Fei Liu
WAC M130
Final Paper
Because I am a F.O.B.
The earth under my feet is on the move,
The water by my side is flowing on,
But you always just laugh at my having nothing
Why haven’t you laughed your fill
Why will I always search?
Could it be that before you I will always have nothing?
–Cui Jian, Yi Wu Suo You
The Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4th shook the modern world; a gathering of young educated minds in peaceful protest was stamped out brutally by the police. It was made clear that any feelings against the government were unwelcome and punishable by death. China, who made such an attempt to catch up with the rest of the world in “progress”, was still capable of uprooting a large section of society and in a sense “exiling” them from what was deemed as acceptable. Themes of poverty, political rebellion, and social disconnect are constant themes of Cui Jian’s music. As the acclaimed “Father of Chinese Rock and Roll”, he is one of the first Chinese artists to really push the envelope in terms of lyrical content, evading the censorship bureau with hit songs, and really making the idea of the loneliness felt during alienation a popular subject to breech in the arts. I grew up singing the words to his songs, not knowing what they meant, but just knowing that they sounded like they were important. Lyrics from Cui Jian’s Yi Wu Suo You (I Have Nothing) express the intense feelings of alienation felt by the student protestors from their own country. Although they were physically still in China, they could now no longer call “home” someplace that showed them such violence. They had nothing, no rights, no sense of security, and no sense of impact in their existences. Although “Reflections on Exile” by Edward Said deals mainly with displacement as people are forced to move physically to different countries, the idea of a “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place” can also be applicable to citizens of a country who have felt disconnect from their natural surroundings and places in life. Similarly, people who grow up as a hybrid of two completely different cultures, such as myself, have also felt displacement because they could not find another “home” to fill in the void of the one they just left. Immigrants also understand and feel nostalgia in totally different ways than natives do: they are connected to two different histories and thus feel nostalgia towards both.
I immigrated to the United States at the age of seven with my grandparents, young enough to not have formed any severely deep ties with my homeland, but old enough to be keen on the fact that I had no friends where I came from and will have none where I was about to go. In a way, I was exiled from my native place before I had even left. I had always felt disconnected from my preschool classmates because by the time I was in school, my parents had already left for the States and it was always my grandmother who took care of me. I couldn’t understand why the other children were able to summon their parents to come pick them up after school so in a way, my affair with the jealous state of exile started at an early age. To make matters worse, my grandmother took me out of school a whole school year before we had even departed, drawing an even deeper rift between me and the place I was supposed to be in: the playground at school with friends. Because of this, I played alone most of my childhood, “clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealousy insist[ing] on [my] right to refuse to belong.” (Said) Shortly after, I became a successful immigrant and enrolled in an elementary school in Santa Clara still holding onto that weapon of exile. I recall walking around by myself in the school yard during recess time, singing one of my favorite songs in Chinese almost at the top of my lungs just so people would notice me, what a strange and utterly alone girl I was. “Willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision–which you make more unacceptable because you are in fact unwilling to have it accepted.” I had wrapped the loneliness caused by alienation around me like a blanket made of spikes; I didn’t know how to make friends although I really wanted to, so instead I used the situation as a defense mechanism. While I was singing that song, I would think in my head how I didn’t need anybody else, that I was stronger somehow than everybody else in that school, and that I would be okay just as long as I could sing it.
In this regard, I feel as if the two seemingly polar opposites of nationalism and exile are actually quite similar. Extreme nationalists and those who have been in exile long enough share the mentality of self sufficiency, while nationalists ward off other countries and insights, those in exile ward off those who share the same plight as them. “It is in the drawing of lines around you and your compatriots that the least attractive aspects of being in exile emerge: an exaggerated sense of group solidarity,” Both share pride in their solidarity and uniqueness.
It took me a long time to become acclimated to my new surroundings; I was trying really hard to blend myself into the environment, trying to throw away and disguise my accent, telling my mother to buy me clothes that the other kids in school wore, even changing my name to a character’s from The Babysitter’s Club. But no matter how hard I tried, I was still an “alien” resident, as my citizenship dictated. I was so consumed with the idea of progress that I was trying to reject all connections I had with my home, almost to the point of wanting to sever all ties because I was so desperate to fit in. Lesser developed countries always compare progress and modernization with the West, “to become Westernized” meant in a sense, to catch up with everyone else, to fit into the great scheme of globalization. While rushing towards what I had thought to be the better thing, I abandoned and in a sense, exiled myself from my cultural place. Although I was not around to witness the kinds of things my parents had to go through in order to give me all the things I possess now in the states, I can imagine their process of becoming familiar with American life was even more challenging. The distinction between their views on immigration is clear in the fact that my mother accepted the American ways quicker than my father did; in some ways, he is still holding onto the fact that he is and will always be an alien (even though he has citizenship) by hardly learning the language at all.
Now that I have received citizenship and became officially documented as American, I am in a more liminal space than ever as I went from an exile who was using my alienation as a form of self-protection, to wanting to fit in I was ready to denounce all of my heritage, to finally feeling proud of my background. This final stage was achieved through my acceptance by others and my slow integration into society. If I had never felt like I had a place to belong to, namely the American school system, or developed close bonds with a group of friends, then I would never be able to be at ease and get over the fact that I will never be like the majority of Americans.
This leads me to the topic of nostalgia. I believe it is only possible for one to feel nostalgia if one as been accepted by and feels attachment and sentimentality to one group or another. This way, there is a point of comparison between two things and therefore possible for one to recall to something they miss and cannot have with the current group. Nostalgia is felt when one is comfortable, mind idle, when one daydreams and is reminded of things from their childhood in a wayward glance. If one was not comfortable with their position at the moment, and thinking about the things that they miss from home, that just means they are homesick. Mentioned in Boym’s article, are the exiles who experience nostalgia frequently but do not feel the urge to return home for good.
I am one such example. I feel kinship and nostalgia towards China bur I cannot imagine myself moving back and living there for the rest of my life, or even for more than a year or two. This is because I am already content and comfortable with my life here in the States. If I had lived in China until my teenage years, I think I could probably say that I miss being there, but because I had never developed a complete understanding of life in China, having only lived there for 7 years, I am less attached. I can only say that I feel nostalgia towards things that remind me of snippets of my life there: crowded apartments and balconies on which laundry would hang, the hot summer nights and sleeping in mosquito nets, chickens where my grandparents used to own a farm. None of these snippets are long and constant enough to link together a full memory or a sense of true belonging. I find validity in Boym’s claims about nostalgia as a connection to the homeland without responsibility. Nostalgia is felt towards positive things that one misses, nobody feels attachment towards the negative aspects of any country, for example civil strife, poverty, or racism. One who is able to feel nostalgia is removed from the direct effects of problems in the place of their origin, and thus is not responsible for their actions nor is it likely for them to be deeply traumatized by anything they cannot witness directly.
As a not-so-recent immigrant, I realized through the readings that the nostalgia that belongs to me, is actually split up into three different loyalties: one for the collective memory Chinese share, one for the collective memories of Americans, and the third based on my own personal and immediate experiences. The first is felt whenever I am exposed to imagery that reminds me of things I grew up around, like Chinese opera, or films about the cultural revolution. I have never witnessed these things but I feel deeply connected to them due to the fact that my parents and my parents’ parents have witnessed them. Thus I feel like I own them, and they are apart of me. The second category is full of things from American pop culture in magazines, movies, and television that I started noticing more within the past 5 years or so. I enjoy watching the VH1 I Heart the 80s series and I feel a certain type of nostalgia when I go to Johnny’s Rockets and put in money on the table-top juke boxes because they mind me of the show Happy Days, but this type of nostalgia is only possible because I know what American pop culture is about. I don’t actually feel nostalgia when I see these things, but I understand that what I should be feeling is nostalgia because that is what the American would feel. So in a way, because of the heavy commercialization of things from the previous decades, what ever sensors I have for nostalgia have been sensitized and made more accepting towards American icons. I feel even less responsibility for this kind of nostalgia because there is no history between me and America to back it up.
Due to the fact that I am both an immigrant and an artist (or I’d like to think I am), experiences forcing me to adapt quickly to a certain environment and learning a new language have helped me gain different perspectives. “Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision…exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions”.