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Going Home

"I knew they would take one look at me and see that I didn't belong."

Listen to this Commentary!

By Stacey Leung

Here's a letter my cousin wrote me when I got back home:

Dear Stacey,

How time flies! You have been back to America for a month. And I finished my final exam in early July. Now I'm waiting for the result. As you seen, in China, the students, or exactly say, the whole population are serious to the exam. Everyone thinks that it relates to our future. So we suffer from the stress a lot. In ours opinions, an exam doesn't represent anything, but our parents, even our social take the exam as intelligent standard, in a word, it stands for our abilities. The competition is fierce. How about in your country? It is to be regretted that I accidentally dropped in the exams because of my careless. But maybe I still can enter the Shenzhen University. It lies in the city where my sister works.

I'm very happy to be with you those days. Though I am always silent, I want to talk with you very much. As you known, my character is quiet. And I don't know how to make contact with others. It takes a long time for me to make friends with others. If I'm not familiar with someone, I don't know what to say, and how to get along with him. I'm a little shy.

Later I will pay a visit to Yun Nan with my classmates. But the weather is not very good now. It rains everyday. I'm a little anxious that my travel will be delayed. When I come back, I hope I can sent you some beautiful pictures.

Recently, I have an interest in English. I want to learn it well. When I heard you and Henry talking, I found my English is poor, especially the listening. You talked so fast that I couldn't follow you. In china, they pay more attention to the reading than listening and speaking. Could you name me an English name?

Next time, would you tell me something about your college life and part-time job?

Please give my regard to everyone.

Best wishes.

I was five when my family came to America. It's been almost 13 years since I left the village in southern China where I was born. When my mom announced we would be spending part of our summer there, I was not excited about the trip. I still wasn't when we arrived after a 16 hour journey.

The village my family originates from looked like a storybook scene brought to life. There were people riding bikes, toting cases of freshly picked fruits or a cage of squawking chickens. There was even a wardrobe that fit the characters perfectly; their triangle straw hats ("cho mo") and clothes that could have been mistaken for rags had they been piled on the floor. I felt overdressed in my sleeveless T-shirt and Old Navy overall shorts.

I knew they would take one look at me and see that I didn't belong. I had become an outsider in other ways, besides the way I looked. I don't study 24 hours a day like kids there my age, I don't spend all my time with my family, and I don't weigh 98 pounds.

But it was nice to see my extended family again, and at times I felt like I had rediscovered a missing piece of myself. But most of the trip, I felt stuck with family and completely cut off from the outside world. Every night I went to bed thinking the same thing: I wanted to go home.

Home. To them, China was still my home. "How does it feel to be back home?" they kept asking. But I have a cousin my age who grew up there, and I've become so Americanized that she and I are now almost complete opposites.

School is about 90 percent of her life. With classes running from six a.m. to 11 at night, it's study, study, study and test after test, leaving no time for anything else. Her school may be number one in its province, but what I saw was a boarding school prison.

I used to think that my mom expected too much of me, but as I got older, I realized it was just part of the culture she grew up with. What I didn't see until I went back to China, was the extent to which those expectations go.

My aunt asked which of our aunts in America loved us most, meaning who takes us out the most. The question didn't startle me so much as the concept of going places with my aunts. That was when it became clear to me that in China, you don't hang out with your friends, you spend time with family. They are your friends.

The three weeks dragged by, but I was sad when it was time to leave, especially since I was just starting to get reacquainted with everyone.

Now that the storybook picture has changed from overpopulated streets to empty and serene ones, and now that I'm allowed to wander out past the front yard on my own, it feels like the trip didn't really happen. Like the final fading pieces of a dream lingering moments after your mind awakes. I was living a different life there. Now that I'm back, it doesn't feel real, just like a character I was playing.

But I was there, and I feel like I did get something out of it. I don't take the freedom of my life as an American teenager for granted as much. But as the weeks pass by and my memories of China become more distant, so do the lessons learned there

— Stacey Leung is a freshman at UC Santa Cruz.

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