concluding thoughts

When I started this travelogue as a text file, the scrollbar was over an inch tall. Now it's hard to click on when I try to read over it. I don't think there's any conclusions I can give for a trip that spans almost a month and divers locations, but I will leave some thoughts:
- your family is your family for life
- your life is what you make of it, so try to make a lot of it
- eat in moderation, or you'll get really fat
- the amount of umami delivered in Chinese food is consisently high. And I'm not talking about through MSG.
- if you see something you might never see again, take a picture of it. If you don't get a pic, write it down. Failing that, remember it as sharply as you can in your mind.
- I wish I had spent a little more time with my relatives, particularly the ones down south. I think it was easier for my parents to accept leaving early, because they've been back quite a bit more frequently than I. It would have been nice to further understand their lives.

If you're traveling to China, be ready for some things:
- meat in every dish, which might bother the more stickling of you, and pork in every other dish
- really dirty bathrooms and relatively low hygiene standards. As an example, I saw a total of 7 snot rockets while I was there, all out on the street somewhere
- a corollary -- bathrooms without toilet paper. Absolutley, at all times, have toilet paper on your person. You never want to be without your own supply
- have your drinking water situation planned out ahead. At airports and train stations, there'll be stations with hot potable water, but you have to let that cool before you drink it. The only place that had cool drinking water was at the Expo.
- flying into Tibet will give you almost no time to adjust for the altitude; take it easy. You should also bring something for the lack of humidity, like Ayre, which I really regret not having.
- an increasingly robust yuan, which means things aren't that cheap anymore.
- a totally different facet of the country no matter where you go.
- difficulties getting to interesting places if don't have a guide or friend to lead you around

I'll leave you with one more anecdote, about deciding what to do with your life. When we were at my dad's old home, Lin Jin sat down with my cousin. My cousin does electrician labor and occasional subcontracting out in Guangzhou, several hours' bus ride from home. He and Lin Jin were discussing the future fate of the family farm land. Lin Jin said, "you know, if you ever want to get some income on the side, you could start growing ginger. It's low maintenance -- you just bury it and keep maintaining the shoots." Lin Jin kept pouring out tips about ginger, like how many seasons you can go before you have to let the field lie fallow, how deep you want the roots, how to get the roots to fan out like you see in store-bought roots. On and on and on. I couldn't tell you how closely my cousin was paying attention. He seemed noncomittal. The only time he seemed genuinely curious was when Lin Jin dropped a figure on him. He said with a few acres, you could get a ginger crop of 10, maybe 20,000 RMB a year. And what with the rampant commodity speculation going on in China, ginger prices could skyrocket.
Lin Jin was just being friendly, tossing out a random idea that my cousin could try out with fairly low opportunity cost. And who knows, maybe he could go somewhere with that, instead of grinding away at a low paying job in the city. The points I take away from this exchange are this:
- you always have to be learning and looking out for opportunities. Lin Jin learned all of that stuff about ginger by just reading about it online after his friend mentioned that he was trying to grow it. If you aren't constantly seeking out something new, you'll never find anything.
- what you do with your life is in your own hands. Sure, there'll always be setbacks and misfortune, but you're fundamentally in charge of where you go next. If you want to do something, you have to chase after it and work hard.