A New Leap

by Robert Burton (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown China

Seven and a half years ago I took a leap into the unknown. I took a leap of faith and went where no man or woman I had known went before. Not letting the paralysis of fear stop me, I jumped, not knowing whether I would fly or die. I was floating on nothing but faith and the desire for adventure. I leaped, sprawled, head first into the jungle. I dove into the urban jungle that is Shanghai, China. On arrival, I was awestruck: before me were crawling with taxis, cars, vans, buses and a whopping 27 million people! Never before in my life had I experienced such population density. As the Chinese say, “people mountain, people sea” and there were indeed people as far the eye could see. Millions of people on top of people became like white noise, my mind started to block them out, they were there, present, but yet, bit by bit relegated to the background if my brain. I suppose my mind had to calibrate to refocus on what it thought was important. The move from Richmond, Virginia, my hometown, that barely has 300,000 people, to a city where the neighborhood of Jin Qiao, where I lived, had 3 times that number. Shanghai has all of the modern glitz and glam of an international city. It’s the business center of China where there is a Starbucks every 2 blocks and foreign cuisine that one may even struggle to find in New York City. However, it’s still China! Still a foreign country with strange pictographs that I couldn’t read, customs that I had to quickly familiarize myself with and a population density that sometimes made me nauseous. But I am Robert Burton, explorer extraordinaire, never one to back down from the most populated country on earth, I wouldn’t let fear, waves of Chinese people, traffic noise or the fastest pace of life I had ever come across stop me. So, explore I did. I explored the Chinese language and all of its 4 tones. I struggled with my tone of voice, and after mastering the art of controlling the tone of my voice, I was in tune with a 1.5-million-man chorus. After a while, I started singing the lingo like the locals. Next, I took on the culture. All countries have a culture, meaning all countries have values, norms and beliefs. I learned a new set of values, a strange set of norms and some beliefs that just left me mind-boggled. I had to learn how to listen to what others believed to be true without judgement, and seeing with a new set of eyes, who they were underneath the veneer that they put up to the outside world, as well as how to analyze their dreams, hopes and fears. And once I sophisticated this new skill-set, the whole endeavor, shockingly, put me in direct juxtaposition to my own personal beliefs. When one learns what a thing is, they also learn what thing is not. This goes for people, places and most certainly cultures. For example, where my Chinese co-workers and friends valued harmony and conformity, I could appreciate harmony but conformity wasn’t what I aspired to. Instead I found myself craving expression and individuality in the midst of them wanting to fit in, while realizing my definition of harmony was different. When leaping into new realities and far off cultures, you will certainly expect to find temples, amazing cuisine with mouth numbing spices, and music that is strange to the ear. What I didn’t expect to find was something that was always right in front of me, or shall I say within me, the whole time. What was strangest of all, was how in coming to know them I slowly began to come to know myself. After six long years in the people’s republic of China, after traveling from Beijing to Xi’an, from The Great Wall to The Terracotta Warriors, I explored temples and mosques, yurts and palaces and after all that time, all of that exploring the only thing I finally came to finally find was myself.