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.
Xoxo
Me
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