前门 at night, 4 January 2020
This fall, I came home to Beijing. For three months, I lived with my second aunt, her daughter, my brother-in-law, and their seven-year-old daughter, Qiqi. Crowded in a 100-square-meter apartment with four other people, I had never felt more alone. I spent late nights hiding in my office cubicle, ostensibly because my educational consulting internship required overtime, truthfully because I was afraid of more small talk with relatives I had not seen in years. Over ten years ago, I moved from Beijing, where I grew up, back to New Jersey, where I was born.
In my New Jersey boarding school, I only spoke Chinese to my best friend, a girl from Nanjing who often teased me good-naturedly about my Beijing accent, especially the r’s I attached to the end of my words. By the time I came back this year, people thought I was from southern China. It took me a few weeks to get used to rounding out my vowels again as a true local would.
When I told a friend about my discomfort in Beijing, he told me, “Linda, you are an American Asian.” His inverse struck me because I had always conceived of myself as an "Asian-American," not the other way around. My friend didn’t explain further and at first, I figured that they meant the same thing later. But I began to prefer American Asian, because at my East Coast boarding school, the phrase “Asian-American” had been tarnished for me. Before boarding school, I didn’t realize the cultural gap between “American-Born Chinese” and “Chinese Chinese.” The Chinese international students looked down on the Chinese-American students who had grown up in the states for not being “Chinese enough.” The immigrant students disliked the international students for their accents and ostentatious displays of wealth. But I never identified fully with either group.
In China, I felt uncultured. Because my Chinese had plateaued at a second-grade level, I was unable to hold an intellectual conversation. I could not quote Chinese poets with as much ease as I could quote Vergil. When Qiqi grilled me on the number of strokes in a character I had long forgotten how to write, I felt vulnerable and powerless. I struggled to connect with my grandmother, who had a thick Baoding accent and spent most of her time watching variety shows. We lacked a shared language.
Living in China was a shift from living at boarding school, where I could see my friends at any given time. I didn’t have many people my age to talk to. Because my mom is the youngest of six, my cousins are all twenty or thirty years older than me. I saw them more as authority figures than friends. Most of my friends from middle school were abroad. When I caught up with my friends who stayed home for university, our conversations skirted around the teachers we shared in school and what year our friends left; our class of sixty had dwindled to less than ten by the time we graduated high school. Between the first week of October and the third week of December, when my friends flocked home, I resorted to playing golf with my parents’ friends and offering them parenting advice for their teenage daughters in exchange.
But I wasn’t sure if I knew what a good Chinese daughter should be, much less if I were one. I nodded when my relatives suggested that marriage is the most important part of a woman’s life, or learning how to do housework is more necessary for a girl. I love my relatives, but I couldn’t talk to them. More than my linguistic ineptitude, I realized that my values had changed. I aspired to be the lawyer, not to marry one.
In the years that I was abroad, I looked forward to coming home to the Beijing in my memory. I dreamed of alleyways with street vendors roasting sweet potatoes on charcoal, a family who doted on me, the youngest in my generation, a bright and airy apartment near the city center. I did not know that my parents would sell the apartment before I came home, to a place where I could not be myself, a place where I was not most comfortable. In Beijing, I never shook off the feeling of being a tourist in my own city.
The past few years, when asked whether I preferred China to America, I would always defer the question demurely. I love my family and the food in Beijing, I would quip, but the pollution is awful. I felt embarrassed when I found out this fall that the pollution became much better. The skies weren’t yellow, nor did people walk around in masks, like I had been telling everyone. Beijing had taken another great leap forward while I was gone.
When I visited the Forbidden City, I found my eyes involuntarily drifting to the English descriptions, because even though I read Chinese, it was faster for me to read English instead. I bought the four classics of Chinese literature (adapted for elementary schoolers) in an attempt to improve my reading comprehension; they’re still collecting dust on my bookshelf. Understanding eighty percent of the puns at a Chinese stand-up comedy show should not have felt like a herculean achievement, but it did.
Does a Chinese-American changeling have a home at all?
The day I left Beijing, my aunts and uncles came to say goodbye. We were crowded in my second aunt’s little kitchen. There wasn’t room for all seven of us. My third aunt made my favorite dumplings with braised carrots and eggs. I regret not eating enough because I was scared of eating too much before my flight. My eldest cousin drove me to the airport, and my fifth cousin snuck off from his shift at the airport to see me. He bought me a frappuccino at a coffee shop. It was 33 kuai, which could probably buy him three meals at the company cafeteria. At my insistence, he bought one for himself too.
As we slurped on the syrupy whipped cream concoctions in our cups, he said, “You know, everyone treats you like you’re barely older than Qiqi. You’re still a child in their eyes.”
“I know,” I told him and smiled sheepishly.
If he had said that to me a few months ago, I might have started to complain or defend myself. But in that moment, all I felt was gratitude. I took pleasure in being the little one. As my eldest cousin dropped me off at the airport, he started to tell me, here’s how you go through security, this is when you should go to the gate. The irony is that I’ve probably been on more international flights than he has. I’ve been going on thirteen-hour flights by myself since I was nine years old. Going through the motions was his strongest expression of love; saying thank you to him as I went through security was mine.