중국사람이에요

There used to be moments talking to my mother about nationhoods when she would respond to my grasping claims of American identity with:  "周为, you can be as American as you want to say you are, but at the end you're still 中国人."  It's ironic because these days I say 한궄사람아니에요 almost every day, and likewise 중국사람이에요 is more important to me than ever.  Tricky positions.

This was how it became clear to me why I couldn't spend the 추석 holidays in Seoul.  The costs to bring myself to 杭州 for the holidays were more than discretionary.  This was the frame of my week, the root of my impressions of my fifth trip to China.

My 中国 is mediated by the people whose experiences I try to access.  It lies in a frame is held tenderly by my parents, who deny the leaks that happen at the corners when I reach for cultural ground outside of their reach.  Europe, Latin America, the American West and the American city.  I call them leaks that's what it feels when language comes to you and leaves from you - a trickle, a flush.  While I stood at the train station at 杭州 gathering the hundred characters or so that I know, I re-saturated myself with Chinese as a month's worth of Korean trickles and fifteen years of English sweat a little, too.

Things I did: Entertain family friends.  Feel awkward about my educational privileges.  See family.  Talk international politics with my cousins.  Eat a little 月饼.  Visit the Shanghai Expo.   Learn the 上海 metro and the 杭州 buses.  Wonder a little about my place here, but everywhere really.  Six days.

한궄사람아니에요 = I'm not a Korean person

중국사람이에요 = I'm a Chinese person