Not all those who wander are lost
I think my next tattoo will say waiguoren, Mandarin Chinese for foreigner (literally outside-country-person.)
This visit to my family in California has been instructive. My mother is upset with my father, almost constantly, and has been talking to me about it. It’s disconcerting on one level, though positive on another: she’s asking me for advice, because I am in a successful relationship. She has been married to my father for over thirty years, and is asking me for relationship advice, because in a few years of marriage I seem to have gleaned things about the art of communicating others and standing up for myself that she seems to have lost out of long habit.
The last time I came to see them, I learned how much I was like them; I found out where I’d learned to talk too loudly, quickly and forcefully for most of the outside world. These days they talk more loudly, quickly and forcefully than I can handle, and I dodge interaction after a little while so that my brittle newfound social courtesies won’t crack under the strain.
At the same time, I find myself becoming more and more grateful to have all these wonderful, crazy people in my family, and find I’m perhaps teaching them, perhaps learning from them at any moment.
I suppose that’s adulthood for you.
The Dana Street Roasting Company, in Mountain View, has a device by which you can pay for your coffee with your cellphone. No kidding! The YMCA at Cuesta Park has exercise bikes equipped with 3-d route simulators, and even a simple video game in which the user may pedal across a fantasy terrain to collect tokens and gain points. It’s definitely the age of technological decadence - am I in California or in William Gibson’s Tokyo?
On the way to the gym, I stopped by the location of the grocery store where I used to eat lunch every day, when I was working at Radio Shack. The store itself has moved, and been replaced by a Chinese supermarket.
I walked through, and was hit by an intense sense of vertigo. The aisle layout and sign style were the same as when I was buying lunch there, but now I heard conversation and intercom announcements in Mandarin, and saw products laid out on shelves in configurations I remembered from living in Yangzhou.
There is here.
The mountain came to Mohammed.
And I realized, as I walked on - too flummoxed to even stop in the Radio Shack! - that the message was perfect: I’m waiguoren here too, and everywhere I go, and that’s a good thing. Being a foreigner isn’t just about being lost or lonely or feeling strange. It’s also about the sense of wonder that comes to us when we see something clever or new or unlike our habitual ways; the recognition of another person, “You are different from me, and in being different, you are sacred.” In standing outside, we see a wider picture.
And seeing my parents reminds me that sometimes, often, it’s good to stand outside. That sense of wonder is why we travel and seek and love.