I bought a 2nd-hand xiangqi board at a YMCA thrift shop during a big book sale, so I read the rules and played a few times against a chinese friend a while back. But it's been so long ago I don't even remember for sure which friend I was even playing, other than he was close to me in age, so I guess it was over a decade ago.

I remember it was fun to play, but I had the same experience as you: it was hard to keep track of all the movement possibilities and the potential movements were less easy to visualize than western chess. Ultimately I didn't think I had the time to invest in it to become decent at it. About 5 years before I had invested a lot of time in becoming tolerably good at weiqi, so I knew how such pursuits could go (no pun intended).