East of Beijing

I got my American citizenship last Thursday, on September 22nd, 2022, at 1:30 EST.

For all intents and purposes I just had to dot some i’s to get here. The certificate was a formality. I’ve basically been American to everyone around me since 2015. Ever since I started going to school in Michigan, I’ve started introducing myself as from South Dakota instead of the requisite “from Beijing, but grew up in South Dakota” before. It’s much easier, and at this point, it’s more true.

My family’s trinational now, too, I guess. One Chinese, one Canadian, and one…American. In a way it’s always been like that. I left a lot of who I was supposed to grow up to be and swapped for a newer version when I immigrated.

My dad already grew up.

One of the sadder times I remember was the first time I returned to Beijing after I’d moved, in seventh grade or so. Of course, I got the flak expected for someone who was supposed to be the heir of a family and couldn’t speak the goddamn language well, but it more depressed me how…elegant my father was in Beijing. I’d known him as the man who couldn’t speak english without stumbling and addled himself in social situations at that time; my teenage self was really somewhat embarrassed of him, but here he knew everything: the lay of the city, valence of its people, a command over language with empirical precision, a beautiful way of speaking Chinese that I try and fail to emulate everytime I speak or write with English.

I had and have never seen him this comfortable in America. That was how much he gave up to move here. I think a part of him knew what he was leaving when we stepped on that plane in 2008. If I was him I don’t know how I would’ve done it.

But I guess I get to vote now. I guess I get to belong to a country. I was kind of stateless for a long part of my life: I belonged in America, but not officially, and I had long lost my way in interfacing with China with ease. It left me in the middle of nowhere, on null island, and I guess I’m glad I finally scrubbed that asterisk. A part of me was almost expecting a federal agent to come out of the pews and send me back right then and there. A part of me has been expecting that for the past 12 years. I guess I made it. I guess I’m happy.

I can’t go back to China now. COVID protocols still hold stringent and no one except for citizens can travel in or out.

I can’t help but feel like I’ve lost an intangible part of myself, whether that’d be good or bad. I’m American now, and there is a part of me that is so blessedly happy that I am, in all definition, here now, that I can watch football on fall weekends and barbeque on summer afternoons, that I can sing and dance and be allowed to live without this subtle recontextualizing of who I was, something I didn’t even notice affected me much until it was unapologetically gone. But, at the same time, I can’t help but think of my dad, can’t help but hold on dearly to something that has long since disappeared in all but sibilant, papery whispers, can’t help but be dearly mad at what they took from me, a hole in the universe everytime I say “under god” in the pledge of allegiance, every time I walk into a crowded room and can’t help but to notice when it permeates of whiteness, everytime says my name. It’s tianyǚ — the rain, the universe, not yù — prison, or shower. Not close. There’s a reason I’ve went by Darrin.

I’m still glad I’m here. I feel it every morning I wake up in Ann Arbor and the sun sifts through my window, and I look out to trees beyond the horizon. When I drive alone on the interstate. The fifteen minute walk back home after say goodbye to friends on a saturday night. Every moment. Every passing second of stimulus. Everyone is so deeply fractured, broken in a postmodern world, but there’s a lot of good things in America. I can stand here, on the fourteenth floor of my apartment, and see the future, however uncertain or harrowing it might be. I can’t do that in China. I think that’s how my dad did it.

I normally don’t share shit like this, but I thought it might be important. If you’re the type who likes a neat moral truism to every fable, then take this: tell your parents, if they are to be loved, that you love them. Text them. Call them. I don’t care how awkward it might potentially be. And wake up tomorrow and take a minute, 60 seconds out of your life to lay there and take it in. America is a good place.