I will never stop arriving in Beijing. Between my plane touching down in China and my plane taking off for home one year later, each day will assimilate me a little further into the city. That’s the thing about living in a place so thoroughly foreign to me — arrival is not a moment. It is a recurrence, a series of experiences and lessons that aggregate asymptotically toward immersion.

Every city has layers, and every traveler’s joy is in peeling them away. When I came to New York City from Richmond, Va., some layers had already been peeled away for me. I knew the common language, I had eaten the cuisine and I understood the parameters of social norms. The same was true of my previous trips abroad with family. I may have been in foreign environments, but I was surrounded more immediately by a cohort of fellow Americans. So when I accepted an invitation to a year-long study abroad program at a Beijing university, I knew that I would embark on a different kind of travel — one where I would have neither a head start nor a safety valve.

Two months in, and I’m comfortably disoriented. I know just enough Chinese to order food and tell taxi drivers where I want to go, but I have to act words out to my roommate, who speaks neither Chinese nor English. My dorm is composed of other international students, but only a very small fraction of them are from Western countries. I find that in my interactions with the few English-speaking students, we establish common ground over each country’s greatest export: entertainment. My nights often involve swapping favorite 50 Cent songs with Tajikistanis, discussing early 2000s sitcoms with Chinese grad students and fielding Korean rap recommendations. I’ve turned my Russian friends into ardent Lauryn Hill fans, and they try to convince me that Moscow house music isn’t unlistenable.

I know that one year is not nearly long enough to squeeze every last drop out of Beijing, and I’m OK with that. My Mandarin will be proficient, but my accent and diction will still be distinctly foreign. I will approach an understanding of Beijing’s cultural and social mores, but I will be a gauche American up until I board my return flight. There will remain landmarks unseen, local dishes untasted and people unknown. But you can fit a lot into a year, and I look forward to whatever Beijing has in store for me. Maybe I’ll become a Maoist. Maybe I’ll learn to tolerate Moscow house music. When nearly every element of your daily life is new, who knows what can happen.

Email Matthew Perry at [email protected].