Chapter 1: "Perhaps as God Must See"

For the first time he saw his world,

perhaps as God must see,

from high above the earth.

Then swooping down,

the sphere was gone...

and continents were blurred,

and like a bird he hovered

over pixelated shadows

slowly taking shape.

“Guiyang?” he asked himself aloud 

unsure if he was there...

“Guiyang?” he whispered yet again.

The word hung in the air.
© Tom Kapanka, Janyary, 2019 

It had been three days since Enoch arrived, days spent mostly in deep sleep, punctuated with quiet tears, and blanketed in a secret wish to rewind the past week and be home in his own bed.

He did not share these feelings with us, but the morning before when my wife Julie offered to help him transfer his large suitcase to the closet we had vacated just for him, he politely insisted we leave his suitcase packed, just as his mother had packed it, and we nodded sympathetically. It would remain packed for over a month, and not until the day he moved into the closet by himself, did he confide in us his deepest longing and the real reason he did not unpack: He was waiting for the call that said, he could come home. But instead each week's WhatsApp call from his parents made it more and more clear that his journey could not be reversed. Not until that reality settled into his mind was Enoch finally ready to settle into our home. Yet for all those days, he woke and smiled and went through the motions of being very happy to be here. He was in that convincing role the morning of the third day as we sat together in my office at school.

Enoch was waiting to join his classmates who were finishing a first semester exam. I thought Google Maps might be a fun way to pass time, and Enoch was willing to show me where he lived in China. Google does not exist in China, but he had heard of Google Maps in school. His teacher explained how the Americans could watch all parts of the world, and he was eager to see how it worked.

Our internet was a bit slow that morning, but finally he was able to zoom in from the full round globe to the continent of China, and the shapes on the flat-screen monitor came into focus.

“Yes. This is Guiyang,” Enoch smiled. [Guiyang is pronounced "Gwee-yawng."]

Enoch's  English is very thoughtful and precise. His accent, pace, and phrasing are typical of intelligent Asian students who have studied English for years but have not engaged in American conversation. He is ever eager to learn new words, and once he hears one, he stops the conversation, pronounces it, defines it aloud, pronounces it again, and says "Got it." And just like that, he has it. It may sound cliché, but he does blend or transpose the "R" and "L" consonants (because those sounds do not exist in most Asian languages). All of this adds charm to our conversations. I mention it here only to help readers hear his voice in the written lines of these chapters.

With the mouse in his hand, he became the teacher and I the student. Zooming out to a higher elevation, she said, "This province is called  Guizhou. ["Gwee" + "Joe" with the second syllable sounding like that of the French car Peugeot]. Guiyang is the capital city of the province of Guizhou." 

"Can you find your school in the city?" I asked.

“I think so. Here. I'll show you," he smiled. Then zooming closer on the satellite image, his cursor began to scamper down streets like a mouse in a maze.  "This way… Now down this street. I know this corner. Take this turn." He zoomed in a bit. "Where did it go?" The pixelated forms slowly took shape again, and the frantic mouse came to a stop as if finding the cheese. Enoch smiled with satisfaction.

“Here it is. That building there in the middle. That is my school.”

For a moment, Enoch sat in silence, staring at the flat screen and the rooftop of a place he had been just days before. The image was, in fact, a large six-story building lost in a myriad of other rooftops and streets spread out like pieces of a puzzle only Enoch knew.

“So that is how Google works. Amazing!” he said, practicing one of his favorite words.

"Yes. Like a camera in the sky. It's done with a satellite" I explained.

He leaned in to look at the screen. “It makes the world seem small." 

“Yes it does,” I agreed. “I’ve done this, too. I've found the places where I lived a long time ago. It felt strange to see the…”  I was about to say "...to see the yard I mowed as a boy," but I did not finish that sentence for fear that talk of home might be too hard for him. Home is a powerful word--and I'd been told the day before in a private phone call with one of our contacts (a man who asked to be called only "Stone") that Enoch had called home on WhatsApp that first night he was with us. He was understandably homesick and wondering if his courage was strong enough to stay the course that had held such appeal before passing "the point of no return."

To my surprise, Enoch took the mouse again in hand to move the cursor on the screen.

“Here is where I meet the bus to return home at night," he smiled.

I noticed that he used the present tense "meet" not "met" or "used to meet the bus."  Too soon it was to say aloud that he was speaking of a bus he would never ride again.

“Is it a school bus? Like the yellow one you saw in our parking lot?” I asked.

“No. In China school bus is very rare. Just city bus. Guiyang invented bus system with no tickets. We just step on bus and pay with money. Many other cities copy this idea after us, but we were first to not use tickets.”

I was pleased to hear some hometown pride in spite of all the pain he'd experienced there.

The cursor continued moving along the bus route he had taken to and from school every day since beginning high school three semesters before. He explained that caught the bus at 7:00AM. Endured a grueling nine-hour class schedule with a dinner break at 6:00PM followed by two-hour "study time." Then he caught  the bus back home at 8:30PM.

“I get home at nine o’clock,” he said."It's dark."

“And then you go to bed?” I asked.

“No. Then I do homework until 1:30 in the middle of the night.”

My face went from puzzled to sad. But wait. There’s more. He went on to tell me he takes this bus route to school every Saturday for half-day, and every Sunday evening for scheduled classroom tests.

“We have no weekends. It’s crazy,” he said.  [Crazy and Amazing are English words he enjoys saying. Wow is another. We have heard these three words often of late.]

He knew the bus route well and the mouse cursor moved along its path down winding streets and stretches of road toward the eastern outskirts of Guiyang, a city of well over three million people.

“It is a thirty minute ride by bus each way,” Enoch said in teacher-mode. Then his hand stopped, the mouse stopped, and the cursor stopped in place. With his finger he pointed to a general area to the right of the screen. “This is a mountain. A long hill. I live somewhere up there but I don’t see the street.”

The screen was in focus. The image was clear. The cursor was waiting to continue across the satellite image, but he had ended the search. I had to assume he did not want to see “home” some 12,000 miles away. It was one thing to show me his school from a bird’s eye view, but perhaps seeing home was another. He did not say these things, but the cursor stopped and he was done.

We had spoken of home the day before as we drove to school. Staring out the window he said, “We do not have houses in China. Not like this with fields and trees [he meant yards]. Everyone I know lives in apartment building surrounded by many other apartment buildings. We live in the older section. We are poor, and Guiyang is a poor city compared to Beijing and Shanghai.” When Enoch uses the word “poor” there is no shame in the word—it is merely an objective assessment. He was simply contrasting what he knew of his own living conditions to the houses we were driving past. We did not see the families who lived in the homes. We did not know their incomes. We saw only semi-rural, middle-class American homes with cars and landscaping and split-rail fences keeping nothing out or in. Each detail reflected a way of life unfamiliar to Enoch.

As I turned onto the final road on the way to Calvary, I changed the topic to things that matter more than houses, and he seemed encouraged, but in truth it is Enoch who encouraged me. He has the gift of teaching while learning things himself.

So now, a day later in my office, when he chose not to show me his home as seen from Google maps, I may have read too much into why he stopped his search. I only know he did—perhaps for fear that seeing the place—even just its roof like a puzzle piece from high above--would be too much to bear. After all, it had only been a blur of days and nights since he was there.

"Enough of maps for now!” I smiled, closing out the program. “Tell me more about your school. What was it like as you prepared to come to Calvary?”
© Tom Kapanka, Janyary, 2019
[On to Chapter 2]