0. China
The best way to think of this series, “Motherland,” is as something between a novella and a collection of short stories. I arranged these chapters/articles in the order of the cities I toured, each discussing a different issue or observation on China and/or Asian American identity. Yes, this meant publishing the blogs in reverse chronological order, which can feel disorientating. I think you’ll be okay if you follow the numbers; besides, each article can stand separately.
About the articles themselves: I tried to maintain a nonpartisan voice. My goal was to simply discuss China through the eyes of a Chinese-American, a perspective that Asian American media has just begun to explore. I understand that everyone experiences China, a country with thousands of years of history and over a billion citizens, in a vastly different way. These are simply the observations I made.
Without further ado, here’s a brief intro.
adapted from the Editor Statement of It’s Real’s July issue
It’s that time of the year when we turn our heads and realize, wow - we’re closer to 2020 than the start of 2019.
This thought always fills me with a mild nostalgia. I felt the same way standing in Shenzhen Airport, staring at the fog-wreathed trees outside. I’d spent most of July in China, touring an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of cities along the coast. The experience had been jarring. It wasn’t just the armies of relatives that greeted us wherever we went, nor the strange foods, nor the bombardment of Mandarin signs (anyone who knows me knows that I can read around 50 Chinese characters).
No: it was the sense that the person I’d grown into over the last two years - a person who’d consistently defied, disappointed, and exceeded the expectations of her culture, family, and friends - had left no room in her for China.
This wasn’t anything purposeful. The past two years (I last visited China in 2017) had simply molded me to America. Everything from my style to my mannerisms to my values reflect this, and this hit me hard in China.
Seeing the troubling wine culture and the toxic masculinity, seeing the obsequious pandering to white tourists, seeing the unyielding hierarchy of social interactions...it felt surreal at best, painful at worst. But being the bull-headed optimist I am, I tried to take things in stride. I tried to learn from the people we met, from the signs flanking the roadways, from the sun-tanned hands of my grandmother.
And I did learn - I learned about the pressures students here face (school from 7 AM until 5 PM, then tutoring until 8:30 PM). I learned about the miles and miles of apartments, breaths crammed into cells stacked twenty floors high. I learned why so many Asian Americans struggle with mental health issues yet aren’t willing to seek help.
More than once, I found myself on the verge of panic: I couldn’t be a part of this. I couldn’t juggle the perspective of an outsider, the skin of an insider, and the values of both.
But you can say that things got better as time went on: after visiting Suzhou, Shaoxing, and Xi’an, all stunning historical centers, I began to appreciate China. I began to treat it as just another culture, complete with its flaws and beauty. There are moments when I genuinely felt proud to be Chinese: standing before Shanghai’s dazzling Pudong River, holding my baby cousin in Taiping, watching a master artist paint a bookmark in Suzhou.
I recently began submitting my poetry to magazines again. One of the magazines surprised me: I was required to write an artist’s statement.
Usually, I prefer my poetry to stand alone. But this prompt seemed justified. How does identity shape your work?
It was late July; I’d just returned to the States. And so, drawing from the well of my time in China, I began to write. For some reason, I thought of the qing dye, a shade of green-blue produced during the Ming Dynasty. Despite its startling beauty and immense popularity, the technique for making qing dye has been lost to history; even today we can’t replicate it.
So I started describing how writing poetry was like making qing. I wrote about the asymptotic nature of both, about the gap between tradition and modernity.
Then I realized my identity was the same - I will never quite rid myself of the American part of my identity. No matter how close I’ll be to China, I’ll always have one foot in the States.
And more importantly, I realized that this was okay. If my month overseas had taught me anything, it was that my motherland was larger and more complex than I could’ve ever understood from across the ocean. In a country with so deep a history and so vast a land, there would always be enough room for me. Likewise, I would always have room for China.
t a b l e o f c o n t e n t s
1. shenzhen | mental health + modernization
2. taiping | extended family + second tongues
3. xi’an | journalism + what it means to be an editor
4. taiyuan | toxic masculinity + womanhood
5. shanghai | asian american identity pt. 1
6. suzhou | asian american identity pt. 2 ft. alleyway candy + artists
7. hangzhou | individualization + industrialization
8. shaoxing | culture vs. industry + why i write
9. guangzhou | education + endnotes
10. china in pictures