This entry is supposed to focus on both the good and bad about China, but I am going to narrow my energies to the stuff I like.

I say 'supposed to' because it is part of the Lost Laowai Group Writing Project on what people like and don't like about the country, but since I have never been one for rules, I have decided to ignore the negative. This is not to say that there is nothing bad—if anything there is too of that stuff to list in a column split between two topics. However, in a concerted effort to shed my grouchy image, I am trying to turn the China Expat into Super-Upbeat Harmonious Society Blog for a day. But just one.

Arriving in China in 2001 was one of the weirdest moments of my life. Probably out of this experience of arriving and discovering how little I knew about the country, I developed a bit of an accepting attitude about the place. It’s not that I hadn’t done my homework before I arrived. I had read half a dozen books and memoirs about China before I showed up. I even bought some audio tapes and studied language an hour every night for three months before I arrived, making me fluent in the eyes of some expats. (Oh, wait, I’m supposed to stay positive).

Anyway, I was headed out to Chengdu, but had to spend the night in Beijing. Stupidly I allowed a guy in New York book my hotel for me, which meant that I was definitely the first foreigner ever to stay in it. As the cab headed into the middle of the countryside, I kept wondering to myself, “How could such a big city look so much like farmland?” Needless to say I woke up the next day completely perplexed about why the image of China as an industrializing nation did not match the scene outside my hotel window of empty fields and rural poor driving tractors down the highway.

By the time I got to Chengdu the picture began to make more sense. Streets lined with cars, and bike lanes with little or no order sprawled out in every direction. Its combination of randomness and apparent internal logic made it visually cacophonous. Yet this contrast between urban oddity and rural simplicity was merely the beginning of what piqued my love for this strange and difficult country.

Each day I see something peculiar and fascinating. China is a giant puzzle that not even people born here can fully understand. When authorities, be they police or bosses, give instructions, there is a tacit understanding that one has to decide if they are serious directives, or simply something unnecessary to be discarded; an inconvenient nuisance to which only a fool would pay heed, like a bit of spam with an investment opportunity.

China is a country that one should never claim fully understand or to have conquered. When I ask my Chinese friends why universities have strange policies, or if given social customs are common, the inconsistent answers belie the idea of the orderly, yet difficult to discern world of “Eastern Culture.” People can grab bits and pieces, but there is no Rosetta stone to make everything fall into place. Even people raised in China struggle to make sense of what goes on around them.

It is this structured disorder that makes the country such a fascinating and enticing place. Working through the intricacies of a jumbled land makes every day an opportunity to solve a new mystery, or change a view on an old one. China wastes more energy than almost place in the world, and yet millions of homes are equipped with solar energy panels to heat water. Its central government is all powerful, yet both impotent and uninterested in curbing the activities of local officials. The country is a constant contradiction that is almost impossible to completely comprehend. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, I love living here.

Where else is life a road that can veer off in any direction at any time? Where can you head to one of the biggest cities in the world and end up in an antiquated hotel surrounded by rice paddy fields? Where else can you wake up each morning and think to yourself, ‘something crazy is definitely going to happen today?’