兔尾: california, first love, and the choice to stay

A while ago, a friend asked me who—or what—my first love was. I couldn’t answer. It isn’t because I didn’t love anyone before college, or that my queerness is still relatively new to me. Rather, it’s because I knew so little of love when I was younger that I can’t even compare my early relationships (whether platonic or romantic or anything in between) to the depth and breadth of the love I know now. This year was the first year I allowed myself to be curious about love—the first year that I let myself love fully. Could I, then, call this year my first love?  

But honestly, I’ve learned to measure love not by firsts, but by returns—the transformations that bring us back to each other. This year has been full of them: the small, tentative ways we (re)reach for each other, and all the ways we (re)learn to fit next to each other. There were many times I’ve turned a corner and crashed into a friend I never expected to see again, and many times I was intentional about it: reaching out, making amends, saying, hey, can we talk?, and wondering, who are you, now that we’ve been away from each other?       

It’s been a steep learning curve. I’ve never been great at returns. I never liked returning to Seattle when I was younger, and I always found it easier to retreat into myself and rush into the next phase of my life (often demarcated by a new place) than to turn back and reckon with myself and other people. It’s therefore no surprise that I form quite intense relationships with places, that while I tend to be reserved around people—resistant to letting them change me—I am always entirely open to what a new city may do to me. When I was younger, I tended to blur the people I met into the city itself, to reduce a person to their role in a place: my ballet teacher in Moscow was just a part of Moscow, nothing more, and my auntie in Dongguan was just a part of Dongguan. Their humanity could never quite extend beyond the parameters of place, and I would forget about them soon after I left. The people I met were never the primary substance of my travels—rather, it was the (faceless) art scene, or the land, or the history. 

Perhaps it has always felt safer to love a place than a person, to credit my changes to the former rather than the latter. A friend once joked that I talk about my cities like they’re my ex’s. San Francisco: a slowburn, the joyful cry of homecoming. Seattle: retold over and over again, made into someone worse than who she really was. Shenzhen: passionate and glamorous and destructive. I have never said that I came from my parents, but I say often that I come from California. The irony, of course, is that I spent most of my life in Seattle, in my parents’ house, and that my time in California was quite discontinuous.

But I believe that from-ness, as much as to-ness, can be chosen. California is the first thing—place, person, entity—that I have chosen to be from. And it is the first thing I have chosen to return to—this last lunar break, when I flew back to San Francisco despite the distance and the cost. That is what love is, I think. Something that gives you a to. Something that gives you a from. As I have learned to love my friends, I have also learned to let them change me—to be from them, and to go (and return) to them. 

But this from-ness and to-ness doesn’t demand linearity. How can it, when I open myself to the idea that I might be from—might credit and owe myself to, might go and return to—many different places and people? My heart has been pulled in so many directions since before I could remember. Most of my family is in southern China, and half of them speak a language I barely know. I was born in Los Angeles, a city that I would spend eighteen years away from. Imaginations—of distant places and strange people—were the first things I learned to hold onto. I learned how to yearn before I learned how to love. 

It’s easy to yearn. Yearning is borne of flight and away-ness and silent distant gaps, while love is borne of a choice to stay. The reason why I was so uncomfortable with my last year of college—the only year that I spent entirely in California—was because I couldn’t accept the implications of staying. What did it mean if I had no way of uprooting myself, of romanticizing my own adriftness and all the homes that might’ve been? What did it mean to look a home in the eye, and to commit to accepting her as home? I spent the fall of 2022 in a state of constant jumpiness: spooked each time I came home to a kitchen of freshly-made food and the unerring routine of my cook/clean shift, irritated by the consistency of my campus-bound schedule, mildly unsettled by the easy generosity of the people I lived with. My theses, too, were victims of my restlessness. I didn’t want to sit down and do the dirty work of survey-writing and citations when I already knew my intuition to be true, when I could think of fifty new projects I could be doing.  

I’m not sure when it changed, when my feet touched the ground. The new year, perhaps, after grad school decisions had come out, and I’d undergone a heartbreak of seismic proportions, and my parents had moved to China. After my future—and my next escape (Beijing)—had been decided, and I realized with no small amount of dread that I still had nine months left in California before I could enact that escape. I spent the first few weeks of 2023 half-expecting the world to split open beneath my feet, for my body to be hurled into the next city, the next job, the next set of fleeting friendships. I dreaded a new uprooting as much as I longed for it. But the world stayed whole. California held me patiently. And I realized that I might’ve gotten it all wrong: that if I looked beyond my terror of staying, I might find something beautiful. 

So I stayed. I stayed through the rain—it rained a lot last January. It rained a lot this year, too, when I returned. Both times, California was green with winter, and both times, I cried with the beauty of it. I’d been born in this land—in Bayo Akomolafe’s words, I’d come out of it—and I felt that I was coming out from the earth once more, crawling out from endless hills into ceaseless rain. I lingered before the flowers and the trees. I drove down Highway 1 to Monterey, wandering for hours through tide pools and waves. I wrapped one-thousand dumplings for lunar new year, partially in celebration, and partially in grief: a gunman had murdered seven Chinese Americans in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay. On the night of chu ba, the birthday of all humanity, I knelt at Lake Lag and burned one-hundred paper dumplings as offerings to the dead. The fire glowed red beneath my eyelids. And all around me, in the reeds and waters and mud, California whispered like a prayer, calling me back into earth.   

Judith Butler writes that grief is the acceptance of inevitable transformation, the recognition that things will never again be what they once were. In Daoist and Buddhist thought, to be is to become, to undergo and bear witness to ceaseless transformation. Is it possible to be—to become—without grieving, then? Perhaps to be is to grieve, though I’m not quite sure of that. What I do know is that I learned how to be gentle when I allowed myself to grieve. That the world always persists, even when I believe it has transformed itself to its end—even when I feel that the world as I know it has already ended. The binary of staying or leaving was an illusion, wasn’t it, when everything around me would change regardless of what I chose? The only thing left to me was to love. 

In January, I loved. I took extra clean shifts and extra cook shifts. I taught children how to dance—sitting on the curbside with them after class ended—and listened to them ramble about their home life and schoolwork and everything in between. I wandered aimlessly through hills and fields I’d walked a hundred times. On Thursdays, I took the CalTrain north to San Francisco Chinatown, where I started helping with the Hungry Ghost Festival: an honoring of ghosts who had nowhere to go and no one to offer them prayers. It was work I could’ve never imagined doing two years ago in Shenzhen, or one year ago in Berlin. After graduation, I lived in the Tenderloin—San Francisco’s most marginalized neighborhood—and it was there that I finally learned to love the city. 

There is a long, long history of the Chinese diaspora in San Francisco. I’d spent much of high school studying the particulars of that history, and much of college studying diaspora at a more theoretical level. Before last year, I’d come to see Chinatown as a crystallization of those histories and theories: thirty square blocks constantly fighting for its own survival, a place I haunted whenever I missed the sound of Cantonese. Chinatown, too, was its own sort of ghost, with its pseudo-Qing-Dynasty architecture and archaic debates on whether to fly the CCP or KMT flag, with a population that was never quite visible to the San Francisco government. It had never felt quite alive to me, not until I realized the depth of the solidarity between Chinatown and other marginalized communities: the Mission, SOMA, and the Tenderloin. One of my friends gave me a tour of Chinatown during my first week in the city, starting not with the history of Chinese America, but with Indigenous land movements and the Black activism that was borne of California. Most of the artists we invited to the Hungry Ghost Festival were not of Chinese ethnicity or from Chinatown—rather, they hailed from communities across the Bay Area. On the day of the festival, thousands of people from across California gathered to celebrate, pray, and grieve. We were all hungry ghosts, and we offered ourselves to each other.

California had once again taught me to love. This time, I realized, it was through the people I met—the dozens of merchants and artists from across San Francisco and beyond. I had long stopped conflating people with place: why would I ignore people in favor of place, when there were stories and wisdom to be learned from people, when place itself was such an amorphous construct? I’ve stayed in touch with many of the people I’ve met in San Francisco, despite the distance between us. There’s something cosmic in tending to a connection across space, I’ve realized. A promise of something, if not a return or a conclusion. Most of my friendships are now friendships across space—we are bound to each other, and no longer to the place where we met. I am friends with my hometown friends not because we are from the same street, but because we are from each other. 

It’s hard to let go of this from-ness, even harder than it is to claim it. In August, I did not want to leave San Francisco for Beijing. I was terrified that I would never again return, that this home and all that I’d come to love would vanish as soon as I looked away. Now, once again on a plane to China, I’m no longer scared. It was true that California had changed in my absence. Many of my friends had left the city. I no longer had an apartment to call mine, and thus experienced the Bay Area in a state of wandering. Neither did I have an access point—a duty—to Chinatown, and so I once again felt myself an outsider, drifting silently and aimlessly through the streets, listening to the conversations I’d once have joined in on. This was an odd grief. But it wasn’t a sad grief. Some of the artists and merchants I’d worked with over the summer still remembered me, and asked me to paint new murals (and play ping-pong) with them in the alleyways. There are still quite a few posters scattered across San Francisco public transit, and on random buildings: HUNGRY GHOST FESTIVAL, AUGUST 26, 4-9 PM. And once again, the hills are green with winter, and I know I am home. 

What to do, now that I am homed, now that I’ve found both the from and to of myself? There is a life where I return to San Francisco after I leave Beijing. I spend the rest of my adulthood here, lining up at La Taqueria for their burritos and attending every town hall in Chinatown, painting murals in Ross Alley and taking swing dance classes in Golden Gate Park. I become the old man I once met on the #33 bus, who told me how he’d hitchhiked across the country in the 1970’s. How he’d known at first sight that San Francisco would be his home. I wanted to cry when he told me his story. How do you know? I wanted to ask him. How do you stake everything on home, on a love? How do you love and fall in love, just like that? I’ve always been a person of second love, of returns and reconciliations. I’m still not sure how to trust—to love—anything so wholeheartedly.   

So, in this life, I do not stay in the city. Neither is this the life where I stay in Moscow to dance, or Oxford to study, or Shenzhen to work. I’m still not sure what exactly this life is—over the last year, I lost the ability to define myself. Instead of any linear narrative, all my stories spiral outwards from a singular displaced detail. I say something like—I call San Francisco home—and wait for a direction to elaborate in. Why? someone might ask me, and I would tell them about the months I spent in Chinatown and the Tenderloin, learning from and making friends with its residents and merchants. Or, someone might ask, did you grow up there? And I would say no, I didn’t, I saw the city for the first time when I was sixteen, touring the Bay Area after my college acceptances, and I’d disliked it deeply at first. It is funny, then, that San Francisco would become the city where I learned to love. That it has become easier to love here than any other place I’ve passed through. I crossed the entire ocean to spend this 兔尾 in California.* There would’ve been no place more fitting. 

Before I returned to China, I took the Amtrak south from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the place where I was born. Los Angeles is so unlike San Francisco. It’s a sprawl of a city, big and glamorous and arid. I went to Chinatown to visit the Thien Hau Temple—the Daoist temple of Mazu, the goddess of the sea—and burned offerings to both her and the Guanyin Bodhisattva. It wasn’t until yesterday, when I came back to Shenzhen, that I learned that Thien Hau was the temple where I celebrated my first lunar new year, that my parents had once known the Cantonese and Vietnamese worshippers who’d frequented the space. I’d once had aunties and uncles in LA Chinatown. They’d all loved me, my parents said, even though I’ve long forgotten their faces, even though we haven’t gone back in two decades. My parents had been very young. I’d been one of the first children of my generation to be born in Chinatown. 

I was stunned. I was born not only in Los Angeles, but in Chinatown? How was it possible that my journey to LA Chinatown had been not only one of wandering, but one of return and homecoming? I’d always known that I’d come from the city, but I hadn’t known how deeply that from-ness ran. I had once been loved, by people whom I might’ve passed on the streets of Chinatown without recognizing. I might’ve knelt at the altar where my newborn self had received her hundred-days blessing. My parents never liked returning to Chinatown once they’d left. Their lives had been difficult when they’d lived in LA, and I’d spent my adolescence in an entirely different Chinese diaspora: the Microsoft- and Amazon-dominated tech scene of Bellevue, Washington. Perhaps I’d always been drawn to Chinatown not because it reminded me of China, but because it reminded me of myself, of the first home I’d known. In that case, how many more returns—and homes—might await me?  

So, it is no longer a source of angst to be adrift, to make and leave and find homes across the world. Why would it be, when there is so much to wonder at, to learn from, and to return to? The choice has never been whether to stay or to leave. The choice has always been whether to love—fully and openly, placing my faith in the world and its people—no matter where life may take me. California taught me this. She transformed me when I stayed for a moment longer than was comfortable, and held me as I looked beyond my terror of staying. What awaited me on the other side was beautiful. 

Happy New Year, and many happy returns! <3

*Translation (兔尾): “rabbit tail,” meaning the end of the year of the rabbit, as well as the end of the lunar cycle of twelve.