Worst Kept Secrets

A couple of months ago, I was walking to work, past a series of second-nature sights, and I came to the intersection at Ninghai Lu. After dodging rush hour bicycle/scooter traffic and narrow encounters with various vehicles, I got a nasty shock when I saw that the Ninghai Lu Suguo was closed. It wasn’t just closed; it was gutted. It looked like it had been bombed - it was just evidence of the impending Ninghai expansion project, but it quite literally happened overnight. I’d noticed the day before that alot of the inventory had been moved out, and I naively thought that maybe they were renovating and expanding the painfully narrow aisles. Suguo is a chain convenience store, and the Ninghai Suguo isn’t particularly special - there was one really kind looking lady who worked there who I liked a lot, and they reliably stocked cat food, but other than that it was identical to the one one block over, and the hundreds of others scattered across Nanjing.

But it WAS special. It was the first place outside of the school building that my comfort zone tentatively expanded into and was the marker of the alley that led to the place I spent most of my time in China. It was a small rug, but it definitely got yanked out from underneath me. It’s an absolutely horrible idea to get attached to a structure here - the destruction/construction is constant, and there’s a neverending shuffling and reshuffling of clothing boutiques, key cutters, migrant worker stalls, street food, and odds and ends shops. Ninghai Lu itself (the major focus of the two years I’ve spent here) is about to get completely redone into a four lane highway, and in the process will probably lose all of its considerable charm. Things absolutely do not stay fixed. Additionally, most of my friends are transient - there’s no telling when someone’s going to up and leave for Shanghai, home, Thailand, etc. The whole bit about never stepping in the same river twice is more applicable to China than any place else I can imagine. But it’s one thing to be IN the river, no matter how wildly it changes course, and something else entirely to get out and dry off, maybe telling yourself that you can come back whenever you want, even though you know that the Nanjing you’re leaving is quite seriously never going to exist again. Most of the time it’s true that you can never *really* go back, but you can *sort of* go back, if you need/want to (although it’s usually a hideous experience). But I don’t think it’s possible to *sort of* come back here. I could come back to China, but I guarantee that in one year I won’t even recognize it.

Moving back was a snap decision, and this is happening incredibly fast. We’re going to Shanghai tomorrow, and getting on a plane on Monday. I think it was a good decision, but it hurts - this is an absolutely maddening place, and I love it and I’m honored to have been here for two years. I’m sure I’ll get excited about the future tomorrow, but right now at 5 am in my apartment that we’ve managed to make a home in, this is really painful.