Homecoming – Chapter 1

It was a reverse pilgrimage of sorts. In 2010, I went from being a Chinese-American woman living in New York City to being an American-Chinese woman living in Shanghai – or at least that’s how my local acquaintances labeled me…more American than Chinese. It was a culture shock and an identity shock all at once. I’m ethnically Chinese. My parents, grandparents and ancestors hail from China. I was even born in China. Cantonese was the first language I spoke (albeit poorly over the years). But to every other Chinese person that I met in China, I apparently embodied the identity, attitude and panache of an American girl. I was an insider by blood, but an outsider by upbringing. It was a strange sense of belonging to this place – my motherland – and yet, not connecting to the fibers of the place – the people.

In my first weeks there, I was like a fish out of water – not because the place was so foreign to me, but because I couldn’t speak the local language (Mandarin) and for that, I was ridiculed and even looked down upon by some locals. They were in utter disbelief that I looked and claimed to be Chinese and yet, I couldn’t speak “our” language. I had not experienced this kind of small-minded discrimination in a long, long time, and I was shocked that it was being handed to me so quickly and thoughtlessly by people who didn’t know anything about me. In a city of nearly 20 million people, I often felt lonely and misunderstood. I was neither special because I had chosen to return to China, nor was I invisible because I dressed and carried myself differently than the crowd.

I wanted to be accepted into their world and their local culture, but at the same time, I wanted them to accept that I could still respect my individual beliefs and celebrate them as much as the new ones I was adopting. My default explanation in Mandarin (which I memorized in the beginning) was to say that I was an “overseas Chinese,” so the locals would know that I was Chinese, but I was not raised in this place like they had been. This explanation worked for some people as it satisfied their curiosity. For others, they couldn’t connect the dots – and their stubbornness was too great – so I offered up my last resort explanation (also memorized): “I’m Korean.”

To be continued....