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Happy journey home puts China in new light
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I’d had enough of the choking air which made me feel like a smoker again. I’d had enough of feeling like an outsider due to my lack of fluency in the language.
After one year, these negatives were eclipsing the feelings of adventure and newness that had accompanied my amblings in Shanghai, so I decided that it was time to go home. It also helped that my one-year language program had just concluded, so my visa was about to expire and all of my friends were leaving — all semblances of the life I’d put together were disappearing, so why shouldn’t I?
A taxi took me to the airport, where I fortunately made the flight that I’d almost slept through (again). Some 15 hours later, I was staring at the singularly ugly carpet that welcomes Portlanders home. I made my way through security, embraced my father, and fell asleep in the car as we coasted down a virtually empty highway.
I spent the next ten days catching up with my father and the few friends who still remain in my hometown. Portland’s fresh air, open landscape and greenery were welcome changes, changes that carried on to my visit to my mother in Palo Alto. Though a tad less green, wonderful food, drink, and company were in equally abundant supply.
I continued to take refuge in these familiarities even after moving, at the beginning of last September, to New York: the journalism capital of America.
Where better to learn how to do this gig professionally? The opportunities are as bountiful as the competition is stiff. Unfortunately, I’ve met with mostly the latter, and now work part-time as a host at an authentic, upscale Shanghainese restaurant in the TriBeCa neighborhood of lower Manhattan while doing freelance on the side.
So I left China only to work in a Chinese restaurant. But the job pays decently, allows me time to write, and gives me the opportunity to practice my Mandarin.
It also reminds me of (and makes me miss) China. And I’ve noticed that, since I began working there, I’ve started seeing elements of China in New York. Small things at first, like the erhu players in the subway, always middle-aged men of some talent. Slowly, larger patterns emerged. For the first time, I couldn’t count the number of Chinese people I passed while walking through my grandparents’ neighborhood (Rego Park, Queens) on one hand. Not only are they in the streets and in the stores, but they’re running businesses and living in my grandparents’ apartment building.
Most of the Chinese people I see on the subway now are speaking Mandarin, whether in Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, wherever. A New York Times article noted the beginning of this lingual shift in 2009 and since then it has slowly but steadily continued.
I didn’t realize how widespread the Chinese diaspora is in New York, or that it’s still growing and undergoing a demographic shift. It’s tempting for me to think of these changes as new developments that followed me back from China, but these shifts have been years in the making, and it’s only because of the time that I spent in Shanghai that I’m finally noticing them.
With each sighting, my memories of and feelings towards China shift away from the pollution, the feeling of not belonging, and the harsh solitude of being far away from friends and family. Instead, I remember how, every day, I devoted hours to learning another language, both by studying and by just living in Shanghai.
I think of my friends (other international students from France, Russia, Korea, Thailand, etc). I think of my bicycle — that rusty, over-priced set of wheels that were my wings as I explored the city — and the traffic that nearly destroyed it. And I think of the skyline, and of the feeling I’d get looking out from my balcony; that every day, there was something new to discover and learn in this land that was not my own.
For now, I’m enjoying my time in New York. But it’s a welcome realization that, whenever I miss China, I need only take the train.
It’s not the same, but it’s a start.
And I can’t wait to get back to China.
The author is a freelancer in America. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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