I’m not questioning my existence (not yet), but I am questioning why I am sitting in a coffee shop in Beijing, China. Well, I’m in a coffee shop because my internet is down in my apartment. That was relatively easy. The hard part is “why am I in Beijing?” This is the sticky part of the question. I am asked this question every Sunday at church, and any other time I meet new people. I have a simple answer that I’ve memorized and that I say as quickly as possible to hopefully eliminate all follow-up questions:

“WellI’mteachingEnglishatauniversityandrunningaconsultingbusinessthathelpssmalltomediumsizedAmericanbusinessesgetinvolvedinChina.”

And that’s what I do here. But it’s not an answer to the question that gnaws at me. I could be anywhere in China and do this. Thanks to the wonder that is the internet, I could be almost anywhere in the world and do this (with only a few small and mostly insignificant problems.) I'm not involved in the culture at all. I’m spending the majority of my time by myself, apart from China. I eat Western food almost exclusively, spend lots of time in this café drinking coffee and surfing the web, and when I go somewhere I make sure I have my ipod and my wonderful headphones that block out all ambient noise. I’ve done almost everything I can to isolate myself from Beijing. Why am I here? Why haven't I moved to Shanghai? Why haven't I gone back to the States? Why haven't I moved to London? Why haven't I moved on? What is keeping me here?

As near as I can tell it's a mixture of things. There are so many more opportunities here in Beijing than there are back home. That's a big part of it. I have a great support network of friends here in China. That's a part of it as well. I've settled down and gotten far too comfortable here in Beijing. Sadly, that's part of it too. Beijing was supposed to be a step in a process, but I've lost my focus. I've taken my eyes off of my goal and stopped moving on. Well, that's not entirely true, since my goals now are different from the goals I had when I arrived.

This question has lost a little of importance since the first time I tried to answer it three weeks ago (this is draft #6 for those of you keeping score at home) since I've decided to move on after this semester. I've taken the GMAT and I am applying to B-schools for the fall. If I was debating whether or not to stay, this question would be irritating me to no end. But now I'm more concerned with learning from this so I don't end up in this situation again.