You feel as though you're moving through solid air, your first time riding the Beijing subway. Seas of people passing you by and the peculiar gravity they hold to their lives. Purpose? There is no purpose, just constant collision. All of us; our hopes, dreams, our prayers.... Businessmen, students, travelers, lovers and beggars, we all live at the speed of life. There, and in Beijing more than any other place, we seem so close to one another. And yet in some ways, we remain so distant.

Sometime after arriving here, I began having an unusual dream. There was always something the same about this dream, however different. I fell asleep each night to find myself alone in some great stretch of wilderness. A lifeless desert, an open ocean or an endless field, all set beneath an empty, beautifully blue sky. Always I was moving forward, moving toward the horizon, but there was a loneliness on all sides of me, closing in.

I slowly began to realize the significance of my dream. It may come as a surprise, given the incredible number of people living in Beijing, but I felt a sense of isolation I couldn't explain.

Walking around the city, with no particular place to go, you begin to notice certain things. There is a kind of distance here you experience, between yourself, people, places and events. You're not from here, and chances are you're not from anywhere remotely similar. And, if you're from the West, everything you do, even walking down the street, seems impossibly interesting to the locals. It's a mild curiosity, the attention, but it's a constant reminder of just how far away you are from where you've come.

People you meet, they're all this curiosity, happiness, open hearts and open hands. Always they want to know where you're from, your name and how you managed to be where you are now, here in their city. You wish you could find the words to do their questions justice, but the language is as unfamiliar as you imagine you must be, standing there feeling lost in the supermarket.

Roads have no name at first, only unfamiliar characters you'll eventually learn by heart if you live here long enough. Everything's a little like you've read about it, but you're there, it's you, not someone else or some character in a film, novel or newspaper column. It's almost like living a daydream, a surrealistic image. Sometimes, living this way, it's hard to make a real or intimate connection with the local people you meet and that sense of isolation comes lurking once again.

None of this really means anything. Distance? Unfamiliarity? Isolation? Most of it's imaginary. Same as the barriers of language, culture, politics, economics and religion which sometimes seem to separate all mankind, you from your neighbor and vice versa.

This city begs you to meet life halfway. Do that and any barrier, any loneliness closing in becomes obsolete. You'll discover these conceptions are only real if you allow them to be, only if you give them context. If they're not imagined, the way that pain, loneliness or hatred are often imagined, they're not barriers at all, merely differences of perspective. We're every one of us individual and in constant collision with one another; our dreams, our hopes always changing.

In Beijing, perhaps more than any other place, you ultimately realize what you've always understood, it's not where we're from or any one thing that defines us. Things are much more complicated than that, and actually even simpler. At the end of the day, you're a human being and so is everyone around you. Depending on how you look at it, that may either encourage or discourage you. Personally, I'm encouraged.

Having only just arrived, I find myself looking forward to my time here. Right now, for me, Beijing is the center of the world. Like Shakespeare's Globe Theater, or Paris in the 1920s, this city carries a strange gravity mirrored in the constant collision of my life with the lives of those around me. My hopes, my dreams, my prayers I think have found a home here, however unfamiliar.

The author is an American freelancer currently living in Beijing.

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)