It is the second day of the lunar New Year and the third night of fireworks rumbling incessantly outside.  For the last two nights I have walked around looking for an epicenter of the noises that never stop.  There is not one to be found.  Walking around reminds me of being a kid growing up in Chicago when the Bulls would win a championship and I would always ask my Mom to drive me around the city.  The energy was palpable anywhere you went yet in no one place did it converge.  The same thing is true with Chinese New Year.  The fireworks never stop, the noise at times is deafening, yet walking around, the perpetrators of this ruckus are usually small families of three, two parents and a young child standing on a street corner lighting off fireworks in celebration or anticipation or maybe just because they can.

In a way the fireworks make me sad.  They make me feel like I am missing some great party, like I am alone in the office whittling away at a document while the world outside rejoices.  But as I walk and wander and search, there is no happiness to be found, no great party, no big revelations, just sulfur twinged air and mounds of burnt up fireworks swept into piles waiting to be whisked away.  

The fireworks are representative of China.  Of the enormity of this place and while I can understand it, speak the language, know the customs, it is not something you can ever see.  The enormity of China is lost within the enormity of China.  1.3 billion people.  Billion is not a word our minds are well equipped to comprehend.  We have never held a billion tangible anything.  You can see 100,000 people at a sporting event, watch a parade of a million people, but billions, billions is something we will never know and can only trust to exist.  

And on these New Years Days, and any day when I am feeling lonely, frustrated or confused, I walk around and look at the people, look at the "lao bai xing" the "old hundred names," a term Chinese use to refer to ordinary people.  And when I get out of the office, away from writing grants, and chasing companies for funding, escaped from planning perfect strategic outlines and lining up government cooperation; when I walk amongst the old hundred names I am revitalized by the opportunity that I have, that PTE has, in trying to make change amongst the billions.  Yet I see no billions, I see young kids eating popcorn and mothers coddling their babies and think that these young people, someday, these young old hundred names will possibly be changed for the better in the slightest little way by what we are doing here in China.  And that change may never be palpable, it may stay scattered out amongst the masses and as elusive as the source of the fireworks or the epicenter of the energy after Michael Jordan led the Bulls to victory, but it will be real, possibly hidden amongst the masses and only evident in the absence of the epidemic we are working so hard to avert.