Jacob and I share the same first name and briefly shared the same bed–I slept in it Fall ’06, he in Winter ’07. The bed in question was in an apt. complex in Anqing, Anhui Province, People’s Republic of China, just about a 10 minute walk away from Anqing Foreign Language School, where we both taught English to Chinese middle-school students–again, I in the Fall, and he taking my place after the New Year when I returned to school.

While our times there did not overlap, we both walked past the exact same farmer’s market on the way to class each morning; since it was the same school year, we taught the exact same students in the exact same grades; taught from the exact same text books; played the exact same guitar I left behind in the exact same office; worked with the exact same teachers, befriended the exact same students, watched the exact same pirated DVDs on the exact same apartment TV, ate out at the exact same restaurants, and wandered around the exact same city. We both visited Beijing, both stood on the Great Wall, both hiked legendary Huang Shan and saw the same breath-taking view that inspired countless Chinese poets and artists before us; in the middle of the most populous country the world has ever known, we both stood in awe at intersections where all pedestrians walked at once without traffic lights–old women, children, rich, poor, fast, slow, all together with bikes, mopeds, cars, trucks, and buses, and somehow all knew at once how to walk around each other, obeying an order out of chaos alien to our baffled Western consciousness.

Nevertheless, as Jacob Clayson and I caught up one weekend a few years after our respective trips there and compared notes, we quickly discovered that our Chinese experiences were utterly foreign from each other–he had stood on the old, collapsing Great Wall, for example, while I stood on the one restored for the tourists (and we each envied the other because of it); I was in Beijing during the Mid-Autumn Festival, he on the Chinese New Year; I hiked Huang Shan with a roommate in the rain, he alone in the sunshine; our friendships and relationships with students, teachers, headmasters, so on and so forth, were miles apart.

It was good to realize this as we swapped stories: for a few years there I’d begun to gently, with some quiet embarrassment, dismiss my Chinese experience as something unoriginal, even derivative, for countless English majors and others have made the same pilgrimage over the Pacific as I had, to engage in the exact same occupation. Not that I’d gone to be unique or popular–I went to get as far away from Rexburg as possible and boy did I get it–but I confess to feeling slightly embarrassed to have engaged in an adventure that was, after all, rather stereotypical, even pedestrian, after all.

And yet, if ever two Chinese experiences should have been carbon copies of each other it should have been ours; yet though mere days separated my departure from his arrival (and none separated our sheets), our experiences of China were fundamentally different. If these two Jacobs should be see the Middle Kingdom so differently, how much more have I seen China differently than all the other countless American teachers who’ve gone before and after me–and they likewise from me?

My experience was unique, for the exact same reason that all I do is unique–because no moment ever repeats itself, and my experiences and knowledge and perceptions are irreproducible in another. Even our most ordinary days are infinitely precious. With this realization, China was consequently reborn to me, and I could treasure that experience once more.

Jacob and I’s conversation caused me to remember the bright, Sunday morning, a brash young 21-year-old, reporting on my mission to the Stake High Council of the Centralia, WA stake. They asked questions, I answered truthfully and candidly, yet all along I could see in their eyes that these men, these full grown men with knowledge and experience beyond what I could comprehend, had no idea what I had just gone through! Their eyes even spoke silently of how they were through me reliving vicariously their own missions from years and decades past, yet even as their eyes spoke their minds remained fundamentally inaccessible to mine, just as mine was to theirs’.

Many Post-Modernists found reason to despair at this epistemological/ontological alienation of one from another; but long before I ever learned the names of Jacques Derrida and Samuel Beckett, I already knew that this separation was cause for rejoicing, for exaltation–for my common experience was inexpressibly singular, unique, separate from the world and therefore beyond its reach, and wholly my own. Take all I have, but you can never take me from me.

I said many Post-Modernists, not all: a professor of mine at Utah, Kathryn Stockton, discussed her book, God Between the Lips, wherein she posits that Post-Structuralism, a theoretical framework constructed to dismantle and deconstruct religious assurance, nevertheless has had of necessity to utilize a religious vocabulary, one of faith that a world exists beyond our private perceptions and immediate sensory impressions. Such was the project of my mission itself–we gave a book and begged the Puerto Ricans to read it and have an experience for themselves, something incommunicable, un-transferrable, inaccessible even to ourselves, for mine was mine alone, and theirs was theirs alone, and therefore was ours and none else could take it from us. Thus an experience we desired all to have was inexpressibly singular, unique to each of us, a treasure beyond appraisal, a pearl without price, worth the world and inclusive of the same.

Fortuitous, I suppose, that I had this insight on China, for the Buddhist prayer beads, which I had bought as mere tourist kitsch at the foot of Huang Shan yet was wearing when the fog lifted over Yellow Mountain and revealed the view the rain cloud and hidden from me (one of the few times in my life when the beauty of a thing brought me reverently to my knees) had recently snapped and scattered when I went to visit Jake. I’d often worn that bracelet, not devotionally per se, but as a reminder that the cloud will lift for me alone and reveal things always there yet new and everlasting.

An end of an era, I’d supposed when it unceremoniously snapped on a Monday or Wednesday morning, I’d already forgotten when. But like the old women wandering around the trucks buses as they traversed the seeming chaos of a typical Anqing intersection, the world does indeed flow much more intuitively and perfectly than we are willing to realize, and I’d soon received an invitation from the other Jacob to come spend the night while his wife was out of town, where we discussed China deep into the night.

Yet even as our experiences, like all experience, were singular, unique, ours alone, mine alone, still these same experiences brought us together and connected us in a manner that happened only when our experiences were allowed to be alone, apart from each other, apart from the world entire. We had walked those intersections as well, as unique and alone as every other person crossing with us, yet we were nevertheless altogether, all one, and flowing into and out of each other as ineffably and really as the cloud over Huang Shan, as the flight plans that intersected two Jacobs in space and time, as the Holy Spirit shedding it’s light upon the hearts of man.