaves just enough time in the middle to enjoy yourself thoroughly.
Any less time is too much of a whirlwind; any more, you start to feel a sense of routine creep back into your life, a disconcerting feeling of transition interrupting the pleasant mode of vacation.
My twenty days were nice. I caught a baseball game with my dad, my first live game since 2006. I watched or listened to several others. I ate all the wonderful food I love from back home and then some. I caught up with people who are important to me. I stocked up on clothes and coffee and books. I made an obligatory drive down the coast to LA, and later spent a couple of days showing my Australian friend, whom I know from Kunming, around San Francisco.
San Francisco is a treasure. While waiting for a friend, I spent a half-hour driving aimlessly throughout the city, making mental notes of what I saw at each red light I stopped at. I had forgotten the city’s great diversity; how neighborhoods of different character and appearance manage to blend seamlessly together, how on a clear day every hilltop has a breathtaking view, and the local coffee shops that straddle corners are beautiful.
As always, a place is only as good as the people who inhabit it. When leaving home for full-time residence in a place like China, maintaining friendships becomes difficult; people’s lives change and evolve and often there’s little opportunity to take stock in them.
With my friends, though, our reunions betray little evidence that we live thousands of miles apart. Everything falls into place, as if we exist in a Narnia-like fantasy world in which the main events of our lives exist behind a wardrobe.
Fortunately, leaving is made easy by the existence of a life here in Kunming, full of friends and work and fun. Walking around Kunming last night, fighting jet lag but saying hello to familiar faces, reinforces how lucky I feel to have a rich, fulfilling life on two continents.
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