Who am I?

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-12 09:52

So he wandered around the city for several hours, taking in an astonishing new world with a childlike understanding of what he was seeing.

"It was Christmas Eve, and some people in red were handing out presents," he recalls.

"I didn't really know what to do with them, so I just passed them along to other people."

He never thought to unwrap them to see what was inside, he says.

After he got tired, he saw a red phone on the side of the street, remembered about the phone number and dialed it. On the other line was his friend Wu Wei, vocalist of the city's celebrated punk band, SMZB.

Wu was surprised Aamot didn't remember him on the phone but figured he was deliriously exhausted from traveling. He became worried when Aamot greeted him with an unrecognizing blank stare when he came to pick up the Norwegian.

"He really didn't get it," Aamot says. But he couldn't detect his friend's anxiety.

"I really didn't perceive so much of people's deeper feelings."

When Aamot also didn't recognize Wu's mother or old friends who visited his apartment, they took him to a doctor.

The doctor confirmed Aamot had lost his memory, and recommended he visit a specialized hospital and the Norwegian embassy in Beijing.

The embassy told him to go back to Norway, and friends helped him use his e-mail and password, which was found on a paper scrap among his belongings, to contact his mother.

He then flew home to Norway, where doctors said his condition might have been caused by brain trauma, narcotics, or toxins from food, plants or animals. A diving accident the year before and a high school case of meningitis might have also contributed.

By the time he was examined in Norway, it was two months after the memory loss and too late to determine its cause. All doctors could find was an abnormality on the back of the brain that was too small to test.

Aamot learned he had been sailing around China with friends when he left the boat to study Chinese. In his last e-mail to his mother before the amnesia, he said he was leaving to search for a "nomadic Rasta horse tribe" in Tibetan areas.

Three weeks later, he awoke on the train.

As Aamot met people from different countries, he slowly began realizing he could speak several languages. Eventually, he came to understand he knew English, Norwegian, Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Danish and Mandarin.

"The words were generally there; I'd know the word for bowl - wan - and table - zhuozi - but abstract concepts like humor, irony and stupidity these things took time to get," Aamot says.

He also said he would instinctively respond in whichever language he was spoken to but wouldn't realize if others changed languages mid-conversation.

"Many Chinese people would say, 'hello', or, 'how are you'. After that they might switch and I'd keep speaking English, and eventually they'd just walk away," he recalls.

"It was a while before I realized that might be all they knew."

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