Exit to Chinatown

I had intended for this post to be completed much sooner, but like everything else in my life, it seems that I am always playing "catch-up." It's not easy to clearly understand your destiny, until you journey to the other side of the world and have people you've never met before, and normally never would have met before, tell you that your name [pronounced as "keri"] means Left Behind in one of the local languages. At least someone has found some humor, and I don't even really care any more that it might be at my expense. I am only glad to see another human being laugh, and to share a smile. Over the past week, I have tasted sickness (intestinal parasites that I'm over now) and isolation (missing home, few people to talk to outside work here), so that my fear of imminent career failure has been lost. I could be sent home tomorrow or the next day having ten times the understanding of what's really important that I had as little as three weeks ago. Already, I have changed. I took these pictures during our pre-departure orientation in Washington, DC, and had intended to post them much sooner, so that the time-frame would make better sense. But I didn't need to worry. Their significance doesn't depend all that much on sequential time. Every time I go to Washington, I try to take a blister-forming walking tour (jalan-jalan in Bahasa Indonesia) of the city, usually limited to the Chinatown area around Union Station, since I'm always waiting to catch a MARC train to BWI airport, the easiest way back to my part of the world from DC. I like to photograph things that would not normally appear on a postcard, so that they can be used in photo-story writing exercises for students. I've found many interesting things to photograph as I've Left Behind what used to be my life. Here's what I saw as mentally, spiritually, I made my Exit to Chinatown....

No visit to Washington would be complete for an Alabama Crimson Tide fan without a photograph of an elephant with a map of the Washington Metrorail system painted on its back and chest. This piece of artwork lives on the sidewalk outside the main lobby of the DC Public Library's MLK Branch, the city's main public library. Roll Tide!

I've always been a great fan of the DC Public Library and try to visit every time I'm in town. They have terrific resource rooms for literacy and new speakers of English, and I hope to see something similar in Tuscaloosa one day. Nearly all of Chinatown is visually interesting, and inspiring. I wish that each of my students back home, particularly those who come from China could see the "friendship" archway over the main street, the feature that defines the neighborhood for visitors and residents alike. Especially at night, it really makes an impression. Chinese writing on public signs is beautiful to me and incomprehensible to me. Its personal significance is that I have always been dogged by the nagging suspicion that answers I needed were printed plainly before me, but that they did me little good because I was simply unable to read them. Those who know me best made a point of counseling me about the significance of living and working in a place where others would have beliefs about all the most important things in life that would be "fundamentally different" from my own. Few of them realize that I have always shared my existence with persons who were supposedly "different" from me because of differences in belief.

I called the two I shared an office with [KB, AC miss you guys a lot!] for three years two nights ago, just to hear their voices. The sound














was somewhat incomprehensible, but beautiful, like Chinese writing on public signs.