a slow forgetting

Ok, so I have nothing to do here. I might as well do something. Everyone else draws, or paints, I cannot do either. I used to dabble in it, but with years and years between the last time I practiced and now, my clumsy fingers stay still on the paper, uselessly. Just like Chinese, I seem to forget everything once I have no immediate use for it. What makes a person like that? Am I too hedonistic?

I’m afraid I’ll turn into one of those daughters in Amy Tan’s books, realize the value of a culture they’ve thrown away too late, and by the time they do, they’ve already become an outsider. When I go back to China, my uncle said: you have a foreigner’s air, I can tell. And it’s not just the fact that I stumble over my words like a silver trout on the net of my grandfather’s fishing expeditions, flopping everywhere yet going no where. It’s something else, an air, an aura. I think at the time I was secretly pleased, I don’t know. And if I was pleased, what does that say about me? About how I feel about myself? I used to proclaim how China is such a deep, necessary, inseparable part of me. But now it feels like hypocrisy.

When I go back, I show unfathomable excitement for old, out of fashion things. Like the White Rabbit candies we used to eat when we were little, or songs that are 14 years old. Everything I like about China is…no longer China. It no longer exists out there, but only in my preserved memories. As my cousin looks at me with perplexed exasperation, I realize how childish my excitement is to her, and I drop the decade old treasures back where they came from, some lost, tragic corner of a street vendor’s display, belonging to a seller who doesn’t even believe in their magic.

I’m beginning to wonder if what I really feel a connection to is China itself or simply my childhood. But I suppose it is an inextricable part of my childhood—would our family have been so close if we had been immersed in American culture?

But even now, the closeness is dissolving. Those I had shared so much with barely make an effort, and it leads me into a muddled state of confusion and disillusionment.

And if the people were my sole means of having a present connection with my past, then their fading will inevitably lead to a disconnection of myself from whatever I remember. Even now it seems like another life. Can I stop or even slow this forgetting?

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