Endings

And it's over. Yesterday was our exam, which I finished in record time (I was, as always, the first out of the room) and then went to get a haircut.

One thing that I will kind of miss is the exchange rate. In America, I would never get my hair cut in a place where they give you a beverage, but in China, I was able to enjoy my coffee and chat with the guy cutting my hair about Chinese and American standards of beauty and it was only about $15. When he had finished, he held up the mirror and I saw that, horror of horrors, I'd been mulletted.

"Um ... oh," I said. "Actually, could you go shorter in the back? The back should definitely not be longer than the front."

He was dubious, but complied, and the final result makes me very happy.

That afternoon was our graduation ceremony, where, among other things, the fourth year teachers described the students and people were supposed to guess who they were. Mine was "This student brilliantly rebutts others' arguments in debate class. Her dream is to discover a new logical proposition and go insane."

After the ceremony, the language pledge ended. My haircut was complimented and I was called "sassy" twice in an hour, which is a new record. We went to Paul and Anders' room and hung around for a bit before the big end-of-semester Beijing Roast Duck dinner, where my roommate and another last-semester student and I chatted quite easily. After dinner, we went back to Anders' room, where we talked for a very long time. It was especially nice to be able to make jokes effortlessly and to hear people's real voices - not to mention our real names. This was especially true because the boys, with the exception of Paul, all had rather odd names: Cedric, Anders, and Bennett.

At one point, a second-year guy I don't know came and proposed a drinking contest with Paul - not something I would recommend, as Paul is built like a linebacker. The other guy threw 3 kuai on the floor and said, "All right, that's 3 mao, 3 mao on the floor." Bennett, Cedric and I exchanged looks - this guy has been in China for two months and has yet to master the monetary system. I watched, fascinated and appalled, as they chugged enormous bottles of Yanjing beer. Paul won, of course, which is good since it was his beer anyway.

After awhile, we managed to get up and go to Houhai, where we bought more cheap beer and wandered around the lake. We found some other classmates, none of whom I knew, sitting on sofas outside a bar and decided to camp out for a bit.

(A person came around selling flowers and tried to get Bennett to buy some. He said no - "Unless you'd like one?" he added, turning to me. I said no thank you and my roommate and I did some possibly-not-too-subtle nudging.)

For everything I'm leaving, I'm getting something new.

Here are lists.

Lost or losing:
Cedric, Anders, Paul, Emily, Ben.
Wang Cheng, Luo Wei, Zao Zao, Namu, Xiaoxue.
Teachers: Xu, Zhu, Li, Li, Mao, Wang, Fan, etc.
Noodles for breakfast, the red hills of Sichuan, corn-flavored ice-cream, beautiful Chinese men, ginkgo trees, zongzi, ridiculous twee pop.

And getting back:
Kep, Jim, Jay, Jill, Kate, Katie Rose, Lisa.
My mum and dad, Caroline, Lillian, my grandparents, and cousins, and aunts and uncles.
Quaker meeting.
Peach pie on my grandparents' deck
Singing along with Lucinda Williams or Paolo Conte or West Side Story
My thesis
My cats
The gravity couch

For everything I lose, I gain something else, I know that. I keep telling myself that. I gave Ben my copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel to read on the plane; on the title page, I wrote one of my favorite parts of They Might Be Giants:

"What's wrong with being Sherlock Holmes? Why, I sometimes wish I were the Scarlet Pimpernel. A fop by day, but in the night, I ride. Is he in Heaven or is he in Hell, that damned elusive Pimpernel? What's that? You want to see the face behind the mask?

"... this is the face."

I no longer have my book, but I have something better - the knowledge that now he has something of mine.

This is the end of this story. On Monday I will go back to America, where I belong. It isn't easy, but it's right.