Homecoming Narratives

I cut a syrup-laden piece of the fluffy waffle I had ordered to my brother. I tried to get a good amount of fruit on it as well, and in the process a blueberry went overboard and fell on the floor.  I gave a small sigh of remorse, scooped the piece over to him, and went back to eating my waffle. DJ got up and picked the blueberry, and dropped it onto my napkin. I sheepishly thanked him, embarassed that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to do the same.

The waitress walks by our table and my drink had been empty for quite some time and I tried to flag her down. “Put your hand down Cal!” my friend Kerry yelled at me. I sheepishly lowered my waving arm, not sure what I had done. “You’re not in class, you don’t need to wave your hand to get the waitress to come over!”

Having spent over three years now living on a continent eating mainly in restaurants with dirty floors and inattentive service staff, I come across as a blustering rude philistine in my home country. It’s both embarrassing and fascinating, embarassing because I wasn’t raised to be disrpesectful, fascinating because it gives me even more sympathy for the “uncivilized” manners that mainlanders are accused of exhibiting when visiting Hong Kong.  Not only can I wave my arms to grab a waitress’ attention in Hong Kong, I can shout “waitress!” to get one to come over.

I have lots of Hong Kong-honed instincts now. My feet were glued to the first crosswalk I encountered in America, not sure why that approaching car was slowing down. I instinctively carve space for myself when getting ready to leave the subway cars. And I go inside bathrooms in restaurants and bars and I freak out that there’s space to turn around.  I’m not sure how the experiences of the first 23 years of my life can fade away so completely, but this is clearly an example of out of sight out of mind. For the first time in my life, a life which began with 18 consecutive years in suburban Boston, I feel like a third-culture kid without a country or culture.

I’m not sure how I really got here. You can write your own narrative, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plot elements that you’ve forgotten, or never noticed, or deliberately choose to ignore. For example, I like to start my story as an 18 year old sports-obsessed unworldly college student who was home in suburban Massachusetts working an ordinary suburban college job teaching tennis.  It so happened a coworker that summer showed up fresh from Ireland, with startlingly few solid plans but lots of great stories.  It also so happened that the Summer Olympics were to take place in Beijing the following summer. Though these two events were completely unrelated, the former inspired me to attend the latter and circumstances were favorable enough for this to become possible.  Once in Beijing, I found myself overtaken by the sheer mass of China in front of me, but otherwise took notes on what was different, asked people how to say this or that in the local language, and started practicing my stories for when I got home. Along the way, I met up with a cousin of mine who had moved to Shanghai from the staes and stayed for many years. He told me to not look down on anything in China as inferior, but just as different and try to understand the nuanced context around everything. I laughed and exclaimed that surely he knew I was an educated bleeding heart liberal who wouldn’t make such prejudiced judgements. But his followup example, of left turn only lanes in the middle of a multi-laned road in China, stood out to me. I had only noticed that these lanes made no sense – why wouldn’t you place them on the left-most lane of the road? But because in China, there was no way to turn left except on a left-turn only traffic signal, and in the middle lane, this turning angle was much better. It was a strange concept to my American wired brain, but perhaps it wasn’t so crazy.

Chance conversations like that might have separated me from the many many other westerners who came that summer, saw some Olympic events, and then never went back. But I came back, two summers later in 2010, and then in 2011 to Hong Kong for these many years. Perhaps that conversation set me on a different trajectory. Or perhaps my father’s presence in Shanghai was a much more major influencer. Or my parents’ collective histories of immigration. Or my own sense of community and self-respect. Or perhaps I would have stayed in America for the rest of my life had it not been for a job opening from a family friend in the summer of 2010. These aren’t the sort of questions that have answers.

Whatever it is, I’ve become a very different person from who I was when I was a newbie Laowai in 2008. I no longer have that same mindset, and I no longer remember what that mindset would think. That pre-Beijing version of me would have a similar conception with most other Americans of Asia as an unknown, mysterious land of disparately equally foreign people. Flash forward to April 2015 and I'm in a backyard patio in Arlington, VA with a group of friends and friends of friends. Everyone is within my peer group - in fact, most of us were college classmates. Everyone else seems to have been friends for many years going through similar life experiences in metropolitan DC and the conversations flow that way built upon layers of mutual understanding and omissions of plot exposition, because it's the third movie in a series and everyone has seen the first two. Eventually the scene focused on me, the guy who had just returned from Hong Kong, and I was asked to comment on the protests taken place there only a few months previously. I was well prepared to give these comments (or so I thought) having written an extensive post on my many thoughts on the protests' origins, effectiveness and what they mean for national identity, economics and race relations. I'd talked about this before a lot - for a month it was all we talked about in Hong Kong. But even my friends elsewhere, in Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, America - they all had questions for me regarding the well-publicized events. And now I found myself talking about it again, but as I talked about the public takeover of streets, the power imbalance, the vestiges of colonialism, cultural identity and sub-nationalism and...I saw eyes glazing over. And I was immediately taken aback, and awkwardly stopped. 

For sure I was probably being very boring and overly academic, but I realized upon reflection that this is what it means to come back to a place you no longer fit into. This is what it means to be a third cultural kid. This is what it feels like to talk about issues that are extremely relevant to your life to people to whom they are completely irrelevant. Many of the peers I was with, despite a worldly education, did not have much of a conception of China or Hong Kong. The Occupy Central news stories in the past year blur into the likes of the Syrian Civil War, and the kidnappings in Nigeria, and the refugee crises in Southeast Asia - no more relatable or lamentable or inspirational.

Anyway, it wasn't just this topic. I found that a Venn Diagram of the conversation topics I had in DC and the ones I have in Hong Kong has a frustratingly slim middle section. I was able to "pass" though, by digging into my memory bank and retrieving sports references and coffeeshop locations. It comes back pretty quickly, and I had a great time in the states with my friends. But it did make me question whether I was ready to return home, whether I was prepared to say goodbye semi-permanently to a big chunk of my life. For I realized it's more than just the location. It's not just about the people, the languages, the food, the currency - it's the desire to not accept the geographical hand that you were dealt and to enhance your personal global story. And it's the experiences that come directly from that, which sound pompous to those who have not been able to have them, and make up the conversations to those who have been able to have them.