When I was 25 I left LA, dropped all the career momentum I had built up in the film industry and joined the Peace Corps. I had imagined of going to some sandy African coastal village and living beneath palm fronds for two years while digging latrines or building wells. Something romantic that would leave me with a perfect tan and well-developed forearms. Instead, I was sent to Western China. I spent a summer training in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province (which you might recognize in its more familiar western distortion as Szechuan). A lot of great things happened that summer. I had sex in public for the first time. I ate deep fried rabbit heads. I learned how to speak some Chinese. I taught a few eager college freshmen bits and pieces of English. And I also fell in love with a lesbian. Note to reader: if you fall in love with a lesbian your life will be beset on all sides with wondrous pain, heartache, and candy-colored daydreams.
After the summer was over, my newly sworn-in class of fellow volunteers was split up and sent out to work in sites all across Western China. I was sent into the southern-most part of Sichuan to a town called Panzhihua, a mining town that had grown exponentially since the 60's thanks to Mao's paranoid initiative to move all of China's main industries inland away from the coastal metropolises that were vulnerable to foreign invasion. One of the biggest steel companies in China set up shop over a speck on the map and, in a few decades, the city housed almost a million people and had an immaculate Kentucky Fried Chicken downtown. Peace Corps is a lovely establishment, but full of contradictions.
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