My 6 and 1/2 acres

I’ve gotten into this whole insomnia thing. Like last night I was so tired but was wide awake until 2am. Besides thinking about how I was going to have to get up for teaching in four hours, I started thinking about how quiet it was. For a while I was waking up at 4am, and the only thing I appreciated about that was listening to the silence. In a country of 3+ billion people, there’s not a lot of silence.

The other day, all the noise started to bother me. It’s sort of like a perpetual headache lingering around and waiting to blow up to the surface. On the little road/sidewalk behind my apartment, bicycle carts drive by banging on pots or playing shrill recordings to get people’s attention. Right in front of my apartment is a campus road that is always full of bicycles and motorbikes (which have notoriously squeaky breaks) and sometimes cars or buses or trucks (which have to lay on their horns the whole way through). Besides the vehicular noise is the general noise of being in the middle of a college campus. It reminds me a little bit of living in a dorm. Students are talking and yelling and playing music from 6am to midnight. The nearby campus loudspeakers blare music and announcements every day at 6am, noon, and 5pm, for a half an hour to an hour each time. The windows and doors and walls hardly provide insulation from the sounds outside. Sometimes I can’t tell if my windows are open or closed.

I was thinking about my home in Georgia. When I showed pictures to my students, they were most amazed by all the space around our house. We have 6 and ½ acres of land all to ourselves. In China, that is unimaginable.

If I think about the area surrounding my apartment, what would be about 6 and ½ acres, there are about 6 apartment buildings (about 6 stories high, a good 50 families in each), 4 dormitories (at 6 students per room, say 800 students per dorm?), a road, a canal, a campus store, and several hundred bikes. That’s somewhere around 5000 people living in the space that my family has all to itself. Little wonder it’s noisy.