Peeling the surface

Hi, 

Today I was sitting on the step in the doorway that separated the kitchen form the living room watching him peel an apple. The kitchen was dark and cold but clean. I watched him kneeling over a small bin scraping the skin of the apple clockwise with a small knife. As I watched the skin unravel amongst quick, controlled and effortless shoves of the blade, each peel the same length and width as the next, a feeling of deep contentment seeped through me and I realized that I was finally happy.

 This happiness is not the kind that you see in the movies. It is not the kind that is sugarcoated and oozing with Hollywood romance and passionate love followed by outbursts of jealousy, anguish and possession. My happiness this time is, for once, not dramatic. It is grounded in trust, in respect and in commitment. In a commitment to a person and a life that I have conscientiously chosen in spite of the many obstacles that I, personally, and we, as a couple, have faced. 

I think back on one particular hardship we had this winter which was related to temperature. With 5 degrees Celsius outside, I wanted to turn on the heater, he did not. I am from a country where there is snow four months a year but where the indoors were always heated. He grew up with no snow and made no distinction between indoor and outdoor clothes. The temperature in the room was such a small and silly thing, and yet it really put a dent in our relationship. We tried to make compromises. I bought a down coat to wear inside; he let me turn on the radiator when it was below 5 degrees. Yet the only thing that ended up working was to ultimately be in separate rooms from December to February. Never in my life would I have imagined fighting over temperature. 

And yet here we are in April, me sitting in the doorway watching him peeling an apple, feeling happier than I ever been in my life. Why? 

Of course, the weather is warmer and that changes a lot. But I also know that, in spite of our differences, we are still living under the same roof, sharing, laughing, arguing and working hard towards the rest of our lives together. I realize that happiness doesn’t come easily. It comes from listening, understanding, having disagreements and coming out of them better than when you went in. It is the result of hard work, of being committed to a person and a life that you have chosen and understanding that, in the end, everyone has differences. You might even be luckier than others to see them so obviously through a cross-cultural relationship.

xoxo

Me

The Cycle

Hello dear friend,

Sorry I haven’t written in a long time. I have been a bit out of sorts lately. It came to a culmination at lunch today when I realized that since being back in Shanghai, the reintegration hasn’t been as smooth as I had hoped for. I also realized that I am going through culture shock, or reverse culture shock. I can never tell which direction it’s going.

As you know, I went back to the US for a month and traveled around to see my family and friends. I had only been back once before in my 4 years of living in China. When I went back the first time, it was selfish and personal. But this time, I brought something different with me: a new perspective.

Zeng has never left China, much less been to the US. Since a part of my identity is attached to America, I have never really had to think much bout what it means to see the United States for the first time. But now that we are thinking of moving there together he has started asking me questions like what do American’s eat? What are the taxi’s like? How are US cities different from the ones in China? How are American people different from Chinese people? And I find myself getting stumped. Sure, we only speak in Chinese so there is definitely the language barrier, but even if I were to explain it in English, I can’t use the right words to create an accurate picture for him and frankly even if I could, there are some things I just never paid attention to.

And so, when I went back to the US this time, I started taking pictures as sort of documentation of what I was living and seeing. I started capturing my food, the inside of taxi cabs and supermarkets, paying more attention the shift in landscapes and capturing intimate family moments, like my Nana making apple pie. You know how amazing her’s is.  The more I snapped away, the more I found myself looking at this country with a whole new perspective. And as a result, I began to see my friends and my family differently as well.

I became more attuned to the essence of America – the smells, the details, the shapes, curves and angles, the energy from space and people. I was also privilege to travel around this time and not just stay in one place. I started in New York, moving up the East Coast through Boston MA.,  North Kingstown R.I, and Bangro MA, and flying across the country to Silverthorn, CO. Each place carried stories both personal and historical. I felt reconnected to this place that I thought I had know for four years but realized I didn’t.

I find myself in a strange place now, where my perspective keeps shifting. When I was growing up in Switzerland, America used to be the vacation destination, the trip to a place full on wonderful, family and adventure. But it was still a stranger to me while I was always happy to come home, back to Switzerland.  But when left for college, things changed. The US took on the name: home, in part because I thought I belonged there both in nationality and personality, while the place that I had lived in for 18 years had become the stranger, the foreign land. Still now I have a hard time realizing how that happened. I feel like I have cheated on the place that molded me.

Anyways, after 4 years of calling America home and finally feeling it was actually home, I moved to China and the same thing happened over again. I moved there at first as an adventure, a cultural experience and I stayed there for 2 years without leaving (remember when I was a student there and had no money to afford a ticket).  So, the first time I went back to the US after 2 years, it was more like going back “home”. I was excited to see my family and friends and to reunite. In fact, now that I think about it, it was much about family.

But this time around, this second trip, was different. For one, I feel more settled in China.  I have a job, a relationship, friends, an apartment, a life that I have established for myself. Now China is becoming home. So when I returned to the US, I didn’t go back home, I went to a “new place”, the vacation destination, the trip to a place full of wonder, family and adventure.

I am still confused. Where do I belong, where do I call home?  

Xoxo

Me