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.