Since the last update to this page, written from an outdoor table in a leafy courtyard of Rice University on January 27th 2009, I have driven much of the western United States, spent the summer in the mountains of Colorado, moved with my girlfriend to a small studio in San Francisco, and twice spent three weeks in lesser-known Chinese cities. Inhab.it, which is born out of the conflicting loves of travel and place that drive me to visit rarely and move often, has benefitted from this motion. In it’s twice-monthly fashion this site has followed me, allowing some record of the commonalities, some notice of the variance of where we live and what we do.
Having spent the last few years at work on a novel based on my experiences in China from 2003 – 2008 I am now settling in to San Francisco, as well as returning to China for work and research. I am enjoying the west coast, which has been an operational base for many years but never before a home. Like all places I have ever lived, I miss Houston greatly at certain times of the year, and appreciate the freedom it offered me, newly returned to my own country.
The list of places lived that graced the previous version of this page I have indeed tired of. In its place I leave some smattering of explanation for this love of living not in one place, but in many.
Mowing the lawn as a young boy in the rural north east I watched airplanes pass overhead, amazed that those small silver streaks were each filled with people. As I went around in circles surrounded by the smell of cut grass I thought of how they had woken in one place, some in my home town, and were now leaving it. How they had stepped out of the lives like mine that remained here on the ground in daily routine, and would land, eventually, in an entire different place and set of people’s lives. Imagining those people, their lives and varied destinations, became a habit that persists.
Sitting on an airplane in Shanghai last week the cabin screen displayed a map of our voyage across the Pacific. I thought of the people a few miles away in downtown Shanghai I’d just said goodbye to and all those asleep in Los Angeles who would be surprised to see me when they woke. I was about to change cities, countries, and continents. Most importantly, though, I was about to leave one set of lives and enter another.
At thirty, living on the west coast with no lawn to mow, that impending swap remains my favorite feeling.
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