sleepless

I'm exhausted but I can't keep, because there's too much adrenaline in my body. I keep tossing and turning. It's been a really long day. Really enriching, but at the end I'm utterly confused about myself.

I've been at this dyke bar since 1 PM, where the lesbian group met to do interview training for the oral history project. I'm working with someone else to do one of the first interviews. There were a lot of new people, who thought that, besides the fact that I look really young for my age, I also look really innocent, good, like "a blank paper". The annoying thing was, there was this other girl there today, (who has this awesome hairstyle that I want), who was a couple of months younger than me. That's a first, to meet someone younger than me. But they all kept comparing us and saying, well, she looks way more mature than her age, from the way she looks, the way she talks, the things that she say; but you, the way you talk sounds like you haven't had much life experience, and your cuteness will draw out the protectiveness/tenderness in older people. And when we were playing drinking games, hm, truth and dare, they decided to ask me questions that really assume naivety, like "are you a virgin?" Grr... I mean, I don't feel hurt because I know I'm not stupid/immature, but it IS a problem that people think I am when they first see me. I just can't figure out why? what do I give off that makes everybody think this at first?

The girl who's younger than me seems interesting. She says that her parents stopped taking care of her when she was 15, and she's been making her own living, starting from washing dishes, etc. She does sound impressive/mature. But the ironic thing is, I moved out when I was 16 too, and there we are, sitting next to each other, giving such opposite impressions to other people. Maybe it's because she volunteers these biographical information, and talks about herself a lot, but I always feel like it'd be obnoxious to brag and offer people all kinds of information about my life without them asking.

Later on though, this girl suddenly became interested in me because, she says, she can tell that I'm actually rebellious, even though I look really cute and innocent, because she noticed my cartilage piercing. It's sort of a shallow way to judge, but I'll take it :) Too bad I didn't keep talking to her, cuz I got distracted by this German who came to interview the group.

It's a straight German white woman, who doesn't speak Chinese, who's doing her master's thesis on homsexuality in China, by doing a documentary. This is what left me all confused in the end. I really stayed part of the group and just listened to the awkward interview at first. There were several people who could translate for her. And my alliance is with the group, not her. I guess I'm suspicious from the beginning because, first of all, she's a total outsider trying to study a group that she does not identify with whatsoever, besides being female. She brought along this straight German guy, to help w/ the filming, who was so out of place. Plus, she's doing her thesis for a design school, not a queer studies or East Asian studies major; the topic just happens to be this. Which means that she's probably not well-trained in queer theory and stuff like orientalism and standpoint theory, etc. Which means that, after she meets and interviews all these people, who are devoting all their time and energy to do this pioneering work in China, she will go back and submit her thesis. And then what? She will draw up all this human resource, but not benefit the queer community in China in return. Just looking at tonight, this huge group of people stayed at the bar for about 5 extra hrs, after finishing the group training, to wait for her to show up and do the filming.

Well, later on, I started helping translate, and before I knew it, I was speaking some of these thoughts out loud, and by the end, we were pretty much arguing. I said she was an outsider and obnoxious for thinking that she could understand and applying her Western value system here without owning up to it. She said I was in cultural shock and had an inferiority complex and was younger/less wise than her. I got all worked up. I was only trying to make one point: she was talking about all these problems China has, with political censorship, media censorship, gap btw the rich and the poor, and saying such stereotypically Western things like "Communism is completely bad, it's a proven failure," but how many uniquely good things about China has she noticed? I'm not saying that censorship isn't bad, but the bigger picture is, she's so focused on freedom, freedom, freedom, as the most important thing in the world, that she only sees the faults and not the strengths. So you end up only criticizing, and not appreciating. As an outsider, it's easy to see the problems, but how many unique things about China can she name that's good? The problem is that there isn't this balance. So even though she keeps saying that, no, no, she's not saying that Germany is better than China, in reality, that's what she sees. She can name a ton of things that need change in China, but she can't appreciate much of what's already good. So she's only saying the words of a shallow, European liberalism that says "oh, we're all equal," all the while ignoring deep-seated power dynamics, and "of course no one can be completely objective" while saying a while later "I'm doing research, I'm looking in from the outside, but I think you are just protective of China... These things I'm saying [about how freedom is the most important thing and "freedom is life"] aren't Western values, they're my OWN values." Bullshit.

Hm, these kinds of discussions are so unfruitful. She wouldn't budge to any point I made and of course, I think I'm right. That's why I said it. I was exhausted by the end, and I had left the woman I'm seeing outside, in the main room, to continue this frustrating debate in the backroom. But what I did learn about myself is that: wow, I really want to belong in this world. I find myself turning to friends to speak in Chinese, when there's a Westerner there, cause I feel like I'm marking my membership; I'm one of them, not one of you. I HAD to correct this person when she introduced me an ABC (American-born Chinese). But it's not all so pretentious. I found it really awkward to speak for so long in English to the German woman. I think, I have an accent in English again. There's something uncomfortable about the way I have to bend my tongue in English; Chinese feels much better flowing off of my tongue. But at the same time, my Chinese isn't good enough to express everything I want to say. There're still all these vocabulary and ways of speech that I don't know. So in reality I don't completely belong here either. But I don't belong in the U.S. completely either. Ay, I don't belong fully anywhere. I can laugh at this comment: self-consciously, I can see that it's such a typical thing to feel for somebody who's a product of migration and uprooting. It doesn't make it any less weighty, though. I sorta have an urge to abandon my life there, and stay here for a few years. I've made good friends, that i will enjoy getting to know better, and if i keep living here for a while, i will get readjusted and belong again. But I can't abandon my life there. Even though it was such hell when I first went over, the last few years had been so comfortable; I understand American culture thoroughly. Even though some Americans might always see me as Asian and foreign, I'm not really affected, I live quite comfortable in my life, with wonderful friends, because I AM culturally fluent in the U.S. Then, something happened, I remembered Chineseness and got back here. I'm afraid that when I get back in February, I will no longer feel as at home as I did half a year ago, because I will have to put behind all the things that I've rekindled in myself here. I don't want to put them behind though -- they're so precious, but they will make me feel out of place, they will make up another part of myself that I cannot share with everybody in my life. The funny thing is that, I'm often unwilling to talk about American society with friends here, because if I say all these details about American life, it will highlight the fact that I have an intimate relationship with this other world, and mark me more blatantly as not the same as them... I really like this quote from Babyji:

"I had split myself like an atom into many electrons and neutrons. Each subatomic particle danced with a different person and led its own life. But all of me, the whole me, did not exist for anyone but myself."
-Abha Dawesar