Читать книгу A WAY OF LIFE - Notes from a Small Chinese Province - Maria Linnemann - Страница 5

DOES IT HAVE TO BE CHINA?

“Perhaps you think that I’m too old for this?”

I was sitting in my mum’s kitchen, sipping Earl Grey tea and eyeing my mother warily as I saw what I took to be a hint of worry in her expression. She put down her cup and sighed.

“Well, your life has been something like a film script often enough,” she said, straightening her placemat for something to do as she added:

“There would be enough to do that is closer to home, if you were to look, you know.”

I knew, but I had always had what some people impolitely call: “ants in my pants”, or as a German word more politely describes it: “Fernweh”: a hankering after far-away places. I felt it in my bones as had numerous ancestors of mine, and there had never been sufficient willpower to resist it.

Asia had fascinated me from my childhood, and a chance glimpse of a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) advertisement offering two-year placement contracts in China came at a fortuitous moment in my professional career. After a selection process by that organisation and a number of preliminary courses, I found myself, together with a young colleague from London fresh from university, in Nanyang, a city of a million inhabitants in the central agricultural province of Henan. Roy and I had initially been destined for a northern town in Inner Mongolia, but at the last moment our organization had relocated us. Swallowing my disappointment I unpacked the “ready-for-anything” boots that some might have described as “Clodhoppers”, which I had invested in with a view to the demanding natural features of that far northern territory, and replaced them with ordinary winter boots.

This book is not a travel guide but a very personal account of the five years I spent as a teacher in “my small corner of China”, a many-facetted experience that became – as Vice-Dean Mr. Wang put it on my last morning in Nanyang – “A Way of Life”.