9 Notes on Re-Entering Canada After Quite a Long Time Away

I have evaded jet lag! I have traveled four hundred bazillion light years from Shanghai to Vancouver to Vancouver Island, crossed the International Date Line, stayed up for 34 hours continuously during my journey and initial arrival, and seem to have righted my circadian rhythms unceremoniously and efficiently. 

I was in Vancouver over the weekend and now I’m in lovely, quiet Victoria, holed up in my parents’ house. For those of you unfamiliar with my personal geography, I’m here:

This lovely map was brought to you by the lovely folks at rivercorp.ca

It’s been a year and a half since my last journey home. That one was for a month in mid-winter, dark and cold and hermitty.  I hadn’t been home in summer since 2004. Living a de-centralized lifestyle can do that to a person. It’s good to be back. Let me tell you about it.

Out at the Pudong International Airport in the far reaches of Shanghai, I had a long queue for the check-in. Ahead of me was a plethora of young Chinese tourists trying to rearrange their over sized, over weight suitcases so they could be checked in. What made these suitcases so marvellously plump and weighty? Why, the half-dozen ten kilo bags of rice they’d packed. When flying to Vancouver, one must make sure that one won’t starve to death. I thought about clearing my throat and tapping them on the shoulder and attempting to explain in mangled Chinese that, well, you can buy rice in Vancouver but decided against it. They would find out soon enough.

On the flight I was in the 4-seat middle row, in an aisle seat next to an empty seat and a mother and son traveling together. The mother had packed a huge cooler bag full of Tupperware containers filled with whole, unpeeled shrimp, which she ate like popcorn throughout the flight (like popcorn that has eyes and pokey little legs and exoskeleton that you spit out into a paper cup every twenty seconds or so and then hand to the flight attendant when filled to just above the brim). Midway through the flight, during the movie, she hauled out a bag of wet chicken feet and ate them like Twizzlers (like Twizzlers that you bite off at the knuckle then chew for a while before spitting the bone and skin out into another paper cup which is passed on to the flight attendant when full). Her son spent most of the eleven or so hours puking into his barf bag as she ate her shrimp and toes.

On the airplane television screens, they played an odd mishmash of astronomy documentaries (yay! quasars!), pseudo-astronomy investigations into UFO sighting over Arizona in 1997, and an E! thing on The Black Swan which reminded me that without the interruption of commercials, a lot of programs are really just a series of repeated obvious statements which are then repeated again an then summarized before moving on to the next set of obvious statements. I think in the whole 20-odd minute program only about a dozen sentences were uttered.

In Vancouver, I was met at the airport by my best friend from Turkey, who had emigrated to Canada last summer with her Sudanese partner. Her life has been very similar to mine- lots of travel and expattery and non-linear pathways- until now. Now she’s trying to figure out how to live a settled life in Vancouver and the culture shock that has come with it. She’s American but has never lived in America as an adult, just as I’ve never lived in Canada as an adult. It’s a very alien feeling trying to settle in at age 36.

She had errands to run over the weekend, so I ignored my jet lag and tagged along as she drove around Vancouver, going to big box super stores and DIY warehouses. We parked in vast, crowded parking lots, we dodged huge shopping carts, we shook our heads in bewilderment at the sight of the aisles and aisles of Stuff. You want twenty different kinds of salt? You want a hundred kinds of sugared cereal? You want a kilo of cold cuts? You want five bags of chips for a buck? Ok. My head felt like it was going to explode. I missed my street in Shanghai with the doomed chickens and flopping fish and greens laid out on the sidewalk. I missed my jian bing/hardware lady.  I missed shops the size of a small SUV.

In the Rona DIY warehouse, I bought her a donut to comfort her and we strolled the aisles full of fifty sizes of nail and twenty sizes of hammer and thirty sizes of casters while her partner went off in search of whatever it was he needed to fix his food cart (he has a very good kofte/donair cart that is parked on the corner of Granville and Robson st– do go. The donair is marinated in Jamaican jerk seasonings and the kofte is Sudanese style). As we walked down the kilometer of nails, her thought process was something like this: nothing here functions on its own. Everything here needs more things and you use these to make something else or to fix something else or to embiggen something else– but everything there depended on needing more things. What if… what if you decided that none of these things were necessary to begin with? What if everyone suddenly realized that, in the grand scheme of things, we really don’t need any of these things? Would the universe implode?

I met Nomadic Chick and she plied me with congee at midnight. I think this helped me to avoid jet lag.

After only three full days here, I already feel calmer, saner, healthier. My hair doesn’t look like I rinse it in acid rain now. The internet is unblocked and I can read freely. I feel quiet and balanced.  It’s good to be home. I have a feeling that this wouldn’t last if I actually decided to stay here. Visiting is like a retreat. Living here makes me tired and annoyed and complacent.

Public washrooms have hot water! And toilet paper! Which you can flush!

I can understand what people are saying, without any effort. This is good because I can ask questions, answer questions, comment, express myself without sounding like a stilted idiot. I’ve found myself asking shop assistants long, convoluted questions, just because I can. This easy comprehension is also bad, however, because I now remember that most of what I can hear is just noise and chatter and inanities. I actually prefer being able to tune out the mindless small talk.

Being home with my parents means I am also confronted with my past, which I don’t tend to carry with me when I live abroad.

Let me show you, in chronological order, some of these things.

I had to hunt and fish for my dinner! Raised by wild salmon, taught by elk!

Yes, my childhood was straight out of, say, Call of the Wild

Early 1990s ephemera and detritus, as it were: clearing out drawers and cupboards

Count the hair styles and colours. A decade of ID cards in Europe and Canada and Turkey

This would be me, aged barely 20, after a late night in Galway, Eire

Lola Kedi, age 2 months, back in my old Istanbul flat in 2005


26 thoughts on “9 Notes on Re-Entering Canada After Quite a Long Time Away”

  • Omigod, that kitten is too cute. I want to cuddle with it NOW. I am glad to hear you are enjoying Canada but kind of missing China (that was “kind of missing” I felt while reading this, right?) as China kind of misses you. (It does! It told me so! It just has trouble expresses its feelings.)

    • Lola was a terribly adorable (yet lethal) kitten. She’s now an adorable and lethargic (yet sporadically lethal) 6 year old cat living with my parents. We’re trying to re-bond after a long absence. We had lived together for over three years in Turkey before I had to abandon her to go to China- it’s a hard, hard life having to live in my parents’ big ol’ house with all the food and windowsills and laps…

      And yes, I do kind of miss China in a weird kind of way. I think it’s just the super-stores and car culture and Stuff that made me miss my doomed chickens and hordes of crazy cyclists.

  • Nice! Makes me homesick, as my whole family lives in Victoria. The first time I came back after two years in Bangkok I saw a RCMP officer – yellow striped Han Solo Pants, goofy hat, etc – and was filled with an unexpected rush of pride. Not sure why…maybe because I knew he (probably) couldn’t be bribed. It also felt really weird drinking water from the tap – what a luxury!
    Great blog, BTW.

    • Aw, yeah- that strange sweet feeling of fondness for the long lost familiar things. I feel the same way about the sea planes in the harbour and the blue bridge. Also love not having to worry so much about what I eat or drink or if it will kill me.

  • Just your luck. I have flown back and forth from China to Canada many, many times and have never come across such caricatures as folks transporting 6 bags of rice in their lugguage or a passenger eating copious amounts of “yucky” food beside me.

    • This was a first for me- I’ve flown back and forth between China and Shanghai a number of times and the worst I had to put up with was the meals served by China Eastern…

  • I just can’t get past the part where you said you actually had a long queue in check in at Pudong Airport, I’ve hardly ever had to wait for anything there, easiest airport in the world (also one of the most boring!) it’s always a creepy ghost town when I’m there! I guess people only fly during holiday season!

    Enjoy you time back home in the fresh air! 🙂

    P.S. Can you please bottle me some of that air and bring it back to Shanghai so I can occasionally inhale something not brown, dusty and filled with nasty chemicals!

    • I’d never had to queue at Pudong before either so I was surprised! It wasn’t nearly as bad as at other places though- maybe 15 minutes total (but ten of those minutes were spent at the front of the line, waiting for the rice people to deal with their bags).

      The air here is FANTASTIC! It’s almost sweet…

  • Photo of all the ID cards is simply amazing. Should go through all of mine when I go home.

    Can’t wait to smell the sweet air myself. Will be back in Canada this summer after exactly three years away.

    • The ID card thing is kind of surreal when you have spent the past 15 or so years walking away from each stage of your life without really looking back- each era comes as a bit of a surprise in retrospect. So many incarnations! So many hairdos!

      Are you going back for a short visit? Where will you be? The air here, even after a week, is still sweet and lovely. My hair feels so soft…Oh Shanghai water, what have you done to me?

  • Just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from you, here in Seattle and planning on expatting in SEA soon. Toughest part of leaving is knowing how much I’ll miss the Emerald City and surrounds. Your fine post today surely gives me pause… (but only pause)

    Welcome back to the glorious PNW!

    • When are you heading out? You’re going to Vietnam, right? There will be plenty to miss when you leave, but certainly plenty to make up for it! There is a balance.

  • The thought process in point 5 is my favourite. It is enlightened. As is your use of the word ’embiggen’. If I didn’t know better I’d swear that was a Simpsons reference…

    • “Embiggen’ is one of my favorite words. Wasn’t it Jebediah Springfield who coined the term? A wise man.

      And really, we don’t need 98% of the crap that’s out there, do we?

  • Have just discovered I can get the internet connection working here in my guesthouse in rural China if I sit behind the door of my room on the floor…..;)
    I hope you’re enjoying FAST internet speeds in Victoria!

    Now, regarding the rice, I have it on good advice from Chinese friends living abroad that although you can buy rice in Vancouver it DOES NOT TASTE THE SAME as the rice in Shanghai.

    (Substitute any other food stuff/pair of destinations into that sentence for your own take on the theme, eg ‘although you can buy Weetbix in Shanghai it DOES NOT TASTE THE SAME as the Weetbix in Sydney)

    • Maybe the rice tastes different because the water is, um, clean? I mean, a huge percentage of the rice here IS Chinese…imported FROM China…not quite sure how it would be different. I mean, sure, Corn Flakes manufactured under license in China WILL taste different from the original but, well, the 30% of Vancouver that is Chinese seems able to eat the rice. I’m just a little perplexed as to why they’d need to pack to many 10kg bags of it. Live and learn, I suppose.

      By the way, happy to see you’ve finally found net! Your Dragon’s Backbone post made me crave a little adventure!

  • Oh my god, I absolutely cannot wait to flush my toilet paper and drink tap water at will. Out of all of America’s faults, the sewage system is not one of them (does that make sense?).

    And what a plane trip home! Yikes.

    Also…you’re such a great writer. I’m totally jealous.

  • “I’ve found myself asking shop assistants long, convoluted questions, just because I can.” Hee!

    Feeling you on the big supermarkets – just going from Cusco to Lima I get THAT particular culture shock. So clean, so organised, and so BIG. Sensory overload.

    Have a great time back home. How long are you staying?

    • I’m just here for three weeks total, with less than a week left. It’s been a totally whirlwind trip, with lots of family stuff and stocking up on clothes that fit and whatnot. I feel a bit shell shocked and, to be honest, after the first few days of using as much English as possible, I’ve found myself not wanting to speak much to anyone at all any more. Not sure why.

  • I discovered your blog this afternoon and I’ve been reading (stalking?) my way through a rather large quantity of your archives and enjoying them greatly. When I came to this post, I realized that we’re both from pretty much the same place – I was born and raised in Victoria (although I’m now living in Rome).

    Anyway, I just wanted to say hi from a fellow Canadian, and thanks for writing in a way that really brings travel and everyday moments vividly to life.
    Sara White recently posted..Horror story without an ending

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