Only In China: Fate, Serendipity, and a Tank Full of Trouble

Sometimes fate hides in the people you haven’t yet met, the choices you don’t know you’re making, and the places you never planned to go. I couldn’t have known then that one decision, to leave my job, pack a suitcase, and chase a dream in Paris would set off a chain of moments leading me halfway across the world to a rural village in China, a fellow Trumbull County resident I’d never met, and an unforgettable taxi ride that would leave me laughing instead of quaking about a tank full of illegal gas.

This story begins in Paris, the summer of 2014. I had just asked for a leave of absence from a job I once loved but had grown to resent, ended a long-term relationship with the love of my life, packed my belongings into storage, and pressed pause on everything familiar. With a rented flat, a suitcase, and a one-way ticket, I traded certainty for the cobblestoned unknown and moved to Paris. Things didn’t unfold exactly as planned, but that’s another story.

For nearly six months I lived the dream I’d scribbled into journals for years. I woke to the scent of fresh croissants and the sound of church bells echoing across the arrondissements. In February 2015, I returned to the U.S. unable to slide back into the life I’d left behind. I didn’t return to the YMCA, and Warren, Ohio no longer felt like home. It felt smaller than before, as though I’d outgrown it. My heart was restless, my whole being was pulled toward the far corners of the map.

China became my next leap of faith. I discovered a program that would let me study Mandarin on a student visa while teaching English. It was a perfect fit. So once again, with one suitcase and a one-way ticket, I boarded a plane to Beijing. I wasn’t fluent in Mandarin, couldn’t master chopsticks, and had never faced a squat toilet, but I was ready. After two weeks of cultural training, I found myself in a rural village so small it wasn’t even named on most maps: Xiashan, in Shandong Province.

Xiashan was the China I didn’t know I’d been seeking. The 4,000 or so residents lived in simple homes surrounded by fields and high-rise “ghost” apartments built in the hope that families would someday come. The village’s pride was its new bilingual school, where the population more than doubled when the students arrived each term. I lived in one of those empty high-rises. It was here, far from everything I’d ever known, that I fell in love with China.

It was as far from Warren, Ohio as one could get, not just in miles, but in spirit. Few people spoke English, and many had never seen a foreigner. With my light hair and blue eyes, I stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. I was a walking curiosity. My six-month visa passed much too quickly. I had thought that after spending half a year teaching in a rural Chinese village, I would be ready to return to my old life. But as the end drew near, I knew I wasn’t. Still, I had to return to the U.S. to renew my visa, and the school would need to replace me before I could return.

Life in Xiashan was simple. I bought vegetables at the street market, meat from hooks, and once even waited while a sheep was slaughtered for me. Reluctantly but determined, I went back to Warren, I immediately sent my passport, application, fees, and hopes to the Chinese Embassy. Two and a half weeks later, a ten-year multiple-entry visa was stamped in my passport. I was so sure I’d return that I had asked the school to keep my things until I did and they had graciously agreed.

Before I left China to renew my visa, I already knew where I’d be spending Chinese New Year once I returned. Not in the fireworks and frenzy of Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong, but in a quiet farming village with my co-worker Alina’s family. I couldn’t have asked for a more genuine celebration.

When I arrived in Xiashan, Alina and her brother met me at my apartment, he, thank goodness, effortlessly carried my fifty-nine-pound suitcase up twelve flights of stairs before whisking me off to their village, just fifteen minutes away. On the way, Alina reminded me that her parents were simple farmers and spoke no English. I told her I was honored to be invited into their home for such a special occasion.

Her father was waiting outside when we arrived, smiling shyly in the crisp winter air. Their home was a modest concrete building with three rooms: Alina’s small bedroom, a cooking area, and a main living space that doubled as her parents’ bedroom. There was no indoor plumbing; the toilet was a concrete trough outside, shielded only by a low wall. Yes, I had the midnight adventure of discovering it at three a.m. under a freezing sky.

I didn’t know it then, but these quiet 3 a.m. moments, stepping out into the dark, breath turning to mist, the world hushed and waiting, would become a recurring theme in my travels. In the years ahead, I’d find myself awake at that same hour in the shadow of Mount Everest and again beneath the stars of the Sahara, each time reminded how alive and present the world feels when it’s just you, the cold air, and the hum of something greater.

Her mother was already preparing a lunch of steaming baozi, soft buns filled with minced meat and served with garlic-vinegar sauce. They were delicious; I ate two and was thoroughly stuffed. Afterward, Alina translated a bit of conversation before her mother insisted I rest after my journey.

When I woke, the courtyard was alive with the evening’s preparations. Her father was butchering a chicken, slicing pork, and cleaning fish and prawns while Alina’s brother helped their mother fold dumplings for the midnight meal…symbols of luck and prosperity. As evening fell, the table filled with dishes I couldn’t always name but will never forget. We toasted the New Year with red wine her brother had brought, laughter cutting through the cold.

After dinner, we gathered on her parents’ kang, a wide, tiled bed warmed from beneath by a coal burner. A thin cushion softened the ceramic surface, and the radiant heat spread slowly through the room. We watched the televised celebration from Beijing. Just before midnight, we ate dumplings and stepped outside to light firecrackers, sending the crack and sparkle of good fortune into the sky.

Alina’s father insisted I “live” with them for the night, so Alina and I shared her warm bed, listening to distant bursts of celebration fade into quiet. In the morning, her mother poured hot and cool water into a basin so I could wash, then served mantou, plain steamed buns, and reheated leftovers for breakfast. After we ate, Alina and I wandered through the village before riding her scooter to Xiashan Lake for the New Year’s Day market and festival.

It was simple, authentic, and perfect. No luxury, no fanfare, just family, generosity, and tradition. I was profoundly honored to have been welcomed into it, and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

I spent the next ten or so days quietly tucked into village life, maybe taking one bus ride into Weifang, but mostly lingering in the stillness of Spring Festival. The streets were nearly empty; no students yet, no chatter spilling from the school gates, just the sound of wind through fields and the occasional bark of a dog echoing between concrete walls. I was waiting for the new foreign teachers to arrive while finalizing my next placement with my agent. Those days passed the way still days often do, unhurried, uneventful, and somehow gone too soon.

When the time came to meet my replacement, the village seemed to hold its breath. The air was crisp and bright, the kind of quiet day that makes you feel both grateful and nostalgic at once. Knowing my time in my first Chinese home was ending, I took my scooter out for a long, ride. The dirt roads, the clusters of concrete houses, the open-air market where I’d bought vegetables and laughter in equal measure, all of it felt suspended in memory even as I moved through it.

I rode down to Xiashan Lake, at the base of our small mountain – xia meaning “beneath,” shan meaning “mountain” – the namesake of our village. And then, not by coincidence I think, I found myself pulling up in front of 1-Der-Ful Dumpling, a tiny shop where I’d eaten soon after I first arrived. Inside, women were folding meat-filled jiaozi faster than I could count, their hands moving in a rhythm older than the town itself. I sat there with my plate, the steam fogging the window, thinking about all the people and moments that had made me fall in love with this quiet corner of China.

Eventually, it was time to head back and meet the newcomers. “Small world” doesn’t even begin to describe what happened next. When I returned to the apartment, the four new teachers had already arrived. Two would share my three-bedroom flat with me until I left; the other two had the one across the hall.

I happened to be wearing a Cleveland Cavaliers shirt. Fitting, since it was a big year for the Cavs. One of the new arrivals, a guy who was rooming with the girl across the hall, noticed it.

“Hey,” he said, “you’re from Ohio? Colleen’s from Ohio too.”

“Really?” I asked. “Where in Ohio?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t know it,” he said with a shrug. “Some little town near Youngstown.”

I laughed. “I’m from a little town near Youngstown…Warren.”

His eyes widened. “Well, she’s from Cortland.”

A few minutes later, Colleen came over, and we obviously both knew that Warren and Cortland neighbor each other in Trumbull County, we both just stared for a moment, then burst out laughing. Two people from the same corner of Ohio, meeting for the first time in a tiny village in rural China not even marked on most maps.

The world, it turns out, isn’t so big after all.

Life, of course, had other plans. What was supposed to be six months in China no longer had an end date. One city led to another, and then another, three in total before I’d finally leave in July of 2019 to begin a new chapter in Bali. Each move brought new faces, new lessons, and new ways of seeing the world. China had become less of a stop along the way and more of a home that kept reshaping me. I often thought back to Xiashan. To its dusty roads and quiet markets, to the people who had unknowingly marked the beginning of this long, unfolding story.

And then, as if the universe wanted to remind me that the world loves a good callback, our paths crossed again. It was Christmas of 2018, not far from that first meeting. I had traveled to Weifang to spend the holiday with a couple, Amy and Harrison, who had met in Xiashan, an American teacher and her Chinese husband, now married and building a life together.

Colleen wasn’t there when I arrived, but she was still living in the Xiashan–Weifang area, and we arranged to meet for dinner. Sitting together that evening, we couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer improbability of it all. Two girls from Warren, Ohio, who had never crossed paths back home, somehow only managed to meet up on the other side of the world, in China.

Leaving Weifang after the holidays, I was ready for nothing more than a hot shower, my quilted pajamas, and a martini with two almond-stuffed olives. But first, there was the small matter of getting home. A journey that started with a train from Weifang to Jinan, followed by a two-plus-hour car ride to Dong’e. It’s a route I’d taken before, the kind of long-day travel that usually ends quietly. But in China, the unexpected isn’t the exception—it’s the rule.

When my train pulled into Jinan, my driver was already waiting. Because Dong’e is so far from the nearest station, it’s common to arrange shared cars. I’d used this driver several times before, so when I saw three passengers already packed into the back seat, I simply smiled, climbed into the front, and off we went.

For the first hour and forty-five minutes, the ride was uneventful. Pitch-black roads and stretches of countryside broken only by the occasional flicker of neon from a roadside shop. Then we turned down a narrow, one-lane dirt road, the kind with ditches on both sides, to drop off the first passenger. It was so tight the driver had to make one of those awkward three-point turns to get us facing the right direction again.

About ten minutes later, we turned down another single-lane track even darker than the first. The remaining two passengers got out and climbed into a small cart that was waiting for them. Side note, it was about seventeen degrees that night. And then there was one: just me and my driver, heading toward Dong’e.

I wasn’t worried; he lived there too, and we’d traveled together before. We passed through a few small villages with no streetlights, just the occasional glow from a window. And then, about fifteen minutes from town, we pulled into what looked like a small parking lot. There was one car and a shack, maybe four by eight feet. My driver honked, and a rather large man emerged, climbed into the back seat, and we started off again. I assumed he just needed a lift into town.

Well… not exactly.

About thirty yards down the road, we turned into what looked like an abandoned factory. The driver said something in Chinese I didn’t understand, then backed the car up perpendicular to a box truck. The big guy got out, opened the truck’s back doors, and to my astonishment, there was a full fuel pump inside. My driver turned to me, smiling, and said something that sounded like “just a few minutes.” I nodded, smiled back, and pretended this was the most normal thing in the world.

They filled the car from the truck, paid whatever arrangement was owed, and we drove the man back to his shack before heading toward Dong’e again. No harm done. Just another little adventure in my China life.

By the time I reached home, I was equal parts amused and relieved. I kicked off my shoes, stepped into a hot shower, slipped into my quilted pajamas, and finally poured that martini with two almond-stuffed olives. As I settled under my thick blanket, I couldn’t help but laugh. Some people collect souvenirs; I collect stories, and this one, well, could only have happened in China.

China had a way of reminding me that plans are only suggestions and certainty is overrated. From chance meetings to midnight detours, life here kept proving that the best stories never begin with “everything went as expected.” What was meant to be six months had stretched into years, and I had the feeling this was only the beginning. Fate, coincidence, and a touch of chaos seemed to follow me wherever I went and I was learning to welcome them. After all, the road was still calling, and somewhere beyond the next horizon, another story was already waiting for me.

Because in China and in life the detours are sometimes the best part of the trip.