When I finished highschool I chose the workforce before I chose college. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in going to university, it was more that I was told “find a job or go to school” and I chose find a job. In truth I did choose both in the long run and I suppose that has defined who I am.
During 2007 and up until I relocated to China in 2010, and again in 2012, I worked as a pharmacy technician. It wasn’t easy work but it made sense to me. I was very fast at typing and entering sig code into the proprietary pharmacy systems made sense. I was very efficient and the workload was not the challenge. After the 2008 financial crisis was in full effect, I found myself with a) a part time job that would never give me full time to avoid benefits and b) increasing costs across the board. While all this was going on I witnessed my employer emboldened by the labor surplus that the recession brought, decrease the staff on at any time and lower their tolerances for replacement.
While all these challenges were happening, I wound up on closing shift usually around 5-6 days a week (remember I worked sub 40 hours and periodically sub 32, so these were sometimes 4 hour shifts), and the nature of the pharmacy chain I worked for meant that we had our music corporate tailored, which overwhelmingly meant I hated it. Except for one song that wouldn’t show up every night but would would come on regularly: Fast Car.
At the time I was coming to terms with being at the bottom of the totem pole and coping with the reality that there was no one coming to give me my first chance. I was on my own. I would often lean on the pharmacy intake window during slow times when this song would come on and think about the challenges I had faced before reaching this point and the central thesis of the song: Get out. Go. Run. Go far. Fast. I spent week after week watching people come in and choose between meds or bills and saw as the financial crisis slowly played out (into 2009) and banks were bailed out, but no the american people, realizing there wasn’t anyone that would fix things for everyone. I slowly accepted that being a pharmacy tech meant nothing and was close enough to minimum wage that I could do it for the next 30 years and never make a dent in something like a mortgage. All the while my non fulltime employment meant that I couldn’t even apply for a mortgage, even though the cost of a small home was at a low. Somehow my work ethic and reliable employment was still a major liability while two years prior banks were lending to anyone and everyone?
By the end of 2009 I was restless and disconnected from the life around me. I couldn’t imagine myself grinding as tech, and going to pharmacy school for example, only to get a job that would see me continuing to be trapped in a a box all day. I just knew there was too much out there to see and experience.
During all of this existential sorrow I was slowly coming around on education, as I found myself exploring Metro State’s Philosophy department and realizing that I indeed was interested in studying something. I spent this time reading and learning about philosophical concepts that I had never even considered on my own. I also had an outlet for the existential frustrations I was going through, and in truth this only bolstered my dreams of finding my version of a fast car to leave.
I don’t think I realized things had changed until I stepped off the plane and had my first exchange with a person in Chinese.
I don’t think I realized things had changed until I stepped off the plane and had my first exchange with a person in Chinese. Early in 2010 I was amusing myself by handing out fake fliers that had a crude comic about people handing out fliers to people that didn’t want them when I actually did receive a flier that changed my life forever. I was walking through the campus’ quads and was handed a flier for a study abroad consortium that would give me the chance to get credit for learning abroad. I followed up half expecting it to cost more than I would want to spend (I paid my way through school to this point and had not gotten student loans), and was surprised that I could not only go to China but that there were two cities I could choose from, Shanghai and a city I had never heard of, called Chengdu. I looked at both and in the moment I recall thinking “go where you’ve never even heard of” so I chose Chengdu.
Not 6 months later I was on a plane to Sichuan and found myself in a taxi with a Chengdu Taxi driver, asking where I wanted to go. I had been doing listen and repeat for months to prepare but nothing prepared me for the first time a Chendu taxi driver asked where I was going. I was on the other side of the planet and I had gotten there through my own efforts.
Truthfully I had no plan beyond go to China. I just needed to see the world. In highschool I had a book that was titled “From Confucianism to Communism” and after reading it I had decided that China was where I needed to go. It was the destination I would think about throughout my days, first working in a subway, then a pharmacy, then briefly in the academic scholarship office at school. And after hearing the song for the first time, I just knew exactly the sentiment that Tracy Chapman was going for. I didn’t belong. I was restless, I knew there was so much more to see and do. And so I did it.
I don’t think this was the most exciting and certainly not the happiest time of my life. But the truth is, if I hadn’t had somewhere to run from, I don’t know that I would have had anywhere to go.