It has been the fourth year since I have been the U.S. People ask me all the time, “Where is home for you?” But there’s no easy answer to that question because I have always been wondering the same.
I grew up with my two older cousins, Circle and Allan. Allan is similar to my age, and Circle is a few years older than us.
Allan moved to the U.S. with his family when I was in elementary school because my aunt got remarried to a Texasan. After they moved to Texas, for a while, Allan kept in contact with me. At first, he would tell me his struggles at school, at church, and with friends. Soon, we started to receive photos of him being in the boy scout, competing in the swim meets and hanging out with his new American friends. To him, home is America.
Circle, on the other hand, didn’t come to the U.S. until college. Now he’s working as an actuary at a high-end company in Dallas. He has a Chinese girlfriend that he met in college, and he mostly hang out with other people from China who had the similar experience as he does. Him, my aunt and uncle, bought a house in Texas a few years after Circle graduated from college. In their house, it’s almost like a Chinese household. They make Chinese food every night at home with ingredients they buy from the Asian Market, while watching Chinese dramas on TV. To him, home is China.
A few years ago, my aunt had a son and a daughter with my step-uncle. We always called them “the American babies” in the family because they are born and about to be raised here. Alison, who is six years old now, speaks fluent English and would argue with his parents in English when she gets mad. Though my step-uncle is fluent in English, my aunt knows very few English. Alison, on the other hand, speaks few Cantonese and barely any Mandarin. So, Allen, their brother, will always be the translator in the family when my step-uncle is not around.
Allan, Circle, Alison and I, we are all Chinese living in the U.S. But each one of us have such different experience that have sharped us to become who we are today.
I came to the U.S. when I was 16. I decided to drop out of high school in China and moved to Oregon by myself. After living in the U.S. for four years, I went back to China for the summer to visit my family.
Most of my friends called me a “foreigner” because I refused to have anything else but spaghetti and McDonald’s the first few weeks I got there, I had a hard time phasing sentences and using the correct grammar when I speak Mandarin, and there’s English accent in my spoken Chinese. But more importantly, I found such a big gap in the ways of thinking and our perception when I communicate with some of my best friends in middle school, who there’s nothing we didn’t tell each other a few years ago when we were going to school together.
When I came back to the State after summer, I am once again, used to being recognize as a “foreigner” here because of my ethnicity. Though it has been a few years since I live here, there’s still a lot of things that differ me from an American. I still have a Chinese accent in my English, struggle to find the right vocabulary when speaking English, and have a rice cooker in my apartment.
To me, both of them have been my home, but at the same time, neither have. Or maybe the gap in between the two countries on the opposite of each other of the tellurion, that will be where home is for me.
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