I miss China.
I first realized this when I went out to San Francisco’s most lavish dim sum restaurant with my family. The food was delicious, but the whole time I had to struggle not to think about how the green beans were cooked at Dongbei, my favorite nearby eatery, or how the shrimp dumplings measured up to the ones on offer at the Dumpling Restaurant.
It only got worse from there. Once again I found myself mystified by the strange practice of “tipping.” My friends wondered aloud why I looked both ways about ten times before finally getting up the nerve to cross the street. I use the horn a lot more than I used to when I drive. I informed my parents that they are buying the wrong brand of gin. I can’t for the life of me understand why everything always costs so much.
The whole thing came to a head a few days back, when I explored San Francisco’s Chinatown with a couple friends. The restaurant we settled on had food that I would have liked before I’d gone over there, but after eating dollar-a-plate heaps of fresh, spicy, warm food, our eggplant, beef, and pepper squid didn’t do it for me. I didn’t eat that much.
Out on the street was better; I almost automatically brushed off the proffered menus with a bu yao or a bu yong. When I bumped into someone, I automatically duibuqi’ed after them and xiexie’ed every car that stopped to let us cross the street. The souvenir stores that litter most of the street contained the same fake lighters and counterfeit perfumes I’d seen (and bought) on the other side of the Pacific, and for similar prices. I tried to tell my friends about all the weird stuff I’d seen only to realize that the story really only made sense in my China friends’ and my weird patois of English and Chinese.
About a month ago, I couldn’t wait to leave China and come back to America, a land where people mostly speak the same language as me and where things make sense. Things don’t seem to make as much sense here as they did when I left. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I wish I was still there, but I know now that China has grabbed hold of me, probably for good. When I left I was ambivalent about whether or not I wanted to come back. Now I know I do.
