Coming of age in China
In my first week of study abroad in Beijing, with a few semesters of Mandarin class under my belt, I got lost on the way back to my dorm room. I asked a slight young lady for help, and I expected her to respond with rapid-fire directions that I would need her to repeat five times for me to fully understand. Instead, she smiled and pointed out that it was easier to show me than to tell me, and looped her arm into mine and walked me back to my dorm.
As a child, I never understood why my Dad offered to give our community rides home from mosque. Now, I understood with vivid clarity what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land and for a kind soul to make it feel like home.
Although I only spent 6 months in China — split between Beijing and Harbin — I arguably grew up in China. I learned how to eat vegetables, which were far tastier in China than in the US. I joined an on-campus extracurricular group at Harbin Institute of Technology and experienced first-hand the feeling of being accepted whole-cloth into a community despite being a total alien. I learned not just how to talk with strangers but to trust them, hitching long-distance taxis between cities and visiting cultural sites along the way.
Today, in the midst of the Coronavirus, East Asians are getting more suspicious glances than usual, especially if they happen to have a winter cold. Some expressions of racism are louder, some softer. I find it unfair that a country that taught me to welcome others and to trust in community is now the subject of xenophobia and suspicion.
There is a wrinkle in my China story — a challenging wrinkle. When my favorite teacher in Harbin took me to a party with her friends, I wore an outfit made from my mom’s saris, which I had gotten tailored in Beijing. Her friends, not knowing that I was an American, asked if I was Uighur. Today, I am afraid of showing up in a country where as many as a million people who look like me and who worship like my parents are detained in internment camps.
There is nothing inherently Chinese about those camps. There is also nothing inherently Chinese about the Coronavirus. We are all susceptible to expressions of tyranny — and we are all susceptible to the fragility of human mortality. Responding to a public health emergency with fears of another race plays right into the hands of those people and forces and tribal instincts seeking to divide us.
Maybe it’s a good time to take a page out of my hosts’ playbook: Perhaps we strive to embody a sense of welcome that melts the worst of our intolerant instincts into the sparkle of wonder.
If we do, we just might have the chance of our lives — the chance to come of age, together, as one.