This has little to do with travelling or cultural experiences, but is something that is a part of my experience in China nonetheless. Everyday I am around human beings that life has not laid hands upon, that innocence still abounds in. It's inspiring. To see their smiling faces, and to know that their fragile minds are still sheltered. The glimmer in their eyes, the eyes that haven't known or seen a world full of hypocrisy and bitterniss. Children are like this everywhere, not just China, but it's not something I picked up on; I had spent little time with kids back home, or just hadn't noticed it. The genuine smiles and hardy laughs when something strikes them as funny. The unreserved laughs. The carefree attitude where exams and the cute girl or boy that sits in row three are the only thing that matter. Parents are a source of eternal protection and pocket money. Where going to the store for a bottle of pop is something to look forward to. Childhood. Truly something that is only truly appreciated when viewed in hindsight. Although they exist in simple world that to an adult seems as though it's confict free, the tumult of growing up is not without it's anxiety. Chinese youth are heavily pressured in school, and if they can't hack it with their studying, a life of fantastic amounts of labor await them. If not successful in their studies, a job in a restaurant or Wal-Mart doesn't await them. Nay, a life of toiling in fields or some hazzardous industry, or the mundane, ever constant sound of the factory siren awaits them upon awaking to a new day. It's a hard life here in China for most. At least to my American perception. Childhood and the refuge it offers is shortlived, but will live forever in the twinkling eyes and unabashed smiles that I see everyday as I teach them my native tongue. I leave the classroom, and then the school grounds, on my way home to contemplate the anxieties that perpetually face me. To smoke cigarettes that will be my downfall, and to drink tea.

At times I know not where my childhood evaporated to, and then it hits me. It was lost in my dreams of growing up. I could have stayed a child forever, but nature wouldn't allow it. Ambition and a loss of innocence took control. A desire to move, to see and to feel. To refine my senses, to grasp that which is unknown to the child. And so it happens with everyone else. Forgetting the charms of coming home after school to an afternoon of homework and TV, the smell of a cooking dinner and the subsequent call to eat that soon follows, we set out to create an adult life. Seeking love, both fanciful and carnal, we shed our innocence, and our smiles lose that certain touch, our laughs become less frequent with a faded resonance. Our own choosing and the course of nature leads us away from simple understanding of what is good and safe as we plunge into depraivity and bill paying. Spend a day in a class of loving children however, and you can be taken back to a time when little else mattered than a full stomach and the touch of a mother's voice.