When I was recently on vacation in China, all my regular Internet sites were blocked! I thought I could get around this by purchasing a VPN, but alas, I couldn’t even access the support page to troubleshoot the problems, nor could I contact my phone provider for more international data, which I didn’t think I would need until I discovered that my translation app wouldn’t work on the data speed I had.

So here we were, trying to talk to people when we didn’t understand a word of each other’s language, and trying to navigate without Google maps. It definitely helped to keep a sense of humor about all the getting lost and the miscommunication. One night, we were trying to explain (without the translator app–or a note in Chinese that we later got) to various restaurant people that we were vegetarian, only to get a lot of shaking heads and blank looks. Finally, we saw a place with an array of fresh vegetables displayed in a cooler behind the counter and thought we could explain ourselves with sign language. The server, who miraculously had her own translator app, told us to point to the vegetables we wanted and she would make them. We pointed to a lot of vegetables, because we thought she was going to throw them all in a stir fry, but we ended up with  separate dishes for each veggie, plus scallion broth, rice and tea. The delicious food just kept on coming!

Being blocked from the Internet also made me hyper aware of how much time I spend (waste) on Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. It felt both odd and welcoming to be forced to go to my writing files whenever I felt the urge to use my laptop. Over the course of the trip, I spent several hours working on a spring clean-up I try to do at least every other year, where I go through all the unpublished poems in my “Active” folder and figure out which ones I want to keep sending out for another year, and which ones no longer hold interest and need to be moved to “Inactive” or “Meh.” This always leads to tons of revision as I look at old work with a fresh eye.

Though being forced to write was a good thing, I have to admit I regretted not getting the immediate gratification of people’s reactions to the cherry blossoms in Kunming, or my musings on Substack, which made me wonder–what is it about we humans in the social media age that makes us feel that everything we do needs to be immediately validated? True confessions, I am one of those people who obsessively looks for likes and feedback for anything I post on the big cyber cloud. Sometimes I worry that this has a negative impact on my writing–whether in sharing groups, I’m too quick to read something half-finished, simply for the joy of hearing people’s reactions to it. But I do like to think that reading things out loud, even  early drafts, sharpens my own ear for what’s working or not working in a piece. In fact, one of my favorite revision techniques is to read a piece out loud even if I’m the only person listening.

I didn’t write a lot in China; I rarely do on vacation. I mostly enjoyed the distraction of sightseeing, the feeling that I was amassing thoughts and experiences I could synthesize later. But when I did sit down with my writing–just me and the page, and the Great Firewall surrounding us, it felt like a lovely ink-brush wash of inner peace because I couldn’t quick-click to headlines blaring at me from news or email or social media sites. What a wonderful feeling of insouciance to have no idea what was going on in the news! T–mp could die, I remarked to my partner and I wouldn’t even know.

Now that I’ve been back home for a week, I hate to admit how enticing the old habits have become. I’m letting my distraction demons take hold more often than not, as if making up for lost time, partly because I worried that all the work I’d done to publicize my books by building up my writer presence on social media had dissipated with my two weeks of complete silence. But really, what people seem to want to see from me are not more book or writing-related posts; they want to see my pictures of China, which I’m putting out day by day on my Facebook page. I guess many of us respond to the urge to experience travel vicariously when we can’t do it directly. And perhaps, through looking at some of the astounding images, we can find our way behind the Great Firewall of China, capturing both some of the magic, as well as the shift to a more peaceful perspective that can come from letting the anxiety-producing headlines fade to a gentle blur.