9/11

I feel somewhat sheepish that I already titled a post "Proud to be an American."  That pretty much sums up how I feel today.  I've never been particularly serious about commemorating September 11th.  I've always felt its presence, each of the prior 10 times the date has fallen since 2001. But I'm usually far more interested in how the country as a whole marked the date rather than actually participating in any sort of shared memory of the terrorist attacks.  This is probably due to how lucky I am that I really didn't know anybody in those buildings or planes.  Sure, I, like everyone, knew of people who perished on September 11, 2001.  And the day affects me, and how I view the world, to this day.  People weren't kidding when they told me -- an eighth grader at Fieldston, doing Latin homework in the cafeteria with Kate Harris and Eric Schultz when people started crowded around the tiny television broadcasting Spanish news to the kitchen staff, who then couldn't reach his family because cell phones in the New York area were jammed, and the bridges connecting the Bronx to Manhattan were closed -- that I would remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on that day for the rest of my life.  There's no question that the day had a profound impact on my adolescence and life in general.  But I think part of its power for me is the knowledge that its impact on the population was broadly varied and inherently relative, and that I am fortunate enough to have received the benign end of that spectrum. 

Which is why it has been somewhat jarring, today, to realize that it's just another Tuesday in Shanghai.  Here, on the opposite end of the world, where buildings didn't burn and children didn't get sent to war, life is as it used to be.  Today is no different from yesterday, the 11th no more significant than the 10th.  You can't blame the Chinese for that.  9/11 wasn't their tragedy, just as the Sichuan earthquake wasn't ours.  If you asked them -- my colleagues, going about their business today as they normally would, the people pushing to get past me in the Metro station, even my Canadian and Chilean roommates -- what was special about today, I'd be willing to bet that at least most of them, if not all, would get there after some thought.  But I'd also bet that none of them woke up thinking about it.

Aside from specific people (many of whom read this blog), whose physical absence naturally create the biggest void in my life created by moving to Shanghai, I've felt that the two things I would miss the most about not being home were the Presidential campaign/election, and watching NFL football.  Missing both of those things relates to something larger that is obviously (though not obvious to me until today) lacking here: the national ethos.  Emotion shared by nature of a common bond -- in this case, a national bond -- is incredibly powerful and often unspoken.  It is my realization of its absence, or, more to the point, the fact that those who surround me now don't share that innate zeitgeist, that compels me to write about a day of which I have only been a passive observer for the past 10 years.

It is precisely that out-of-my-comfort-zone-feeling that I sought by coming here.  The fact that I feel this way means it's working, and even on days like today I don't for a single second regret my decision.  The best way to learn -- about yourself as much as about other people -- is to surround yourself with people who are different than you are.  But for at least today, I don't have much interest in China, its language, or its people.  Today, my thoughts are cast overseas, back to the land of purple mountain majesties of which I am so proud to call home.