Good at Losing

"I'm good at losing things": a text message I wrote to a new friend here yesterday, a follow-up to asking if I'd left my kuffiah at her apartment the night before. A kuffiah being a traditional scarf worn by men in middle eastern countries to protect from sun, from sand, from cold. The kuffiah having been considered a symbol for uprising and revolt and coopted by hipsters from Madrid to San Francisco years ago now and reproduced in rainbow colors and with slogans. This kuffiah one of many I've had, and the only one I haven't lost yet, purchased nine years ago now from a Moraccan man from his stall in Grenada. We'd gotten to talking--a mix of Arabic, Spanish, English--and he said the scarf came from Syria. This kuffiah something of my uniform in Brooklyn, doubled up with scarves in winter, worn on it's own in spring and fall, put on the sand at the beach, on the lawn at the park. This kuffiah getting me attention from Arab men in the bodegas across Brooklyn and an Israeli once, each one of them: "Do you know what that means?" And: "Where are you from?" Here in China, people don’t seem too aware of Lebanon; the few people I've spoken to about it--the man at the passport office when asking me to verify my birthplace, the young Chinese couple I made friends with one night at a restaurant in the mall near where I live--haven't known what it is. 

I'm good at losing things, and when I woke up thinking about my kuffiah yesterday, and looked in the few corners of my sparse apartment and found them all kuffiah-less, I started getting pretty angry at myself--just like last weekend when I realized I'd left my only sweatshirt I'd brought with me to China--a cool one a good friend helped me pick out on a special trip she made to see me in New York before leaving--in Hangzhou, and then on Monday when I went to deposit cash into my Chinese account and noticed my US bankcard was missing, remembering I'd used it the afternoon before. It wasn't still there, at that ATM in the corner of Carrefour, where all the women working at the counters nearby got my phone in their face, with a slurry of sentences translated by Google via VPN. "Where is the lost and found?" Right here, the woman who couldn't help me seemed to say, pointing at herself with the banana she was eating and unable to help me find anything but a deep sense of frustration, the likes of which I had yet to feel here.

I'm good at losing things, from things that I need in order to function as a responsible adult to precious things, passed down from the generation before, sweet gifts, friendships, ideas, intentions, motherlands. Oh loss. This is the moment I'm supposed to say that it's actually a gain, that the things we lose teach us about ourselves, if we pay attention to them just so, if we let ourselves notice the pain of losing them and also realize what those losses have given way to. My friend, who texted me back a half hour after I confessed my superpowers of loss currently has my kuffiah at her apartment and will reunite me with it tomorrow, she was pretty interested in Lebanon, in me, and we talked late into the Shanghai night, with her husband too, about many shades of this world and also other worlds we've known--where we're from, where we've been in between then and now, the landscapes and characters that fill our imagination even though they're gone.