Below is a letter, more or less true to original form, I wrote to a good friend circa late autumn 2005. He lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, the home I had just left for Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, China. I was a new English Teacher then, never having taught before, and expecting a big city, a curriculum, small class sizes, and students who could speak English. Instead I got rice paddies, a thin paperback textbook, and one thousand high school students who knew minuscule English. I knew even less Chinese.

Dear jonah,

Zheng Wei, a gatekeeper of “fiercely indeterminate age”  here at the boarding school, is now my favorite person to spend time with. He loves the NBA and I know just barely enough about it, and about Chinese, to overcome the language barrier and converse with him on the subject. Did you know that Allen Iverson is very popular in China? A name brand! There are stores dedicated solely to him. I rely on Iverson, actually, to answer the question people often ask: “What city are you from in America?” When they don’t recognize the English word “Philadelphia,” or my atonal way of trying to say it in Mandarin, “Fei Cheng!” I say “Allen Iverson—NBA” and they say “Fei Cheng! 76ers!”

Any rate, last evening I joined Zheng Wei as he patrolled school grounds. During our walk he vehemently declared his admiration of the NBA, and I asked him if he would fly to America just to see an NBA game. When I realized that he didn’t understand the word “fly,” and I didn’t know the translation, I tried to make my hand into a convincing airplane. Zheng Wei repeated my gesture, moving his hand in waves in front of us, but he didn’t know what this motion meant. So we were swooping our hands next to one another in the night sky when suddenly red paper planes appeared at our feet, illuminated by the moon.

I hope it has stopped raining there.

Take care,

amanda

And here I am, circa late autumn 2014, on a cloudy Sunday in the Philadelphia Tri-State area. I’m feeling a little like a foreigner in my native country, and so am reading letters from another time, from another land. And Sundays, it just so happens, are currently one of my favorites to spend time with. They’ve always been more merciful than sentimental to me. So while I admit this may sound completely maudlin, I hope you’ll forgive me in advance for writing it: I can’t help but think that life itself is like origami folding. It doesn’t make sense a lot of the time, but it’s all about being formed. And maybe our job is to be brave enough to trust that the crazy creases, the seeming incongruities, ultimately sustain a masterwork greater than our divining. For every now and then we get a glimpse, a little wink, that there is coherence. It all simply takes shape. Like red paper planes arriving at my feet in tailor-made time.