Experience means comfort

UPDATE!:

Courtesy of BOCOG, we have scored tickets to a track and field event on Saturday. Please revel at my photos! :-) I get to go to the Bird's Nest! YIPPEE!




I have been in China a long time. I’m starting to feel as if I have lived my whole life here. Not because I fit in particularly well, it’s more because forced comfort has a way of becoming real. Maybe life should really only be measured in months not years and decades. I hardly feel the same now as I did before and for that my life is now changed. The luxuries of a common language and heritage seem to be from a different life now. Walking across stage at graduation, seeing Dave in concert and sitting at a bar in Chicago have all faded as part of a mirage of somebody else’s life.

Despite the still unfamiliar food and undesirable smell, I have grown comfortable here. Enough so that my mind no longer wanders as much to the people at home watching the games so much as it does to those participating in them. In many ways going home seems like an end to everything, and that is more than scary. At least here, in my unknown and unpredictable environment, I have a purpose. I’m “Molly, Olympic flash-quote reporter,” and my skills are needed, even wanted. It’s ironic that I have a more solidified identity in China than I do back home, and that makes comfort for the time easier.

The Olympics began and the world spilled over into Beijing. The influx of Westerners has downgraded us from mini-celebrities to… commodities. Our private viewing of Beijing has ended as the world’s flags flank all sides of the streets and experience what we have known for months. When we see a fellow foreigner stalking his map, circling a street like a vulture, it’s as if we are sharing a private joke with ourselves; I feel as if I can relate more to the Chinese than the Westerners at times, and it was my alone time with them that allows such a response.

Of course, the Chinese and the Americans are not alike. We all know that. At times I feel as if we are timid animals, slowly observing each other, curious enough to stare, but never to interact. Like children parallel playing, we know we are alike in some ways, but much too different in others to ever forge true friendship. At work we segregate ourselves. It’s not out of malice or disgust, but more out of general boundaries. We are the children in a china (excuse the pun) shop, told to look but not touch. We are forever observing and absorbing but rarely interacting. It’s just how it is.

I’m sorry that my only report in days is a vague, dramatic description of my mental stability. I have spent the last four days in the clutch of Archery, and have three to go. It has become oddly therapeutic, and for once I feel like I’m (sometimes) doing it right. My round, freckled face has become familiar to many of the Archers and most of the time they are happy to oblige my pestering request for answers. I have seen several cry and other’s redden at the loss of medals. I participated in a medal press conference and chilled when the athletes held up their Gold, Silver and Bronze medals merely feet away.

I’m all too happy to be here, all too happy to see athletes and know that they are real people. To see them cry, laugh, breathe and ache as we do. And even when I’m running to them with my ONS bib and fanny pack draped across my back, praying that I catch their last sentence, facial expression, or best of all, their attention, I don’t envy them. I was more excited when a reporter from BBC tapped my colleague and me on the shoulder after we had secured an interview with Alison Williamson, a Bronze medalist in 2004, to secure a simultaneous interview. I was even more excited when the reporter’s questions turned up little from the athlete, and I pulled her aside for a second interview and better quotes. And my heart fluttered once again when my blatant stubbornness and attitude was the only reason I, and about 20 other reporters, received comments from a well-known archer (it’s a good story ask me about when I come home). For me this is stardom. While I miss the calm days when it was just the Chinese and us, I enjoy the atmosphere of the Olympics and the camaraderie that truly seems to infiltrate cultural barriers.