Saying Goodbye

China has been my home for almost 5 years of my life. During that time, I have learned a lot about myself…and a bit about the world.

I have learned what it is like to be a minority and an alien—both in terms of being physically strange, socially ostracized, and culturally abnormal, and also a foreigner—to have no rights, to be an outsider, to dream of one’s home country. I learned what it was like to live in a place whose language you struggle to understand.

During these years, I experienced loneliness that I had never thought was possible. An unshakable loneliness that forces you to hug yourself at night while tears squeeze through your shut eyes. A loneliness that you can only know in a place where you are always and forever the outsider culturally, racially, and linguistically. Every day and everywhere you go, you are the other, the weird one, the alien.

I learned what homesickness was, a sickness that speared my heart and tangled my stomach and blocked my lungs. A homesickness that stays with you until you finally start to learn how to breathe again and you start to crawl and then walk, and finally you’re okay again. Before you know it, you realize that you’re starting to become fluent in a second language, and you learn what it’s like to go back and forth between languages in your thoughts and your dreams.

After learning about Chinese language and culture for two years, I started a new adventure in 2014. I learned a third language. I witnessed the politicization of ethnicity. I learned the comfort of a headscarf. I learned how to go days without showering. I hand washed my clothes. I learned that eating Halal is about so much more than abstaining from pork. I experienced in a fearful and visceral way what it meant to have a violation of unwarranted search and seizure violated. I learned what it felt like to live in fear of state surveillance. I learned what state inflicted terror was like. I learned the violence of minority oppression in new ways, and witnessed people continuing on despite it.

In China, I struggled but I also learned what it meant to live with all of your being, a richness and fullness of being that required every ounce of my energy, but gave back a life more colorful than I could have imagined: to love and be loved in a foreign language, to laugh until tears streamed down my cheeks, to scream in excitement and fear at the cab driver’s kiss with death, to dance until the sun rose, to weave in and out of traffic on a bicycle, to share the fuzzy warmness of an intoxicated closeness, to have sleepovers and weddings and parties and dinners and secrets and whispers and inside jokes shared only with the people who know your faults as well as your attributes. The people of this country have given back to me 10 times what I have given them, and they have shown me the love and warmness and kindness and hospitality in the fullness and generosity of humanity. They have shown me as well how rich life can be when you take the risk of an adventure, the risk of a first kiss in the rain, the risk of looking stupid, the risk of failing. They have shown me the richness of adventure that you can find if you take the risk of getting lost. They have shown me their hearts—their fears, their dreams, their sorrows, and their triumphs—and in doing so have shown me the humanity of vulnerability that each and every one of us share.

In China, I learned how to live through the winter without heating or running water or an indoor toilet. I learned about the violence and instability of displacement from real estate development, the pain of inequality, and the violation of freedom. I saw development that was moving faster than anyone could handle. Development, yes. But at what cost? Pollution, poverty, discrimination, and debt. Debt that drove people to suicide, debt that drove people to hopelessness and to lives and jobs that they hated. Development that led to the disintegration of culture, social, and familial ties. And yet, despite everything, people here yearn more than anything else to give their children a better life and have sacrificed their entire lives for that purpose. For them, development was the answer to their lifelong dreams to provide a better life for their children.

China has taught me more about race and gender, the pain of inequality, and the violence of development more than I could have learned by staying in the American bubble and reading books. China has taught me about my Western white privilege in painfully visceral ways that I wish I could, but never will, forget.

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I say without a trace of doubt in my mind that China is one of the best thing things that’s ever happened to me. Today I leave with tears on my face and a broken heart shattered in my chest, with a dream to someday give back to the world what this experience has given me.