The author in 1997
The most obvious sign that I’m not a real Chinese person is that I promptly got food poisoning on my second day in Chongqing. As soon as we sat down at the hot pot place, heaping bowls of raw meat surrounding us, I was suffused by a sense of unease. Told myself, as I usually do, “It’ll be okay.” Now I’m on a flight to Shenzhen, using the power of positive thinking to keep the contents of my stomach firmly in place. It’s raining outside. As a child, I would visit Shenzhen in the summer and it would be 38 degrees Celsius, hot and humid enough to make you feel like you were suffocating. Walking into an air-conditioned store felt like passing through a block of ice. Miracle of physics, pure bliss. It’s been over 10 years since I last visited the country where I was born. I hadn’t even realized, I thought I went in 2017. Nope. So much travel during those lost years, Seoul and Hong Kong and who knows where else, when I had no visa, no real job, no one to be in love with, and not enough mental capacity to miss the motherland. Motherland: can I call it that? After all, I grew up in Canada. Though I am Chinese, look Chinese, I don’t even have an accent. But I’m illiterate here, can’t read the signs. Was pretty good at reading and writing Mandarin in my preteen years until a guy at the Chinese school I attended on weekends started stalking me and I stopped going. My mom says I could relearn pretty easily: all you need to know is 3000 characters. On the Internet, they say only 800.
I think I sound better in Chinese than English, even now. My voice is more suited to the language. I used to have the sense as a child that my parents could never fully communicate their personalities in English. Fluency, witticisms, natural pace of speech: for most of us they only appear in our native tongue. In Shanghai I saw my grandfather, who’s now 84. My grandmother died last year, and in the aftermath he moved to Shanghai to live with my aunt. He pulls out his iPhone and shows me that he walked nearly 30,000 steps that day. He tells me about visiting California, Stanford, how Stanford was founded by a railroad magnate. I want to say: I thought Stanford was founded by an ichthyologist, remembering a fact from Why Fish Don’t Exist. We’re both right in a sense, him more so, he’s thinking of Leland Stanford and I’m thinking of David Starr Jordan. But my Chinese vocabulary is not nearly good enough to cover a term like “ichthyologist,” so I simply nod mutely like an idiot. I keep thinking that I’m not going to see my grandfather so many more times while he’s still alive unless I change something drastic about my lifestyle. He refuses to visit my parents in San Diego, the flight is hard on his body and besides he doesn’t like being in America, where he doesn’t understand the language and can’t go anywhere. Suburbia must seem like utter hell to him. I love my grandfather, he’s so smart, former professor, a Fact Guy the way many of my friends are Fact Guys, he’s always been the grandparent I had the most in common with. But, but, but I don’t have the language to tell him. He writes poetry, he has big earlobes.
It would have been nice to marry a Chinese guy so he could talk to my parents. I’ve been in relationships with a couple but it didn’t work out. I ended up with someone who is not Chinese which is okay because I love him very much. We’re in the middle of a breakup, actually, but he’s on this trip with me and my parents. We get along superbly. I mean three weeks ago we flew to a wedding and the woman on the plane seat beside us, an early practitioner of Chinese medicine in the Bay Area, turned to me and said: You guys just look so happy. This is the year I’ve truly learned how fast narrative breaks down.
When I was three and a half years old, my parents immigrated to Vancouver. They left Shenzhen for reasons I don’t entirely understand. I think they felt stifled by it. The demands of the social contract, the lack of work life balance, plus my dad wanted to have a son. So I became a member of an emerging class: born in China, raised in the west, okay grasp of Mandarin but not excellent, played piano, pretty good at math, good grades, went to a good college in the US, white collar job. Asian-Canadian, now Asian-American. Model minority, now ubiquitous in Ivy League colleges, financial institutions, Silicon Valley startups. Forget about paper tigers. My peers and I—if the previous generation of immigrants were deferential, we are not.
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