Nostos for Return

In three weeks I’ll leave for the motherland on a Yale-funded flight, but I thought I’d start blogging now. Something to ease myself into this whole writing-with-regularity thing, before I fall under nigh-contractual obligation to report weekly from the province of my birth. Here I should insert some wistful encomium to Heilongjiang— the Black Dragon River, cold Amur, under whose frothing and watercrested shadow I guess I toddled my first steps. "Frothing and watercrested shadow"-- yeah, I think that's fauxetic enough. Maybe I should angst over how I don’t remember anything— just a soft, sooty impression of dark and narrow buildings, which sheltered me for the first three years of my life. For all the other Yalies going to CET Harbin, the trip to Dongbei—the far Northeast— will be a novelty. But me— I guess I'll be coming home.

That’s why I’m so glad Light encourages blogging. I mean, I’m the flakiest diarist ever. I’ve got a closet full of half-filled journals, covered with the glitter of elementary school, the baroque florals of middle school, the slick faux leather of high school. I could see my handwriting evolving but never my (lack of) perseverance, always too scared of the blank page’s white insistence. But maybe this will be okay. Half of blogging is photoblogging, and I live with my Canon Powershot strapped to my wrist, compulsively clicking at every banal beatitude and dust-mote tragedy I encounter, because I hate to be hostage to my own memory.

I don’t remember things very clearly— I’ve forgotten Harbin. I went back one summer with my parents, three years ago. We sipped kvass, fermented bread drink, as we wound between bakers’ stalls in the morning market, and I stared through the lens of my camera at the onion-domed Church of St. Sophia. I learned to talk a little bit like a Dongbeiren, a real Northeasterner, but Harbin itself lingered on in my weakish memory as nothing more than dreamy Russophile haze. It’s all cobble-stoned streets, with signs subtitled in Cyrillic.

I don’t want to forget this time. Writing weekly will help me keep a record, as long as I can stick with it this time. I hope this blog doesn’t become another powder blue notebook shoved under my faded summer dresses, filled with just five pages of impatient script.