Okay! Now I remember!

Outsider

There I was standing at the bus stop, taking on the viewpoint, imagining myself the great literary observer of an society of which he was not a part.  But then I thought, I have always been the outsider, even in Canada, and so nothing was out of the ordinary in China.  My experiences here were simply magnifications of all that I had experienced before.

Thinking further on this, I wonder if my outsider status is different from the lot of any other human.  I have moved a lot, and I can say that I have never been one small part of a homogeneous whole.  But those who have, like the Chinese living in a village that foreigners rarely come to, those we can say who are cut off from the world, aren't they outsiders too in this life?