Those first few years in Asia were a kind of love story.
I stepped off the plane in my cowboy hat and boots (an affectation, something I had never worn at home in Texas, purchased the week before) and embarrassed myself trying to negotiate, with grand gestures, bus fare to the Taoyuan train station. I hadn’t slept on the 16-hour plane ride, or in the excitement of the night before, but I would remain awake, wide-eyed and enamored, throughout the coming days.
Colors burned brighter, a vibrant and delicate watercolor blur painted upon the window of the bullet train. I had jumped aboard despite having only a tenuous grasp on my route; as far as I could tell, this train was southbound, and the city I was moving to was on the southern tip of Taiwan. That’s what it’s like when you’re in love: You take big risks, confident in your hunch that on this path lay beauty and contentment and, more than anything, belonging.
At one of the midway stops, a young Taiwanese man waited in the aisle to alight. He caught my eye, glanced at my boots and the hat in my lap, and said, as if it were an inside joke between us, “howdy.” I laughed, realizing what a foolish costume I had worn to this subtropical shindig.
As the bullet train regained speed, my attention returned to the passing countryside. I had never seen a rice paddy before. In the distance, actual mist-covered mountains held back the approaching rains. Every detail stands stark and perfect in my memory of that first crossing of Taiwan. No green would ever be that green again.
An ongoing, rolling sense of discovery and wonder was easy to maintain in the early days. Each experience was unprecedented and revelatory, the promise of every narrow alley and stone temple so effortlessly tantalizing. I’ve never been cursed with a picky palate, but the literal and metaphorical flavors of Asia engendered in me an ever-deepening love of food, a high culinary standard, an expectation of freshness and creativity and authenticity. I was sure that I could stay here forever.
But it was at a hole-in-the-wall lu wei spot, highly recommended by my Taiwanese acquaintances, that I first felt homesick. Or, if not homesick, certainly and quite firmly unwelcome. After a moment of me struggling to communicate what it was that I wanted to order, the vendor, depleted of patience, gave me a gesture that transcends the language barrier: Go away. I won’t waste my time on you.
It shouldn’t have mattered. I can’t blame that person for the falling-out that was to come. But looking back, the trajectory of my relationship with Asia began to turn on that afternoon as I stood over those stewed pig ears, snouts, and tails while the proprietor shooed me away and turned to another customer. That was only the first crack in this love story, a hairline fracture, a chip in the blue-and-white porcelain, but it would prove to be the opening symptom of a chronic and violent spiral, a refrain that would grow louder and louder over the following seven years: You don’t belong here.
I spent my twenties trying to save the relationship. I made more friends and frequented localities friendly to me. I brushed up on history, philosophy, and the roots of this culture, somehow making practical use of my anthropology degree (a first in the field!). I moved from Taiwan to Shanghai seeking (and finding) better employment opportunities and a deeper understanding of the Sinosphere. I studied Chinese to ameliorate my own communicative shortcomings, realizing only years later that I had in fact been happier when I didn’t understand what people were saying — when in my illiteracy I could could comfortably ignore the propaganda painted on the walls of my own apartment complex.
I arrived just in time to see the old 中国梦 (“China Dream,” signifying the optimism in the era after the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing) posters being ripped down and replaced by a cynical and militaristic slogan: 扫黑除恶 (“Sweep away darkness and eliminate evil”). A tenor of national superiority began to dominate state-sponsored narratives, and this coincided with increased suspicion and exclusion of foreigners — even those of us who had tried, desperately, to make a home here. As if in counterpoint, western media outlets began, finally, to talk about the abuses in the western province of Xinjiang.
I could, quite literally, read the writing on the wall.
This October, at thirty years of age, I am returning to the US. I have missed a whole epoch of American history, including the entire Trump presidency, the mounting and inescapable tension between left and right, the January 6 insurrection, and the COVID-19 pandemic (given that the Shanghai lockdown only lasted about six weeks). I feel oddly like a foreigner, imagining myself sitting down with old friends who have become strangers over the course of these bitter years. Will my hometown recognize me? Will I still know my way around?
I find myself polishing my old cowboy boots, that pair that I never actually wore in Texas. I broke them in on the narrow, lamplit alleys of Tainan in 2014, tipsy from drinking gaoliang and in the company of new friends. It seems obvious in retrospect, but the totemic value of these boots and hat, their significance as symbols of an imagined and idealized capital-H Home in Texas, has only recently become clear to me. I’ve begun buying similar artifacts of my time in China: jade pendants, folk art, and Classical Chinese texts that are hardly representative of my real life here over the past seven years. What was, at twenty-three, a whimsical affectation now feels almost like a ritual — a collection of ceremonial value.
I fear that I am casting about aimlessly, treading water or needlessly retracing a well-worn path.
I fear that I have lost that audacious edge which once propelled me like fire beneath an aimless rocket.
I fear that this Sisyphean search for belonging is in vain, and that the fault is not in my setting, but in myself.
I fear that I will never forgive the place where I sit tonight, on a warm and pleasant evening despite the circumstances.
But.
I could have written that same list of fears on that sleepless night before my one-way flight, seven years ago, eastward to Asia.
I do not regret taking that flight.
This article originally appeared on Medium, August 24, 2021.
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