Wen Li walks to the front of the college classroom in northern China. She’s short, square-shouldered, wears wire-framed glasses. I don’t know what to expect. Actually, all my students have been surprising me lately with their five-minute presentations on a topic of their choice.
“Don’t be obsessed with material benefits and don’t be sad for meaningless defamations,” Wen Li says in a quiet voice. “We all try to find the answer to how to be happy. But life often gives us what we don’t want.”
I find myself taking notes as Wen Li continues. “The longer people live, the more they suffer. There are no answers. Truth lies in itself. Trust yourself; rely on yourself. Define yourself correctly, and your life will flower.”
I’m not certain in the moment what it means to “define yourself correctly.” But I feel stunned by what she’s said. I feel as if maybe I came to China just to hear this. It’s a phrase I will wrestle with in the coming months and years.
I think: Yes, I’ve known my share of “meaningless defamations.” I’ve experienced scores of them at the hands of employers, teachers, lovers. As I get older, the weight of this pile of memories grows heavier. But the answer, for me, if there is such a thing, may be precisely in what Wen Li says – define yourself correctly.
Defining myself correctly was exactly my task as this scene and others like it unfolded for me in China, 2005-2006. At age 51, recently fired from a marketing job back home, I was somewhat desperately trying on a new career as a teacher, at the same time diving deeper into my responsibilities as the father of the girl we’d adopted in China two years earlier, and questioning every value that had motivated my life.
Some say that the period of life past age 50 confronts us with the same questions we first faced at adolescence: “What will my next work in the world be?” And also, “Who am I?”
For me, it took the year in China and sometime after to work it out. That year was filled with failures in the classroom and crises of confidence, complicated by ill-health from the impact of pollution in China’s cities and nearly chronic food poisoning.
Starting my new career wasn’t easy financially either – our family took a hit during two years of transition. And there was a certain shame, even though coupled with excitement, about facing the fundamental questions so late in life.
For all its trials, this period was the seed of a new life for me. I left corporate communications after 18 years of work for small and large organizations. That work had some of what I wanted, but left me with a vague discontent that ultimately the magazine and newsletter copy I wrote wound up in the employees’ trash.
In my new life, I work as Coordinator of the Learning Success Center at a community college. I work regularly with English language learners, many from other countries – Mexico, Russia, China – a group as sincere and full of everyday lessons for me as my students in China were. I wanted to look into the faces of those I communicate with and know that I am making a difference. I wanted to find a way to share all of myself, everything I’d learned in living, in a way that would be useful for someone.
(To learn more about encores in the Portland, Oregon area, click here and here.)