Belonging, Becoming

Haidian District, Beijing, China, 2012

I must have been no more than three or four, riding my mother’s bicycle under a toddler cover behind her, plastic window sheets pop-popping in the frosty wind. Where we came from, where we were going, I wasn’t sure, only that we were thumping over pebbles thrown into the gutter by the indefatigable traffic, and that the makeshift passenger seat was terribly painful. I belonged to my mother then, entirely. I could smell her floral shampoo and the muted acridity of the cover. I remember the warmth of her back, the warmth of my breath fogging the vinyl, and then the sudden cold that slapped at my calves through the three layers she had dressed me in. It was more warmth, more cold, more scent, than memory should allow.

I suppose it must’ve happened often, because in my mind that one sensation—or rather, that series of sensations—has attributed itself to childhood in Beijing. When we moved to Washington, my mother gave her bicycle to the family six floors down, whose son went to the same preschool as I did. I never asked where the toddler cover went. I like to imagine she didn’t throw it away. Perhaps she folded it up and stashed it in a corner of the building’s storage garage, to which, ten years later, I could return and find it again. By then the acrid smell would be gone, the floral shampoo too, drowned out entirely by the stale nothingness of dust and time.

The recipient of the bicycle was an age division above me, a boy with patched brown overalls and hair buzzed so close you could see the planes of his skull when he turned his head. He was a senior at school. Five years old, top of the class, about to graduate into the Chinese equivalent of kindergarten. I don’t remember if I liked him or hated him, but I believe it was the latter. Nobody in my division liked older kids. They were always on their way somewhere, and we hated them for it.

The official name of our government preschool was too long for a child’s mouth: the Beijing First Kindergarten of the Second Artillery Corps of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. So we all called it Er Pao, ‘Second Artillery.’ We ate breakfast and lunch at school. On most days food was egg-drop soup with tomatoes, then fried rice. We had to bring our two issued bowls—light, insulated metal. I still have mine to this day.

We wore purple jackets on cold days and red-and-gray jackets on warm ones. Every morning we assembled outside on the turf field for synchronized exercise drills. Then came the national anthem, and then the flag-raising.

Girls put their hair up. I wanted to cut mine, once, just below the ears, and cried when I wasn’t allowed. The reason for the rule was that we had dance classes, and consequently a public performance every term—and for appearance purposes, girls had to wear high buns. Boys, buzz cuts.

The school was run by relatives of military personnel. There was Miss Apple, whose brother was a high-ranking political commissar of the Army, and Miss Strawberry, whose husband had served as a lieutenant general. Miss Apple was patient and soft-spoken. Miss Strawberry was stricter, and rarely smiled. There were English and Chinese classes before lunch, naptime at noon, mathematics and choir and dance afterward. During naptime we lay on rows of plastic green cots, eyes shut tight, pretending to sleep for fear of being found out. An older student walked between the beds and lifted the blankets off anyone who dared to be caught awake. I still remember the terror of his footsteps passing by my head, the soft rustle of his pants. The silence was unbearable.

There are only a handful of classmates whose faces return now and then, not clearly but persistently, like things half-recalled in a dream. Qian-Qian, my best friend, a bubbly girl with three ponytails and a tendency to spill her lunch in her lap. Dai, a dark, sniffly boy who was too old to pee his pants but did anyway when Miss Strawberry screamed at him for not finishing his weekly homework book. And Yang, haughtier, paler, always hovering near the edge of the room until his mother arrived with her cloying sweetness and soft words for the teacher.

On weekends Qian-Qian’s family and mine often went day-camping together at the Olympic Forest Park, an area on the north end of the Olympic Green. The park had been built for the 2008 Summer Olympics and boasted a lake, gardens, woods, artificial wetlands, and large-scale fields of sunflowers and marigolds.

Olympic competitions had been held in three large stadiums in the park. I was born in the weeks of the Games, and my parents always thought I’d get into sports, but I never did until my later teens. I remember staring up at the structures and thinking they looked like alien spaceships—huge, silver, impossibly far from anything else I knew. Something adults understood but never cared to explain. Qian-Qian and I sat on a bench with our steamed sesame buns, too young to care much about where we were, only that the sunflowers were taller than we were, and the air smelled like cut grass and thermos lids, and the sky was a deep, deep blue. We blew on dandelions and made crowns from willow branches. We fed the stray Anatolian shepherd puppies that lived in a clearing in the woods. We collected bulrushes. And then, at the end of the day, we drifted off on the subway ride back home and feigned deep sleep when our stop arrived, hoping our parents would lift us into their arms and carry us the rest of the way—as if we were still too young to walk, too loved to be left behind.

A few blocks from my father’s workplace was a café sunken a few steps below the sidewalk. We used to go there sometimes, my mother and I, while we waited for him to get off work. Inside, the windows were squat and set high on the wall. The stalls underneath them were warmly padded. Once, she bought me an ice cream bread bowl, a loaf of bread hollowed out like a cradle, vanilla ice cream melting long before I could finish the edges. Just two years later, my mother would make this same dessert for me in the kitchen of our Washington apartment home.

My father’s office was not far from the hospital. I remember this because, back then, I was allergic to the pollution in the city and had IV infusion sessions at awful hours, often after midnight. On those days, we’d sleep at his workplace. I can still see the eighth-floor lobby: the recliners, the thick cushions with a little too much give, the fluorescent lights left on but dimmed. I would lie neither asleep nor awake, listening to the steady breathing of the machines, picking out faces in the coarse carpet. And soon, time passed like it always did, unnoticed until it was gone and the weak dawn light had begun to filter through the shutters.

Beijing International Airport, Spring 2014

My mother was at the Delta lounge counter, arguing in a tone just shy of pleading. Behind her, a white woman, hair lacquered into soft curls, smiled primly and stepped past us into the lounge. She didn’t even show you her membership, my mother said, her voice rising like the swell of curtains in the wind. The receptionist replied stiffly: She’s a valued customer. I looked up from my book. The maroon pillbox hat, set at an angle on impeccably slicked black hair. The powdered cheeks, paler than those of the woman who had just been waved in. Lips, painted to the exact shade of a maraschino cherry, pursed in distaste. There was something blatant in the way she looked at us, a silent recoil, a I know what you are. Chinese, as if she wasn’t one herself. My mother’s voice pitched upward again.

The door to the lounge swung closed behind the woman’s retreating heel. I watched it vanish. I remember wondering—in horror, in awe: Is this how America’s privilege follows you, even here in Beijing?


Washington, United States, 2014

Winter came late. I sat at the window of our apartment home and watched a squirrel and a crow bicker outside over the half-shell of a peanut. I was curious about this world, this blithe, natural freedom. Pine trees, towering green presences that smelled of clean sap in warmer months and nothing at all in colder ones. Children, wearing puffy red parkas, running against the crisp wind and past the cordoned-off playground area. Cement roads, potholed and home to ever-growing colonies of weeds. I sat three stories up, behind a pane of glass dusted with condensation, and looked out through fans of pine needles, beyond the reception building, toward the steadily rising sun. It felt like a zoo exhibit, and the window was the glass separating the zoogoer from the lion. Separating the watcher from the watched, freedom from fierce apprehension. I wondered then if I was the lion.

In the kitchen, “Ten Little Chickadees” played on repeat. I was learning English, a dense, clumsy language that often caught on my tongue, and so was my mother. On weekend mornings we recited rhymes together, listened to toddler songs, repeated words until they lost meaning and returned again. “Ring Around the Rosie” was my favorite, and I often sang it with some sort of childish pride at school; it wasn’t until years later that I discovered it was, in fact, a rather grim rhyme about the 14th-century plague, and felt a pang of secondhand horror for my younger self.

We were riding the exhilaration of novelty, all three of us. But it was, to my dismay, a downhill ride. Novelty only lasts for so long. In its place came the cold, creeping in through the seams of doors and into our bones while we slept. And boredom, too, a duller kind of ache. I found myself spending long winter hours outside, making angels in the blindingly white snow as my parents sat inside surrounded by paperwork—forms, bills, leases. I was six, and the notion of immigration, the very act of it, hadn’t yet registered for me. Home was wherever we were, and we were simply on a prolonged vacation. It seemed that tomorrow, or next week, or in two months, we would be flying back to Beijing in that godawful plane cabin, an indiscernible distance above the cloud-hidden Pacific, accompanied by a hundred strangers and a sloshing cup of Sprite that was warm and flat by the time I drank it.

We had landed in America that spring, just before the end of the school year. The path from our apartment complex to the school cut through a manicured pocket of woods and emerged between two portables on the edge of campus. I was placed in kindergarten, where the teacher, a kindly young woman with startlingly pale blue eyes and a loose ponytail, pronounced my name correctly on the first try. I didn’t know then that this would become quite rare.

That summer, after weeks of quiet deliberation on my parents’ part, we moved into a house. I remember losing a Lego cat while unpacking. I searched everywhere, couldn’t find it, and finally concluded, with immense disappointment, that it had gone down one of the floor vents. For some reason or other, that was the moment I understood: this is permanent, we’ll be staying here, we won’t return to Beijing and we won’t have office sleepovers and I won’t see my best friend again. I don’t remember how I reacted to that realization. I only know that the first few months in our new house seem to have vanished completely, as if they’d been blotted out with white correction tape. How is it that the image of Beijing is, even now, so acutely carved into my mind, yet the same cannot be said for my early recollections of Sammamish?

A selective memory lapse of sorts? The brain tends to shelve away what it cannot bear to relieve. People laugh when I say this, tell me I’m being melodramatic, that I’m catastrophizing my life. But maybe this is what happens when you’re a child plucked from one life and thrown, never gently, never by will, into another. Everything becomes too messy and terrifying to hold still. It’s hard, then, not to dramatize or revise events. Memory buckles under that kind of pressure. It erases and rewrites. It colors in the blanks where it cannot, will not, comprehend what has happened.

Still, like most children, I adapted quickly. I passed my ESL exam with flying colors. I made friends at a school I would later leave and never return to, friends whose names I remember but whose faces I do not.

Our second summer passed almost without notice. We watched the Fourth of July fireworks behind the City Hall and didn’t think of the war behind it: the muskets and declarations, the horses and broken treaties, the midnight rides and bloody victories, the sad Georgian-style homes shadowed by years of violence. We didn’t think at all of the Founding Fathers who rose, in their fine-coated glory, from a scorched revolution to declare national independence and an unapologetically bigoted vision of autonomy.

It wasn’t ours, and we didn’t ask it to be. We took simple joy instead in the dazzling blooms of color in the darkening night sky, the gleeful shouts of children with glow sticks wrapped around their wrists, the smell of sugary smoke in the air. The fireworks crackled like thunder. I remember the way my chest quickened with each burst, though I didn’t know at the time if it was from excitement, fear, or both, only that something inside me had vivified, thumped into existence.

In September 2015, I stepped into what would become my school for the rest of my elementary years, a second home of sorts, a place I still see impressed on the backs of my eyelids like a Polaroid. The pebble-jammed traction treads on the metal ramps to the portables; the Golden Acorn plaques hanging proudly in the main lobby; the kitchen where I volunteered during lunch, with its commercial-grade sink brimming with neglected steam pans and, in the far corner, a ceramic washbasin that was nearly ornamental in its unreserved fragility. And always: the line of tall pines at the side entrance, where buses would come and go in convoy-like files, brakes hissing, doors folding open with pneumatic sighs, canola-yellow bodies flaring against the drab expanse of the covered basketball courts.

It was under the subdued canopy of those pines, under the faint, sibilant hush of wind passing through the browning needles, that I spent most recesses. A wire mesh fence separated us from the real forest, an unruly tangle of undergrowth and branches. I remember slipping my hand easily through the fence apertures and picking a particular plant from the forest floor—cleavers, though I wouldn’t learn their name until much later. They were sticky and faintly sweet, like a gentler edition of thyme, and I would roll them into bright green balls and stash them in the root hollows of the pines. Somewhere along the way, I had adopted the belief that they had medicinal properties. I’d hold doctor-patient sessions with my friends, wrapping their fingers in those little green things and persuading them, and maybe myself too, that they had some magical healing property. Years later I discovered, to my delight, that my belief wasn’t too far off—cleavers are used to ease swelling, soothe skin issues, draw out infection. Though, in effect, this discovery was more memory than confirmation. Belief alone was enough to hold truth back then. And wasn’t that, in its own childishness, a kind of genius?


2025

Spring, or maybe summer. The peony shrub has begun to flower again in the yard, unceremoniously, as if it had never been interrupted by the winter freeze. Blowsy pink petals falling apart at the seams, frizzy gold centers opening like eyes. The bees are up and about again. Dazed, industrious creatures. One hurls itself against the window near my face with a dull thud. I blink, turn away.

There’s little left to look at. The gray of our neighbor’s repainted house presses over our yard like an ill-fitted backdrop. His shutters are drawn. When the wind blows, the loose clapboards clatter like dry bones. Last winter, during the storm that plunged us into darkness for a week, three of his zelkovas gave in and fell. The dents are still there on the fence, in our trough planters, and in the way our poor maple still leans, knocked out of the soil by something assuredly heavier and more disastrous.

I remember when the maple seemed steady, permanent. At the time, I believed permanence was a thing you could grow into as naturally as you grow into your own skin. That it stayed and meant something. Because permanence should hold, should endure, should stand irrevocable—isn’t that what the word itself promised?

But the maple did fall; but the memories did wane; but one day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t. It happened first in China, where I was born but left too young to keep hold of the culture in its entirety. Then here in the States, where I was raised with such conviction only to learn I’d never fully belong.

I get up from my seat and shut the curtains against the sun’s afternoon glare. Here it’s beginning to warm, but it’s still mild for the season. Not like in my hometown, where by now tides of pastel parasols must be sweeping the streets, sunblock coverings over people’s faces, the air lemony with mosquito spray. The seasons come and go earlier, more pronouncedly there.

An ad is playing on the radio on the kitchen counter, something from QFC about seasonal fruits. I’m pouring myself a glass of sparkling lemonade when the news anchor returns.

In a sharp escalation of US-China tensions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the United States will begin aggressively revoking visas for Chinese students. This move will target students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and those studying in sensitive academic fields. Rubio stated that visa criteria will be revised to impose stricter scrutiny on all future applicants from China and Hong Kong. The policy has already sparked backlash from Beijing, which filed a formal protest, calling the measure “politically motivated and discriminatory.” We'll continue to follow this developing story.

Here it is, someone telling us we are no longer welcome, we no longer belong. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last. I listen, and I do not cry. I sip my lemonade and think of our first year here. I think of the snow. I think of the chickadee song, the Lego cat, the cleavers. I think of all the things I lived, and how all of them are gone. But I held them in my hands once, pressed them to my chest and face and feet, and they felt real. They still feel real.

I hold my glass and watch the maple tree sway like it’s trying to nod yes, yes to something I have not asked, have forgotten to ask, should ask soon.

What is immigration, if not a long forgetting?

So I sit here. Soon, the dark comes down outside. The lemonade turns flat. And I think, perhaps I was never meant to belong.

Perhaps that, too, is a kind of becoming.