Suburbia

That’s why you would, while traversing the vast and lonely world, reminisce more furiously about suburbia.

When it comes to goodbyes, I’m experienced, or so I thought. Last summer, I said goodbye to skipping school for a Starbucks run under the 90-degree California sun. Before that, I said goodbye to lunch under woven canopies that never stopped the rain from wetting our food. Further back, I said goodbye to the comforts of motherland and native tongue. Moving across the country for college? It’ll be a piece of cake, I told myself as I hugged my brother and bid farewell to my parents. During my last couple days at home, Dad kept repeating how “by the time you leave for college, you will have already spent 93% of the time you will ever spend with us.” I didn’t pay much mind to it then. Before I knew it, I was out the door.

Arriving in New Haven was disorienting: the chaos, welcomes, dragging-suitcases-across-campus, unfamiliar faces. The Vineyard Vines, the way people say “bubble tea” instead of “boba,” the fact that Shake Shack, instead of In-N-Out, took center stage in the town, the sheer number of people from New Jersey. New, for sure. But different is good, right?

At first, I agreed, sentimentality is overrated. But as I lay in a tarp tent on the First-Year Outdoor Orientation Trip, rain tapping the nylon, I was overcome by a sudden longing. Newness became fear, and fear graduated into longing for home. I started to miss a lot of things. The nights when Dad sat in front of his computer, crossing off items on a list: ropes for climbing, boots for hiking, sprays for bug bites, down jacket for winter, bedding that must be Egyptian cotton with 800 thread count. Some from Amazon, some brought all the way across the ocean in family friends’ suitcases. The warm smell of tofu fried pork belly with green pepper, and Mom knew just the amount of spice to add without having me chug down pots of water. The way Dad walked by my desk at exactly midnight with a palmful of vitamins before he went to bed because he knew I always forget them. 93%, I thought. Maybe he was right.

On one of the first nights of elementary school, all the kids scrambled out of the dorm to play jump rope on the moonlit field. I pulled the teacher aside and pointed to the apartment building barely visible behind layers of leaves. “Look, that’s my home.” On one of the first nights in the US, after coming back from Denny’s and trash-talking American food, I sat on the balcony of our new house and sighed, “this doesn’t feel like home.” Mom looked up at the blank ceiling, her smile forced and bitter: it didn’t feel like home to her either.

We always took on the shifts and goodbyes together, me and my family. Nights in the elementary school dorm were lonely, but every weekend, I went home. Then we would drive across the city to East Lake, where cherry blossoms bloomed by the pagoda in the spring and water lilies roamed the lake surface in the summer, the smell of algae and rain would populate the car. When we first moved to the suburbs of LA, we endured the miscommunications with the water meter together, the unwillingness to engage with Home Depot employees together, the too-afraid-to-order at restaurants together. Until that common denominator was ripped away from me, I never quite grasped its value.

For the final get-together with my high school friends, we watched The Farewell. My favorite scene was the ending, when Awkwafina stops in the middle of the bustling New York streets and shouts at the top of her lungs. The sound ripples all the way back to her hometown in China, scaring a flock of birds out of the tree by her grandma’s house. It makes me wonder sometimes, when I scream in the shower at 1 a.m. hoping none of my floormates notice, would my family hear me? Is Mom tending to her succulents? Is Dad compulsively wringing the clothes out of the washing machine for the fifth time? Are they alright?

But that’s the story of growing up. You become more and more alone until you’re the only one left on the road. When I was young, I thought I could be anything — Premier of the State Council, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, scientist discovering the next big thing. I didn’t know I would volunteer at two research labs and end up hating both. I didn’t know my dad was detained by the Communist Party for two months under false allegations. I didn’t know I missed the recruitment mark for my elementary school by two points and wouldn’t have been able to attend if not for the 5,000 Yuan my mom gave to her friend with a connection.

It might sound like a grim world, but I’d say growing up is not necessarily the process of discovering a darker world. At seven years old, everything was splendid. Now I realize it was magical and wonderful because back then, everythign was simple. The people who loved me shielded me from the complex, the blurry, the despicable. The world is neither intensely beautiful nor extremely horrible. It’s just difficult, and neither the good nor the bad presents the whole truth. Growing up is accepting the complicated world, accepting the gap between reality and expectation, and still choosing to believe. Believe that your past empowers your ventures in this world and without it, you never would have arrived here.

I guess you always start off wide-eyed about everything. Everything is shiny, everyone is impressive. But the novelty wears off as soon as you realize that any stranger you lay your eyes on might have a totally unique story, a story that remains a mystery to you forever. The planet is filled to its brink with extraordinary people doing all sorts of things. That’s why you would, while traversing the vast and lonely world, reminisce more furiously about suburbia.

Nowadays, when I go home, I get reprimanded less for waking up at noon or staying out late or eating too much In-N-Out. It’s good. Different and good. I also get phone calls from home. I dread them sometimes because I know Mom would be pressing me to join club swimming, or badminton, or go to calligraphy class, things that I refuse to find the time to do. But it’s ok, it’s all love, I tell myself. It’s all love.