Author: Dingzhong Ding
I sit by the kitchen counter and sip my morning coffee, watching the croissant grow puffy, crisp, and buttery. It starts to crumb and blazes with a shade of gold that melts under my gaze, just like the ones I would order at the nearby Starbucks on a lazy afternoon, back in Arlington, Virginia. I would have already texted my parents to say that I was staying at school for lacrosse, but they would know all too well that I was tucked away in a corner, silently listening to the exhale of the whipping cream and the hiss of the espresso machines. There I was, alone, but safe.
Arlington, Virginia
Arlington, Virginia will always have a special place in my heart. It was the place where my disillusionment broke into a million crumbs and pieces. But it was also the place where I learned to live on crumbs, and piece together what little I had.
I bid farewell to my city, Shanghai, and travelled to the United States in 2018. In a way, I was answering to a long-awaited beckoning call from this country thousands of miles away. It felt right. It felt easy. It never crossed my mind that who I was and who I represented in America was worth reminding, but soon I realized that America would never let me forget it.
Soon after I started at my new school in Arlington, Virginia, it became apparent to me that I was different, and was treated differently. Though fluent in English and capable of communication, I was placed in the lowest level of English classes where we were taught rudimentary grammar and punctuation; in history classes, when the topic of communism of broached, I was asked if we only had one brand of toilet paper in China like in the Soviet Union decades ago; in science classes, vaguely interested friends casually inquired if all Chinese people ate dogs, and if I had eaten a dog. Mildly insulting though they were, these stigma-charged comments and questions were taken with good humor and given the benefit of the doubt. What truly devastated me was not the misunderstanding, but the loneliness.
It sounds cliche to say one feels lonely in a crowded room. But when I sat in a makeshift circle in a gym packed with students, wearing shorts that barely fit me, thinking about the last sentence I read in the book that I left in the locker room, with a million voices buzzing incessantly by my ear, that was precisely how I felt. I should have known better than to believe that reading novels in English and watching American television didn’t make me an American, nor did it give me superpowers that allowed me to blend in seamlessly into American culture, or even just into a conversation with Americans. A stranger to reddit memes and YouTube sensations, who was I to spark an interesting conversation, and who were they to take interest? The world was closing in on me, and I hid away deeper into the shell I had built for myself. I was drowning, silently and helplessly, in the locker room, the cafeteria, the school bus, and there was no one around to witness it.
It occurred to me that no matter how much cultural content I consumed, there would always be an insurmountable crevice between me - us - and America. Disillusioned, I had fallen into that crevice thinking in was a puddle.
Boston, Massachusetts
The Harvard Daycare Center is probably as far as my memory extends. At age 5, I travelled to the United States for the first time and spent a year in Boston before heading back to China. My memories of Boston are sporadic, but strangely vivid. The colors of wondrous naivety haven’t worn off yet.
It is fair to say that, as children, we didn’t see color, nor did we care about cultural discrepancies. They were concepts much too abstract for us to grapple or comprehend. It simply didn’t matter if the kid we threw water balloons at spoke English or Spanish, had brown or blue eyes, wore straight or curly hair. We were us, and nothing more. I would sit with my father at the bus stop in the snow, him reading a newspaper that I would fetch for him, me doing whatever an impatient child would do, waiting for the shuttle to arrive. When it did, we would exchange pleasantries and a smile with the driver. It was straight out of a Wes Anderson movie: candy-colored, comfortable, at peace. Despite not being able to speak one word of English before I got there, I immediately felt at home.
Ironically, at age 13, sojourning in America for the second time, I became a perpetual outsider, the alien too “legal” to chase out, too different to merge in. This jarring and cruel juxtaposition hit me when I visited my childhood school in the summer of 2019. As I treaded the path I once took as a child, the Harvard Daycare Center, came into view. I stood in front of its unimpressive doors for a while before a teacher came out, presumably alarmed by this stranger peering into the windows. Though I was not invited inside, the poetic part of me realized that it was the perfect metaphor for how my identity had changed as a tourist-slash-immigrant on foreign soil. I was already too “Chinese” to assimilate, too comfortable with my place in a homogeneous culture to place myself in another one. All along I was looking at America from the outside, through a glass window, never truly welcomed inside.
Boarding the plane back to Arlington, Virginia, I understood the crevice better. It was but a small crack from the get-go, but it stretched, widened, and deepened as who I was became more lucid, more complex, and more difficult.
San Francisco, California
I Left My Heart in San Francisco plays on the speaker. Tony Bennet’s soulful voice hums and winds through the thick May air:
I’m going home to my city by the Bay
I left my heart in San Francisco
Maybe I did too.
I have always had mixed feelings towards my cultural upbringing, but I knew my obsession with California sprouted from it. I’ve never actually been to California, aside from the two times I connected flights there, but it seems to occupy my thoughts more than it should. Having grown up on Modern Family rewatches and Lana Del Rey albums, I often wonder what California is like, what people there do on the beach, what say to their family, what songs they play on the 405 highway… Detached from the Chinese culture, I took refuge in my own version of America, and left my heart in San Francisco, among the ranks of the Dumphies in Modern Family, and between the lines of Lana Del Rey’s poetry. California was for me a safe house, a happy place, a mirage of what I wanted to but couldn’t be.
In Arlington, Virginia, when I failed to resonate culturally, I backed away instead of stepping forward, trying to protect the last morsel of my own delusion. Disheartened, I hardened into my most cynical self, complied with and soon turned into whatever was assumed of me and my culture. Before I knew it, I had turned into the model minority who aced every test, who appeased every teacher, who smiled at every insulting assumption. Sure - we all eat dogs. Sure - we are all math whizzes. It was easier to ignore and pretend than to fight back and blend in. Perhaps this is the true dilemma of my generation of “immigrants”: discrimination can be combatted, bias can be cleared, but isolation is intangible, perpetual, and at times, self-inflicted.
“I wish he didn’t have to leave” was what my parents were told at the parent-teacher conference.
I left. So did my American Dream.
It started in California. It died in Arlington. It was buried in Boston.