This essay explores seeing and being seen. The essay uses a trip to a water cave to look at my own ability to adapt to a new environment and my inability to fully see the place I was living.

I celebrated my first week as an expat in China at a bar called American Pie. The walls were painted orange and a string of plastic American flags ran the length of the bar. There were a dozen photographs of American landmarks sporadically plastered to one wall. The Statue of Liberty. The Grand Canyon. The Rocky Mountains. Patrons had written messages in black Sharpie around these photographs, a record of foreigners passing through. I signed my name next to a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge, then lifted a bottle of local beer. To new opportunities, my new colleague said. I clanged my bottle against his. To China, I replied.

I’d moved to China because I needed a job and teaching English composition to Chinese college students sounded like an adventure. I knew very little about China when I left the U.S., only a handful of facts from history classes and the things I’d glimpsed while watching the 2008 Olympic Games in my brother’s living room in North Dakota. I expected paper lanterns, slippery dumplings, three-wheeled tuk-tuks, and smog. I expected old men playing mahjong and cute school children smiling and jumping and waving tiny Chinese flags (like the kids on the cover of my guidebook). I expected old cities with protective dragon statues at the entrances and giant pictures of Mao and a crumbling wall you could see from outer space. I knew these were stereotypes of China, but I found them both comforting and seductive.

A few weeks after my first visit, I tried to go back to the American Pie bar, as a way to ground myself and remind me of home, but when I got there the doors were boarded up, the lights out, the wall of names that seemed like it would always be there was gone. It was as if the bar had never even existed, almost as if I’d made the whole place up. I paced the sidewalk outside the bar, wondering what to do. I needed something else to latch onto, to remind me of where I’d come from. Without that grounding, I was afraid of getting lost in all the glittering novelty of being in a new country, in the dangers of drifting along untethered.

*

When I first arrived in the country, I wanted to spend all my weekends exploring as much of the country as I could. But all the major sights—Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall—were too far away (I was living near the northeast corner of China, away from the major cities and tourist attractions) and I was still too inexperienced with the country and its people, so the teachers I was working with suggested I start out with a day trip to somewhere nearby. I took the train to Benxi—35 miles south of where I was living—and then a three-hour bus ride into the mountains, to a park with an underground river and a series of caves with stalactites and stalagmites.

Outside the Benxi Water Caves, I noticed a statue of a melting elephant on red marble tiles near the entrance. I approached the statue from behind, where it just looked like a rock, but as I moved around to the side the elephant materialized. I saw the hump in the middle of the back, the dinner-plate sized feet, the craggy ears, the trunk half-submerged in the tiles. The elephant was slate-gray near the bottom but chalky white at the top with streaks of pale yellow all the way down the trunk and off the back haunches⎯a man-made sculpture meant to look like a stalagmite rising up from the ground. When I visited in September 2008, all I saw was an animal going the other way, melting as if corrosive acid were eating away its flesh. It reminded me of that scene from Dumbo, where the mother elephant is shackled inside the trailer crying. I still can’t watch it without a few tears pooling in the corners of my eyes.

I stared at the melting elephant and thought about extinction and separation and ice cream dripping off a sugar-cone on a hot summer day. Then I reached out and touched its ear. I knew it wasn’t real stone—it looked like that plastic newer garden gnomes are made of—but I had to be sure. It felt rough and sandpapery. I ran my hand over the melting elephant’s forehead and down its trunk. Behind me, a group of tourists shuffled toward the mouth of the caves, their excited chatter echoing off the mountainside.

Beyond the melting elephant was a man-made pond with a stone path across the middle, willows around the edges, and a pagoda on the far bank. It was a warm autumn day when I visited and the leaves on the willows were bright orange and yellow. The lily pads scattered across the pond seemed to sparkle. It all felt very magical, just the way I’d imagined China would feel.

My guidebook made the 45-minute boat ride through the Benxi Water Caves sound like a carnival ride. The entry—under the subheading AROUND SHENYANG—described a trip along a river called the “Milky Way,” where stalactites and stalagmites were spotlighted with red or green or blue lights and given names to signify what they looked like—Seal Playing with a Pearl, Tiger’s Mouth, Ginseng Baby. Riding along the Milky Way felt like being on a movie set and that the evocative names given to the formations were fun because they made you use your imagination to see the image in the rock.

Outside the caves, I saw the China I had been looking forward to, with the pond and pagoda and willow trees and tourists. But the guidebook and the melting elephant had primed me for a different experience inside the caves—one of make-believe, where imaginations conjured up images from rock, where visitors were asked to see what those before them already identified and named; A manufactured experience created to make the real seem more exciting. This was why I’d come to the caves—to find a connection with the country I’d come so far to see. I was aimless, drifting, waiting for something to snag my collar and hold me in place. And, as foolish and hopeful as it sounds, I thought floating down an underground river and conjuring up the images assigned to the stalactites and stalagmites would show me something real about China, not just this place I’d cobbled together in my head. There are clues hidden below the surface, I thought. I hoped to see what everyone else saw, that I wouldn’t look at all the named stalactites and stalagmites and just see rock.

Next to the melting elephant was a metal sign claiming—in white English letters below the Chinese characters—that the Milky Way river was “the longest underground river in the world.” This claim wasn’t in my guidebook, so I didn’t know what to make of it. I knew the Chinese government liked to exaggerate, to make things seem better than they actually were. But I wanted to believe that the claim was true—that I was about to float down the longest underground river in the world—and that meant tamping down my tendency to question everything. I knew that if I wasn’t open to what I was experiencing I wouldn’t last very long in China. So, I snapped a picture of the sign, and as I walked towards the mouth of the caves, I gave myself permission to believe.

*

When we were in graduate school, my friend Natalie and I played this game where we’d guess what the other saw in everyday objects. We didn’t have a name for the game, or maybe we did and I just don’t remember it or we never vocalized it while we were playing, but it was a game we took pride in playing because we liked to think we saw the world the same way.

One of us would hold up an object or point at something and simply say, Do you see it? A typical exchange went something like this:

“Do you see it?” Natalie would say, holding a chicken nugget out before me.

I’d glance up from the hamburger I was eating, see the rubber ducky shape in the chicken nugget, and smile.

“Yes, I see it,” I’d say. “It’s a rubber ducky.”

She’d smile back at me, satisfied.

Then she’d bite off the rubber ducky’s head.

I don’t know why we found so much pleasure in this game. Maybe it reminded us of childhood, when we’d stare at the clouds and point out the different shapes and ask our siblings or our friends if they saw what we saw in the clouds. Maybe we liked the game because we both pointed at clouds into adulthood, unlike our friend Cat who would shake her head at us when she saw us playing the game and half-scream, “It’s a chicken nugget. A fucking chicken nugget!” We’d smile back at Cat, shake our heads, say, “Oh, Cat,” and tsk-tsk at her lack of imagination.

Maybe we just needed to know someone else saw the world the same way we did.

When the whole What color is the dress? debate came up and people were discussing perception and “color constancy” and how our eyes aren’t really seeing the world as it actually is, I thought of Natalie and wondered if she found the whole debate as fascinating as I did, if she saw the dress as white and gold or blue and black. I thought of her again when I found the “Faces in Things” Twitter feed and scrolled through pics of smiling faces with button eyes and zipper mouths, faces made from the knobs of appliances, faces made from the holes on cardboard boxes or soap bubbles. With each picture, I imagined Natalie being just as delighted by seeing the image.

Later, I learned that there is a name for our ability to see hidden faces in random patterns—pareidolia. People see faces on the moon, faces on grilled cheese sandwiches, faces in clouds and trees and ocean waves. People see faces everywhere. Researchers have hypothesized that pareidolia is the result of natural selection, where people had to quickly identify the mental state or moods of others in order to survive. I smiled when I read this and imagined Natalie and I surviving into old age while Cat got killed by a lion or a band of angry savages.

I started playing the game with Natalie as a way to bond over our shared view of the world, but the game evolved beyond that. It became a survival mechanism I used any time I was faced with the unfamiliar; I’d turn it into something familiar, something others would also be able to see. If I could quickly assess new information and determine if it was a threat or not, I might feel better about venturing into the unknown.

*

At first, China didn’t feel like a threat. It felt strange and novel and raw. On one of my first walks from my apartment to campus, I cataloged all the sights of my new neighborhood, as a way of acclimating to my new environment. I passed old men sipping porridge from ceramic bowls while sitting on wooden chairs outside the front gate to my apartment complex. I watched sleepy teenagers tumble out cyber cafes and drift off to class. Toddlers with slits in their trousers squatted and peed directly onto the sidewalk. Middle-aged men wandered around outside the cafes with their shirts rolled up to expose their bellies, smoking and talking loudly into cell phones. I observed it all with the moon-eyed naivety of being in a new and foreign place, never questioning what I was seeing, simply letting the images come at me one after another and storing them away in my memory. Everything seemed just familiar enough to be relatable, yet foreign enough to be intriguing.

On subsequent walks, I started to connect what I was seeing to what I knew from back home. The old men reminded me of the farmers in the cafe in my hometown. The blurry-eyed teens stumbling out of a cyber cafe were really just drunk college kids leaving bars. The tottering infants with split pants were like tiny dogs tagging what they could with urine. And, the loud men with their exposed bellies were really just practical businessmen trying to stay cool while taking a call from an important investor. I accepted these sights as part of my new normal. I liked to believe that I was becoming less like a tourist observing a place from the fringes and more like a real, integrated citizen. It felt safe, manageable. This series of unconnected pieces had started to fit together into a larger whole, making me feel like I could not only survive in China, but maybe make a life for myself there.

*

I had wanted to drift down the Milky Way river inside the Benxi Water Caves and let the galaxy of stalactites and stalagmites present themselves around me—like an astronaut mindlessly floating through the void—but my own curiosity and need to create meaning from the unknown wouldn’t let me be a passive passenger. I sat up, leaned slightly over the side of the boat, and analyzed the English words below the Mandarin on the little signs, trying to make out what I was supposed to see in the rock formation.

I saw “Lotus Coming out of Water” just above the tide, in a low cavern lit by green lights. I saw “Buddha’s Hand” as we came around the bend of the river and I watched as several passengers of my boat reached up and touched the hand. But somewhere around the third bend, I started to lose track. Things started to blur together. I saw the sign for the “Ginseng Baby” but I didn’t see the baby. I also didn’t see “Tail of Phoenix” or “Jade Emperor Palace.” The boat was moving too fast. I wasn’t able to take it all in. I wasn’t able to sit and stare, to see everything I needed to see.

Beyond feeling embarrassed, I started to doubt my ability to adapt to my surroundings. I felt I’d done a good job setting up my new life in China, establishing my surroundings and navigating some of the social cues I was noticing around me. But there were bigger issues I was just starting to see and I wasn’t prepared for the uncertainty of digging a little deeper into the culture and people around me. I looked at the sign for a stalactite named “Baoding Double Bells”—not sure what “Baoding” referred to but expecting my brain to come back with some image to latch onto—but instead I drew a blank. Nothing. There was something I was missing, something I wasn’t picking up, something I couldn’t quite explain, and this something created this sense of discomfort and dread in the pit of my stomach that I wasn’t sure what to do about.

*

Over the course of several weeks, I developed this low-grade anxiety about everything in China. It started off with the simple and mundane, but later spread to other aspects of my life. I stared at a patch of mold growing in the corner of my second bedroom, and instead of contacting someone about it, I just closed the door and pretended it wasn’t there. When it came time to get my haircut, I just let the stylist do what they wanted because I didn’t know how to explain the way I liked it cut. The resulting haircuts didn’t look much different from my normal cut, just slightly off and a little more “basic” from how I normally cut it. I constantly worried that I was being ripped off by shop owners and fruit sellers at the market, that I was paying more than anyone else because I was a foreigner. I fretted over counting money out in front of tellers, usually opting to give the teller a larger bill than necessary because I didn’t know how much anything was supposed to cost. When I was shopping at Tesco down the street from my apartment, I didn’t know how to tell the people around me to stop watching me, to mind their own business, to stop peering into my cart to see what the foreigner was buying. These anxieties made me question everything, to second-guess myself, to make me doubt my own abilities to adapt, and I hated this feeling of constantly being on-guard. I thought my survival mechanism of creating meaning from the unknown would eventually kick in and squelch these anxieties, but these anxieties only got worse. Instead of making me more independent and resourceful, my survival mechanism turned me into a skeptic. I started to question everything about what I was seeing. Was any of it real? I started to wonder. Or had I just created my own reality in order to mask my own insecurities about not being able to adjust to life in a foreign country?

*

Near the end of the Milky Way river, before we turned around and headed back the way we came, I saw the image I’d been prepped to see—the melting elephant. Unlike the fake statue outside the cave, I saw this elephant right away. It was attached to the wall of the cave near its head and the legs and trunk extended down into the river. We approached it from behind, which made it look like we were sneaking up on it during bath-time. As we floated past, all the features came into view—the trunk, the ears, the rounded back, the half-squinting eye—and the sign confirmed what I was seeing—“Jade Elephant Playing in Water.”

Finally, something I recognized.

When we got back to the entrance of the cave, I carefully stepped onto the dock and started walking down the hillside to see the crocodile taming show. I had heard about the show from a poorly translated website which described it as “the most exciting crocodile taming show in China.” There were regular performances with crocodiles, the website claimed, “including playing with it and kissing it and so on,” and since the ride through the caves left me questioning my ability to create meaning from the unknown, I wanted one last chance to redeem myself.

When I arrived at the arena, a woman was singing into a microphone while gesturing wildly with her free hand. Her face was stark white, her lips bold red. She wore a black sparkling dress with a slit up the front and high heels. Six feet away a pale crocodile watched motionless on the concrete stage.

At first, I thought the woman was a drag queen because I’d heard about men performing female roles in Chinese opera and because I was familiar with drag queens back home. But the longer she sang and the more I watched her, I started to wonder if she was trans. I knew almost nothing about being trans in China, only that other foreigners called these women “ladyboys,” both in China and in other Asian countries. I didn’t know then any of the other terms used to describe trans people in China, like the names I later discovered that literally translated to human monster or human ghost.

After the performance, I walked down the road towards the entrance of the park, to catch my bus back to Shenyang. Another performer was standing in the doorway of a shed, shirtless but still “in-face,” slightly out of view. I was thinking about the melting elephant and the limp crocodile and everything I hadn’t seen during my visit. Before the performer dipped back into the darkness of the shed, before I caught the bus back to Benxi and the train back Shenyang, before spending two years trying to understand my students and the Chinese people and the country I’d dropped myself into, I caught the performer’s eye and held it for a moment, unsure of so much around me yet hopefully that the fog would lift and all the stalactites would present themselves to me eventually.

The fog lifted eventually, years later, when I found a map of the Milky Way river online, with the names and pictures of many of the rock formations along the route, and I paid a service to translate the map. As I had expected, there was a whole world below the surface—one that told stories about the Chinese people and their history—one I didn’t see while I floated through the caves. There was a trio of lotus-themed formations near the entrance of the caves—not just the one I saw during my visit—followed by a trio of sword-themed formations. The melting elephant wasn’t the only animal in the caves. There was also “Cicadas Playing in Water,” “Crocodile Head,” “Beetle Rock,” and “Lying Cattle Looking Back,” none of which I saw when I visited. Then there were a series of formations whose names I didn’t understand and had to look up—“Two Immortals’ Palace,” a reference to mountain-dwelling Taoists who strived for immortality, and “Rock of Weaving Girl,” named for a Chinese folktale called “The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd,” which is a love story about Zhinu (the weaver girl symbolizing the star Vega) and Niulang (the cowherd symbolizing the star Altair). I loved reading the names and learning about Chinese history and folklore, but looking at the map and the translated names, I realized how very little I knew about the history and culture of China. The Benxi Water Caves showed me pieces of Chinese history and culture, placed them before me on little signs and said Do you see it?, and I blinked back and shook my head.

In those first few months in China, I needed to see the familiar, to recognize something about the place where I’d decided to live and work because I thought it would help me understand China better, but also because I’d wanted to see if I had a future in China, if I belonged there. Looking back on my time in China now, years later, in an old house I’ve settled into with my husband, I wish I could have let go of that need to understand everything around me. I wish I could have just admired the stalactites and stalagmites for their own beauty, and not tried to see the images the signs told me I needed to see. I may have enjoyed my time in China more and not gotten burnt out on the country and its people after a couple of years.

Photograph of cave by Robert Thiemann on Unsplash

Bronson Lemer is the author of The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq. His work has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Hobart, The Southeast Review, & Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. He is a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow and lives in St. Paul.

Twitter: @lastdeployment
Website: bronsonlemer.com