魚～海藍寶石～美麗人生

The other day, I was teaching my boyfriend how to write sentences that express “thankfulness” to parents in Chinese. Cheerful and proud as I was, I found myself in utter embarrassment when I realized after writing merely three characters that I forgot how to write the fourth one. I tried to disguise myself in complete calmness while squeezing my brain to produce that apparently simple character, a character that I once wrote thousands of times when I was young. Eventually it came back. Thank god it did. That simple little Chinese character, which would take a trivial ten seconds to write, could literary crush my self-esteem and, well more scarily, my heritage and identity.

I have always been proud to be a Chinese. I have no idea where that sense of pride came  from. Maybe it sprouted from the root of my family, who had a long and honorable history of patriotism. Maybe it was from seventeen years of living and growing in that country whose mysteriousness had always been misinterpreted and distorted to an unbelievable extent of exaggeration. It took me many more years and a long distance away from home to eventually realize this.  It was equally funny and true that I as a Chinese was always fascinated by everything that was purely Chinese. The red lanterns shining in the wind, the fireworks that completed my childhood Chinese New Years, the candy dragon that I could never won, the Chinese thanksgiving carnivals that looked like heavenly chaotic, the little yummy treats sold on the street that made me mouth watery after school…

Six and half years, thousands of miles, and a different nationality later, those scenes seem so close yet so distant. I never understood those who boasted about getting the American citizenship. To me, abandoning my own identity in exchange for expediency constituted nothing but shame. And when I realized I started to lose my own identity, the shame grows into panic.

I can’t help to wonder, since when did start to let go those precious and fundamental parts of myself? Since when did I start to overlook the five thousand years of splendid cultures and histories that once consummated into one after one dynasties of opulence? Since when did I start being an American, and stop being a Chinese?

Maybe each time when I am driving on I-10, east to west, along the way I lose something valuable unconsciously. As I leave Chinatown and enters the urban Los Angeles where Americanism is embodied in its utter extreme, the consciousness, the memories, which were made of sweetness of the air, blueness of the sky, greenness of the tree, and freeness of the mind that once belonged to me, little by little, jumped out of my car, and eternally disappeared in this country that’s not home.

And when I am finishing up this diary, sensing a page full of English characters, I realize, with a obscure sense of sorrow and apprehension, that I am far, far away from home.