american chinese

general tso's chicken

i stopped going to my study abroad chinese classes. chinese in a classroom is like learning about the world in a petri dish. it's like studying english by studying the grammar section of the SAT.

i changed my phone to chinese. i feel like i've learnt so much just by being here and immersing myself in their suite of apps, getting used to what people do here, what is trending, how the jargon goes, what words drift off of the textbook.

it's weird how life just feels like normal here, how the normal here is an upside down world to me.

i thought coming to china would give me an instant sense of belonging, but instead i was reminded how much of an american i am and how i really just don't belong anywhere.

i don't want to speak in english, so i speak in chinese. but something about me still identifies me as a foreigner

'where are you from?'

singapore if i'm confident

korean if i'm not so sure

american if i'm really feeling like i trust them

i'm ashamed to be chinese and not be identified as one

the language and the looks are not enough

to be chinese is to have been raised in china

and i'm afraid my period of switching over has come to a close

i'm fighting to remember the words, to master the children's novels so i can move on to the real ones. to catch up to all the other words, unspoken behaviors and mannerisms.

i realized that the population of american born chinese is only 5 million, while china is 1.4 billion, so only ~0.4% of chinese are born in america. in this position, i play a role as one who can see it from both sides and address the looming tensions between the two. it didn't feel like a minority when i grew up in the 70% asian bay area.

america and china feel like my parents, arguing and fighting while i'm sitting at the middle not sure what to do. it feels a little too familiar. while together it feels like two countries at war. side with one, and the other is angry. there's not much i could say but pray one day they'd live separately peacefully. and that they did. sometimes it's not worth the fighting, and the differences are too much to resolve.

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before coming to china, i thought america greatly misunderstood china, but coming to china i realized that the chinese also misunderstands the US. the first time i opened up 小红书 (the chinese pinterest/instagram) and saw how the chinese international students portrayed CMU to their friends back in china, i was taken aback. and when i went to disneyland and watched american movies in china, i realized that the manhattan and LA they see is reflected through rosy colored hollywood lenses.

i talk to a lot of international chinese students, and i like to ask them how the US compares to how they had thought it was. i ask if the independence and freedom of speech was worth it, if it was what they thought it was. they don't realize that the freedom comes at the cost of guns, violence, drug distribution, weird religions. the culture of putting another country on a pedestal or victimizing doesn't help either side.

there are a lot of international schools in china whose purpose is to train the students for going abroad for college. someone told me that more people have been sending their kids to these schools because they are losing faith in the chinese government and hope that their kids will find more opportunities outside china afterward. but i can't help but think that running away from the problem isn't helping dissolve the conflicts. not thinking about it and saying it doesn't matter won't help either. world wars happen because no one cares enough to go have a proper line of conversation before things go wrong.

but people like me who are chinese born in the US don't have an easy way to reconnect back to china like the international schools do for the US. it feels distant, like a home i was once at. coming to china gives me deja vu, like my ancestors are coming to welcome me back. though this isn't home on paper, it's home in my heart. there's dark parts of history behind both the US and china, screamed more loudly from either side, but that doesn't make me any less of both. running back and forth between the two countries won’t work for much longer, and it's time for a more open line of communication – movies like the farewell, everything everywhere. songs like 北京欢迎你 from the beijing olympics. songs and media of peace, of mutual understanding that cuts through the cultures.