by Kaleo Zhu
“这山望着那山高” (“That mountain looks taller looking from this one”) is a Chinese idiom roughly meaning “the grass is greener on the other side.”
Two weeks ago, I was approved to study abroad at NYU Shanghai for the spring semester. While someone might take a passing glance at my bespectacled fast-talking, 3.8 GPA self and assume that I applied for a semester in Shanghai to further my studies, more than anything, I chose to study abroad to be able to see my family again in person. Of course, by now I’ve settled into the rhythm of classes and living in New York…which has opened its own set of thoughts surfacing in the back of my head. I can’t ever deny that I’m excited to see my parents, sister, and grandparents in person after weeks on end of video calls and texts, but as I come ever closer to the halfway point of my time in college, I can’t help but feel uncertain about this new route I’m about to embark on.
When I end up weighing these two places to be, more often than not I find myself having to step back and reexamine the contexts that I bring up the US and China in. For instance, many of the things I’m excited about going back to Shanghai and Beijing are material facilities like the high-speed rail or days without pollution, thanks to China’s marked pursuit of expanding renewable energy and environmental projects. This was especially after New York suffered weeks of infrastructure-swamping rain and the hellish smoke of late June, while as much of a third of Americans remained unwilling to even acknowledge climate change’s existence. However, the more I think about these prospects, the guiltier I feel about my attitude towards my experiences at NYU thus far, especially in the worry that I might take friends, staff, and what New York itself has to offer for granted. Even when my return to China is now set in stone, I already know that taking the subway anywhere that isn’t New York won’t feel the same by now. At the heart of it all, I’ve realized that in weighing the US and China against one another has only deepened schisms within my own view of myself.
With all this in mind, I’ve had moments when I thought of going back to China after graduation for the better – to a country that at least cared about infrastructure, the environment, and one with my family no less – when sociopolitical situations in the US have continued to destabilize. At the same time, I’ve still had to acknowledge something with myself – I don’t know that much about living in China. Well, beyond what limited experiences I already have lived through – mostly in Beijing with my extended family, save my aunt and cousins on the West Coast, and the self-contained communities of my international school. Come to think of it, I feel like taking a history class on ‘Connections and Encounters’ within and beyond China this semester might have been an unconscious effort to compensate.
Furthermore, this course (and my many other history classes before it) also hammered home that Sino-American perspectives of one another have never been particularly amicable. If it wasn’t centuries of orientalist sentiment and the exploitation of the first Chinese immigrants as cheap labor in the States, the mutual rhetorics from the Cold War and its resurgence in the 2010s made sure of that. Accounts of US-China relations now constantly emphasize how the two nations’ positive interactions over the past few decades “are giving way to undue pessimism, hostility, and a zero-sum mindset in almost every area of engagement.” This feeling of diametric opposition only resulted in a more disjointed view of myself – an English-speaking, Chinese US citizen who lived in Beijing for two-thirds of my life. I would bring up being able to identify as whichever one of these two labels whenever they suit me as a tongue-in-cheek joke – now it just feels like a void where authenticity should be.
During his run for the 2020 Presidential Election, Andrew Yang wrote that “[Asian Americans] should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need”, which was something I would feel inclined to support if it didn’t remind me of very feeling of lacking authenticity. Many Asian Americans like myself were not enough for the majority – we would have to “do our part” just to be recognized or treated unconditionally as “American”. To make matters worse, learning English as my first language put me in an uneasy middle ground, as my first ideas of job prospects in China mostly just amount to translation for that reason. My parents stressing the relatively cutthroat nature of study and work alike in China did no favors for that, either. At the end of it all, I felt like my future would be stretched thin between these two countries – and the fundamental sides of who I was at one point or another.
Of course, an easy explanation for all of my reflections is just that cultural struggles will always vary across different places and communities as they have for all time. But even then, I still think it’s more important to reject that very zero-sum line of thinking in general – to synthesize these different parts of one’s identity instead of picking and choosing them – easier said than done, I know. I still can’t say I’m sure about how these changes and future events might shape myself, but if there’s one thing I do know that both nations have shared, it’s their continuous changes throughout time, like with China’s long line of dynasties up to the 20th century and the US’ gradual steps toward social progress. In that vein, I guess the best way to find out my identity is just to keep moving forward and take change as it comes.
Kaleo is a sophomore majoring in History at the College of Arts & Sciences. He enjoys exploring New York on foot or bike, writing, drumming and taking photographs in his spare time, and is greatly appreciative of the Generasian community after joining the magazine last year.
Citations:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/andrew-yang-coronavirus-discrimination/
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