From Diaries to LumDimSum

Since the 5th grade, I have kept diaries that I wrote in almost every day until last May 2008. For so many years, I wrote as a form of expression, documentation, a way to vent, to release, to explore and analyze ideas, emotions, actions.  I didn’t know if I would start writing again, but it’s nice to know that I have the option to reminisce and relive all those memories and remember what it was like to be back in junior high when my life was consumed by homework, piano lessons, soccer practice and my dreams and aspirations were to be a lawyer like Ally McBeal.  Back in those days, I played Oregon Trail on my massive home computer and you weren’t cool unless you had your own private phone line with conference call.    As they were my diaries, I only wrote for myself and never with the intention of allowing any other eyes to read them but mine.  And after my time?  I request for them all to be burned.

I’m not sure why I stopped writing in my diary last year, I suppose I missed a few days, which turned into weeks and before I knew it, I had let too much time go by and was too busy to go back and re-trace my daily activities to catch up.

China’s funny like that.  It’s easy to get caught up in everything around you and forget to stop to smell the roses…no, breathe fresh air…haha. It’s easy for me (and everyone who’s an expat) to tease China, to say that if I had a nickel for every ridiculous encounter/situation/scenario, I’d be rich.  But alas, as much as it can be frustrating and challenging to live in a foreign country, it’s also incredibly exciting, fascinating, and full of opportunity and potential.  Never have I felt more helpless and valuable at the same time.  Never have I felt such an intensity of life as I do here in China.  I wake up each day to a day of hope and promise. Every day is a new day to discover new things, new places and to meet new people.  In China, I have learned to expect the unexpected.  A year ago, I had my diary. Yesterday, I had nothing. And today, I have LumDimSum.

“Embrace the rise of this country as having all the complicated aspects of human ‘progress’ in general. It is disorienting, it is sometimes disturbing, it creates problems as well as benefits. But it is a very interesting and exciting part of this era’s human saga and is worth people around the world paying close attention to.” – James Fallows