7 days for 7 years

reflections from the chinese diaspora

今年，我终于回国了。This year, I finally returned home.

If someone asks me the dreaded “Where are you really from?”, I always proudly announce: “Scottsdale, Arizona.” I’m proud to be American, born and raised. I’ve never known another home.

This summer, I visited China for 7 days, to make up for the 7 years I’ve stayed home.

While I was there, I described the trip using the phrase 我来旅行在中国, or “I’m here to vacation in China.” I was gently corrected by well-meaning relatives, family friends, and even taxi drivers.

你回国了, they would say. You’ve returned to the home country.

There’s a linguistic presumption there. If you are part of the diaspora, China is still home.

Doesn’t matter if you speak Mandarin like a middle schooler, forget when Lunar New Year is, and don’t have Chinese citizenship. (All of which describe me.) It’s still home.

But with Sinophobia on the rise in the West and anti-Americanism soaring in the East, it felt like I couldn’t consider both places to be home. In an era of great power competition, neither side trusts the other. To belong to one, is to betray the other… or at least, that’s the narrative I was made to buy into.

I crossed the Pacific, hoping for something different.

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My parents immigrated to the US in the 90’s, and with the exception of one cousin, they left all of our family behind. When I was a child, we tried to go to China every two years.

For me, those memories are fragmented, but infinitely precious. The smell of floral sheets in my grandparents’ Shanghai apartment. Juice, running down my chin, from apricots in my mom’s rural home village. Wind drying my throat as I clung to an uncle who snuck me onto a motorbike without my parents’ permission. A late night trip to the emergency room when I stumbled through jetlag to the bathroom. Hiding under a bed with my cousin to avoid our daycare’s nap time. Street food heaven.

I never felt “too American” in China, mostly because my relatives doted on me far too much. China felt like a little safe haven, forever protected by childhood nostalgia.

In America, by contrast, I was acutely aware of my race. In elementary school, my classmates used to play a clapping game that involved pulling on your eyes while shouting “Chinese, Japanese!” They didn’t know any better. Scottsdale is only 5% Asian, and its residents, like much of the country, often self-segregate into homogenous neighborhoods.

Bill Bishop’s 2008 book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of a Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart argues Americans live close to similar people because we subconsciously perceive them as safer, more trustworthy. Humans are naturally tribal creatures, an evolutionary instinct that strengthened individual survivability by more intensely linking groups.

In our modern globalized society, this raw instinct is challenged at every turn. It’s easier to simply ignore hard truths when you can’t see them. And when we are forced to confront difference, we often de-legitimize the out-group in an attempt to process cognitive dissonance. Sometimes, I was the out-group.

I learned to talk about my culture when it was convenient (ie. among other kids of immigrants. Or when a space required a token person of color). Otherwise, I was largely silent, content with how well I assimilated.

Once I entered middle school, my parents allowed our biennial trips to lapse to support my ever-multiplying endeavors. I was relentlessly ambitious, packing my summers full in the hopes of squeezing the most out of every moment of my childhood. My parents were more elephants, than tigers, but I pushed myself.

I didn’t miss China much, even though I loved the months I’d spent there. Looking back now, I suspect it’s partially because I was ashamed to be Chinese, to be affiliated with the actions of the Chinese government.

I used to root for both China and America in the Olympics. That blissful ignorance, a childish trust in my mother country’s goodness, is long gone. China is an authoritarian technocracy, completely unaccountable to its people.

As a former debater, I’m all too familiar with China’s unrelenting human rights abuses, unequal social structures, aggressive wolf warrior diplomacy, and increasing use of ethnic nationalism to claim all those of Chinese descent. How could that be home, a place diametrically opposed to my values?

I don’t need to go back. I have everything I need here, in America.

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Then, right before I began my sophomore year of college, my grandmother was hospitalized with COVID-19. She’d caught it twice before, but this time? My dad flew back to Shanghai to see her. He never does that.

Faced with my Aniang’s mortality, I realized the black-and-white, us-versus-them lens that I’d felt compelled to use to see my heritage was only hurting me. I promised her over a scratchy WeChat voice recording that I would come see her again. She could trust me.

So, China became a non-negotiable for my Exploration Summer. The first thing I did after my uncle picked me up from the airport was head to Minhang, to the hospital where my grandmother had been checked in again.

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There’s too much from my trip to China to meld together into a singular post. I visited three different cities, and in each, grappled with wildly different lessons. In Hangzhou, I wandered parks and marketplaces, putting together the puzzle pieces of systems that shaped my family through everything from Chinese folk stories to the 户口 hukou residential system.

In Nanjing, I visited the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre and the Nanjing Museum, grappling with China’s history of being the subject of mass violence and also inflicting it.

In Shanghai, I lived with my maternal aunt and uncle, this trip’s only departure from solo travel, and a college friend of my mother’s took me around the city. With a local tour guide, she helped me speed through as many attractions as I could. I visited the Yuyuan Garden, Guanfu Museum, the Jewish Refugees Museum, Shanghai Tower, qipao (Chinese dress) shops, the Old French Quarter, the Waitan District, my cousin’s university in Fengxian, and my parents’ alma mater Fudan University.

I was shocked to discover that my family, despite years of only exchanging WeChat messages, still felt like my family, and China still felt like home.

The first time I sat with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and my cousin’s grandparents (in Chinese culture, they’re also just my grandparents as well) around the dinner table I nearly cried. I’d spent high school so jealous of my friends who had cousins’ weddings to attend or big Thanksgiving celebrations: this was my a homecoming.

Mandarin, my mother tongue, was feeling less slippery on my tongue, with words I thought I’d long forgotten coming back. Every dish I ate somehow tasted of home and family, even if it was from a completely different region of China. I bought three qipaos, because I knew I wanted to take my culture home with me. I never wanted to forget this feeling of belonging.

But a home can be imperfect, and I was thankful I was no longer viewing a deeply flawed country with rose-colored glasses.

I saw stark wealth inequality right in front of my eyes. A shuttered early 20th-century neighborhood, forcibly cleared by government mandate and left to the ghosts for at least five years, was just down the street from a high-class shopping mall and the works of British artist Anne Morris.

In a Hangzhou botanical garden, a boat driver told my family how he once lived off the land in the park, before the government suddenly seized all their land and reduced him to the job of tour guide. China doesn’t have a Fourth Amendment.

There were no longer any of the street beggars or performers that I remembered as a child. I asked a family friend, and she told me they were all rounded up. Homelessness doesn’t exist in many big cities, but that doesn’t mean people live a good life.

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American media messaging surrounding China is often both inflammatory and complimentary; China is an equal adversary, the greatest challenger on the global stage to American dominance. A country that wants to lead and is capable of it. The China that I saw? More human.

China is experiencing its slowest economic growth in decades, excluding the pandemic. Every young person I spoke to was deeply concerned about their future job prospects, how they could possibly afford to live in a city like Shanghai. Many wanted to immigrate but feared how they might be treated abroad because they were Chinese.

College friends of my parents explained that there was certainly anti-American sentiment in China, but there were just as many people who admire America. They’re mostly from a generation that grew up as the nation opened, who saw the West as a place of opportunity. But it’s just now nearly impossible to attain an American tourist visa, and the Great Firewall is distorting a generation’s perception of the outside world. Trust is built, not born. And right now, there’s very few unburnt bridges between the East and West.

I also had a taxi driver who went on an anti-CCP rant completely unprompted. He railed against a corrupt government, explaining how the police had complete impunity to detain drivers to collect fines from them. Electric vehicle standards, he said, bankrupted drivers to try to drive industry. The economic numbers Americans were scared of? Phony.

Now, none of this is to say that the pundits or the national security experts warning of China’s rise are wrong. I too see China’s government as dangerous. But I share all of this to demonstrate: the real world is more complex than can be simplified into any news article (and I say this as a journalist) or even a white paper. Just as the economic reality of many Americans doesn’t reflect strong job growth, the same is true across the ocean.

Many of the Chinese don’t trust their government either, and it’s disingenuous to paint a nation in broad brushstrokes, especially one with such restricted public opinion polling and hardly any open expression.

I believe we can acknowledge geopolitical realities without severing connections. We are more similar than we are different.

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The day I left China, my grandmother checked out of the hospital. She is also finally home.

Home transcends politics. Love knows no borders.

Trust takes chances.