Welcome Home

Your brother is twenty-eight years old, but he still comes home from school every weekend. Every Friday at six p.m. without fail, you hear his car engine roaring from five streets away as he pushes the little Toyota at least ten miles over the speed limit. A few minutes later, he bursts through the door, transforming in an instant from future lawyer into vibrant child as he calls for your mother. And with every triumphant return that he makes into the tangled embrace of your family, you grow more doubtful that you will ever leave.

While the Western philosophy into which you came of age exalts the individual, the Chinese tradition that raised you orbits the collective. And though it has never been spoken aloud, the knowledge that you must always remain bound to your family defines your world. It clenches your teeth together while your classmates attack their parents’ flaws without fear. It re-fashions your subtlest individualities of style and taste into jarring manifestations of filial betrayal. It warns you that while your peers ruminate about leaving their parents behind—college in Europe, a future far away, sailing downstream on the world’s winding river of possibility—acting upon your own desperate desire to do so would only transform you into a stranger in the eyes of your family. An outsider, twisted by the influences of foreigners into a shadow of the good Chinese child that they so painstakingly raised.

So you research tiny liberal arts schools. New Hampshire or Maine, just a train ride away. You thank your first and last therapist, who tells you that you need to disentangle your own wishes from those of your family, and delete her follow-up emails. Because your grandmother once told you that she would never tolerate a grandchild like you, and no matter how many hints you force yourself to drop, your amateurly-transmitted messages will never reach their destination. Because after the election you tried to “foster open dialogue” with your brother, unaware that those words mean nothing outside Enlightenment-primed young minds with nothing to lose but a few friendships, and he told you that your opinion didn’t matter, in the backseat of his shiny new car, hiding your eyes behind his headrest so he wouldn’t see them extinguishing in the glow of the streetlamps that illuminated the rearview mirror. You have already become everything your grandfather warned your parents about when you left China—he knew, even then, that when you met again, you would be someone he did not recognize.

So of course you can’t afford to go, but how can you bring yourself to stay?

Now, when fantasies of leaving flood your mind, spiriting the last part of your existence that remains truly Chinese down the swift river of Americanization, you’ll hold your breath and dive after your lost identity. You’ll imagine the pitfalls of living in a foreign city. Traversing winding London streets like a ship lost at sea, capturing Buckingham Palace on a dusty phone camera like a forever tourist with no true home. Finding temporary ports at which to dock your soul only to realize that the only harbor that truly belonged to you had been deserted and demolished long ago.

So you’ll probably go to college in New Hampshire or Maine, and you’ll visit your family every weekend too. And yet, you still can’t help imagining a future in which being Chinese does not mean being counterfeit—one in which you may stop to rest the boat of your life in two bays of glistening water, both with golden sands warm and inviting, waiting patiently to welcome you home while you are away.

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