Hi Everyone!

Let me begin this post by saying that since Friday I haven’t been able to come up with any workable topics for the writing pieces. Hence this piece I am posting today. I guess it could be considered the nonfiction piece becuase it is nonfiction but I’m going to add another writing category for this series and call it an academic piece. I wrote this narrative essay last year in September as the first essay for my college English 101 class.

It was going to be published in the college spring journal (my professor was the one to suggest it) but then COVID happened and I’m not sure if it ever got published.

When I first wrote and handed in this essay I wasn’t particularly happy with it. I didn’t think it was my best piece of narrative writing so when my professor asked me if I would be willing to have it published I was surprised. Reading it now I think that I can appreciate it and I understand the reason why my professor liked it. (Is it okay to appreciate my own writing? I’m not trying to sound stuck-up. I guess it’s okay. xD.)

So here is the first piece of the series. 🙂

---

[ note before reading: both my sister and i are adopted from china except that i was adopted when i was almost two and my sister was adopted when she was 12. we’re three months apart in age. ]

My sister has gone through a huge cultural shock in the past few years.  I guess you could say that America is to China as water is to land.  To put it in that analogy she has had to learn how to swim very quickly after solely walking for twelve years.   One of the major changes was and still is language.  I remember, very clearly, the first interaction my sister had with a person in the US.  We were at the airport, just off the plane from China, waiting for relatives to pick us up.  She walked right up to the help desk and asked, in her very thick Chinese accent, “Does anyone here speak Chinese?”  The women at the desk looked at her like she had three heads, two of them on backwards.  I wanted to die of embarrassment.  But that was nearly six years ago, and now it partly angers me and partly makes me die a little on the inside.  For it reminds me of the time I heard a teacher say, “In English please!” as she passed a group of Chinese exchange students.  But it doesn’t matter, my sister no longer speaks Chinese. 

When we first met her, she had an old iPod Nano from her foster mother that she listened to incessantly.  I remember she showed me many Chinese songs, the tunes of which I can still recall years later.  When the iPod broke she spent countless hours trying to find the songs on YouTube.  There was one that we used to sing together, in English, though I tried to get her to sing it in Chinese.  She doesn’t listen to those songs anymore, or if she does she doesn’t show them to me. It’s only American pop songs I hear now.  Even though she played the Chinese ones continuously I miss hearing them.  

My sister gets this look when we celebrate Chinese holidays, eat traditional Chinese food or visit Chinatown.  It’s as if she’s back in China, or wishes she was, but then remembers that she’s not and it may be even more years before she can go back there again.  And I know she wants to go back; it was all she talked about in her first two years here.  

When we first introduced her to our local Chinese grocery it took some convincing to get her to speak to the owners in Chinese.  At first, I thought she was too embarrassed to speak it in a country where English is the spoken language, where people look at you weird if yours is broken, but as the years have gone by I’ve realized it’s because it reminds her of home.  And maybe by not speaking Chinese it’s her way of keeping the homesickness at bay.  In China she would walk into a store and say (in Chinese), “Hello Aunt, do you have…?”  When we go into a store in Chinatown or the Chinese grocery she just asks (in English), “Do you have…?”  Even though the people there are as fluent in Chinese as she was in China, it’s English she speaks.  

I have met many international students from China in the past couple years.  They stand apart from the group, or in their own, speaking Mandarin.  When they learn that I am Chinese and live here they ask if I can speak it.  I always shake my head no.  My answer is always met with disappointment.  They must feel how I did when I was in China and met someone who was my age, from America, and could speak English.  It must be a relief to learn that someone who has lived in the US and is also Chinese can speak the language that comes easily to you.  But I cannot offer that.  The exchange students have each other to talk to.  My sister hasn’t had anyone. 

I don’t try to get her to speak it anymore.  Sometimes I ask if she’ll translate something for me or help me with writing the calligraphy but other than that I’ve learned to let it rest. There’s a balance, when you’re an immigrant, in becoming a part of the culture you’ve been brought into but still being able to keep hold of your own.  I think that everyone’s is different.  It’s like a pendulum, it will never stay in the middle, it can pass through but can’t stay there.  When we’re caught between cultures, we’re the pendulum.  On one side there’s our culture, by birth or nationality, and on the other is the one we’re living in.  Our lives need to keep going, and so like the pendulum we’ll never have the perfect balance.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t get as close to it as we can.  I have yet to find that balance, my sister has yet to find hers and the exchange students have yet to find theirs.   

---

I hope you enjoyed this piece.

Until next time!

Soli Deo Gloria.

-Ming （明）

---

---

QUESTION: what are your thoughts on this piece? things you liked, criticism, etc?