It’s the second day of the marriage and family training at the Chuzhou Church. The morning and part of the afternoon have been a fast-track through Erickson’s developmental theory with anecdotes and Chinese fable thrown in as illustrations, and most of the participants - lay leaders and regular members - are still chewing over last night’s session on “empathy”, a term and practice new to almost everyone.

The atmosphere is thick with energy of people coming together to discuss daily-life dilemmas and new ideas. People scribble furiously in their notebooks or gather in small groups for discussion.

I wander around the room taking pictures of the training participants, and I am drawn to this woman flipping through a Bible.

I draw close to admire the worn pages, impressed at the thought of how many times they've been turned. It's strange how the older and dirtier a Bible is, the more beautiful it seems. What wisdom must this woman hold, who seems to have made this book a constant companion? As I approach, she’s searching intently for what I assume must be a certain verse she was reminded of. But I’m wrong.

She’s searching, it turns out, for the word 婚姻 (marriage) . . . because she can’t remember how to write it. Then she looks up and meets my eyes with both hesitation and expectation: she’s asking for help. With an almost childlike innocence, she doesn’t seem to consider that I might not speak her language, that I might not remember how to write the two characters either.

I’m fairly accustomed to seeing Chinese native speakers remind each other how to write an unusual character, or poke fun at someone who can’t remember a somewhat common one. It catches me off-guard, though, to realize this woman can’t write a word as simple as “marriage”.

In fact I can't remember how to write it. But I’m used to semi-literateness – to being unable to write eighty percent of the words that I can read. I'm always using my cell phone as a reference, and I pull it out now, and use the text messaging feature to type out the word. The realization that I can actually help is both exhilarating and sobering.

Strangely, my near-illiteracy in the language connects us. That’s about all the connection we will make, though I can find the word and write it for her in her notebook, in big block characters next to her big block characters. I can return her beaming smile, and shake her hand with both of mine. I can feel my heart being imprinted with the bittersweet moment.

My uncle asked in a recent email what my “thoughts were about the unrest in Tibet.” The simple question swung open a window into the furious tangle of impressions and ideas in my mind – the hours of articles, videos, blogs, and discussions; the facts layered upon emotion upon argument upon belief; the doubt and the fear and the surprise and the hope. It whipped itself out of control out there and (almost before I knew what was happening) in me as well. I felt as if I was being tossed about on this sea of clashing worldviews, mocked in my efforts to carve out conclusions.

Like many people in the “west,” I started out with an assumption that on March 14 the holy people of Tibet were finally crying out against the injustice of decades of political and cultural oppression by the Chinese government. There were, of course, pieces of truth in that, but the waters of “truth” muddied just two or three days in, when the peaceful protests became violent riots. Then the accusations of a “western media bias” (which have always been there) started to grow louder, and I found myself suddenly unsure of everything I thought I knew.

I was shocked at the reports of women and children being beaten by angry mobs, and I was shocked at my shock, at the growing realization that my culturally-based prejudices had indeed biased my assumptions. I began to see with slightly-Chinese eyes the way that stories in the Western news were as carefully pieced together (if in much subtler ways) as those coming out of the state-run news sources here, leaning toward their own bias. I began to wonder how I was going to go about defending China.

So it was a relief of sorts when the large majority of Chinese activists careened out of control too, when they themselves abandoned reason and compassion and by doing so compromised their moral argument. I stopped asking myself how I was going to speak for them, and started asking myself why I have to keep relearning that truth is not black and white, that good and bad are not out there but in all of us.

There has been, and still is, a strong anti-China bias coming out of the west, and it is scary. It’s scary that I still find it in myself, even after seeing with my own eyes all the good that Chinese culture and people (and yes, even the government) have to offer to the world. It’s scary that I catch myself looking for bad news (and feeling glad, self-satisfied when I find it?). It’s scary that it sometimes takes a leap of faith to trust in the abilities and intentions not just of the Chinese government, but of my coworkers.

There is also a strong nationalism in China, and it is scary. It’s scary that “being Chinese” can trump a whole lot of other things, including your knowledge of the gray area in your own government’s claims of goodness. It’s scary that people who know me well make broad sweeping statements that condemn “the west”.

It’s even more scary when any group decides its message, whether it is “Free Tibet!” or “I Love China!”, is so important, so RIGHT, that any means - exaggeration of the facts, condemnation and belittling of the other side, hate, or even physical violence - are justified. The more extreme they talk, though, the easier it is for me to dismiss them, and the messages they bring. Good for my mental health, not so good for getting anywhere in dialogue.

It’s 8:30 and I’m at the office again on a Saturday night, though apart from Wang Xuefu, who’s leading a group therapy session in the other room, we all abandoned hours ago the idea of actually working.

In the afternoon when the two volunteer hotline counselors arrived it started to slip away. Our tea breaks grew longer and we found ourselves dropping into chairs not connected to a computer. Someone had brought sunflower seeds. Zhang was recommending another book that I can’t read. Xiao Meng started detailing a friend’s younger sister’s dilemma (stay with the current boyfriend, or leave him for the one her parents have suggested).

By the time the last of the counselors-in-training were saying their goodbyes and heading out the door at 5:30, all suggestions of work were completely gone. Xiao Meng was out holding the elevator and yelling for the rest of us to hurry and then we were down the street to the “Yangzhou Porridge Shop” where last week we traded an (authentic!) English translation of the name for a bowl of black rice porridge.

Now we’re scattered on the folding chairs and the stools and the two sofas in the main office, staying because there are others, and good conversation, and laughter. It’s the “renao” (literally “warm noise”, that a good Chinese gathering can’t be without). It’s Zhang, trying (bravely) to explain some of the terms related to the Chinese theories of health and divination to his diligent student (me). It’s the draft copies of the almost-ready-for-print book of short stories that are being passed around, flipped through, or read from cover-to-cover.

It's the writing that brings people to Zhi Mian ... not these stories and poems (though everyone agrees that they’re delightful), but the articles about parenting and fear and psychological escape. Countless clients have ended up here because, they say, “I read some of your articles on the website and felt like you really understood me”.

They stay because Zhi Mian is professional (of the few dozen counseling centers in Nanjing, it’s been around one of the longest) and because Zhi Mian is a place where people find love, warmth, real care for people.

Tonight the parents of the three teenagers in the group counseling session are scattered among the Zhi Mian staff and counselors in the main office as we study and socialize. A long haired reporter-father plays on his laptop beside me, on the couch a well-dressed mother reads from the to-be-printed book, and another father sits straight-faced and silent, with his elbows on his knees. At one point someone’s laughing about how setting a ten-minute time limit for TV watching isn’t exactly realistic, and then it turns into a serious discussion of parenting.

Parenting: an issue on which some parents come to Zhi Mian directly seeking help. A lot more bring kids they are convinced have psychological problems, and then after the session, Sun Wen and Wang Xuefu are crying out in frustration, “It’s the PARENTS with the problem!” Being a parent in China is hard. Kids face incredible academic pressures at an incredibly young age, and a quickly changing society means rules are changing as well. Parents often end up at an extreme - either too-much-discipline or too-much-love. A lot of Wang Xuefu's articles are about parenting.

Sun Wen and the parents continue for awhile about limits and children’s desires to push them, and how they need to find identity in their teenage years. I wonder if she's smiling inside, as I am, at the thought of how these two group counseling sessions – an official one in which the teenagers are participating, and a spontaneous one for their parents – are being carried out in adjacent rooms. The topic changes, the evening wears on, I'm not really sure what all is happening. Whatever it is, it feels nice, and I'm happy to be a part of it.

Yesterday I found myself slightly frustrated with my co-worker Zhang, who is a serious academic through and through (and has obsessive-compulsive tendencies, we sometimes joke). In the afternoon he and I were working together to translate a couple pages of Dr. Wang’s journal article titles into English, and we got stuck on a word. There may be a good equivalent in English for 体认, which means literally, “body-know”, but yesterday afternoon I couldn’t think of it.

Ten seconds and I had settled for plain “experience”, was ready to move on. In the meantime, however, Zhang had commandeered the mouse, leaned in over the keyboard, and plunged into a flurry of googling, scrolling dictionary software, and tabbing between . . . leaving me a helpless observer.

“‘Experience’ isn’t deep enough," he kept muttering and kept searching (as my annoyance grew).

Besides feeling that we were wasting time, I was also growing tired of hearing about how DEEP the Chinese language is, how COMPLEX and POETIC, and how English just can’t compare. “English just doesn’t conjure up images of flowers like Chinese does,” another co-worker had lamented earlier in the day. The English language, like Western culture, is one of science, they told me. “Hmmph!” I had wanted to protest, but wasn’t sure how to follow up a grunt.

In the end Zhang and I agreed on “experience”, and I may have let out a “hmmph!” of injured satisfaction then, even though I have to admit that “Experience of the Spirit of Jesus in the Early Writing of Yu Dafu and Guo Murao” leaves something (poetic) to be desired.

I do, in fact, love learning Mandarin. I love learning to let go a little of the definitional edges, letting ideas blur and blend and dance themselves into new ways of understanding. Knowing as experiencing, bodily. Deeper than head, more even than heart. And hard to put into words, even the most poetic ones. I like to think that this is how I know China, and it’s comforting to think that maybe that’s why it’s been hard to write about it.

My MCC term will end this July, twenty days short of four years in the “middle kingdom,” and with it, this blog, I suppose. So I hesitated to write at all. I’m starting now not because I have China any more pinned down, figured out than last month, or even last year. I write because I want - like most everyone in the world - my experiences, my self to be known. I write because I want the psychological counseling center where I work – tiny gem that it is - to be known. Most of all, I want China – the beautiful and the tragic, the “this could only be here” kind of stuff and the “this could be any town anywhere in the world” stuff too - to be known. I write because I have been reminded that as little as I feel I know China, that there are others who know China less still, and that I have a responsibility to share. Write something, anything, I tell myself, as I slowly come to understand that we’ll never know it all, that the best we can do is to know it as it comes.