Shantih shantih shantih

your kiss
is a shallow grave

i am coming back

- Saul Williams, "She".

I've been in Texas for two days, will be at Yale in ten. Still waiting for the language to click back into place post-pledge. My thoughts, when verbal, flow in this tinny cacophony of Chinglish, English strung with Chinese in bright insistent bells. So I pause for a few seconds, leaden-tongued, to translate my emails inside my head, and I speak to my parents in their third-culture native tongue, which is neither here nor there.

This blog post is proof enough, of my old bashful ineloquence made weirder by the two months of no English-- my English now is bad poetry and rust. I think in cliches, in bizarre variegated metaphors. (This can't be the influence of Chinese, which is a language with propriety, certain adjectives pairing only with certain nouns in a courtship like a pavane.) I synesthete; I write on a slant, struggling.

Language pledge is liberation. Or, maybe just for me. (And people like me, by which I mean heritage speakers, or antsy, hackish sometimes-poets.) But what I've really missed is antimeria.

Again, I'm talking a lot, but I feel like I don't have anything to say. Have some pretty pictures of St. Sophia at night (when the kids play hackysack by the steps of the church and the moon is outshone by the streetlamps-- I have cut all this out of the frame). This is me trying to fulfill my obligations to Light and my promises to myself, in a way that feels tediously artificial. But I mean, that makes sense. I'm mildly jet-lagged, gingerly nostalgic, coming back into English, rapidly forgetting Chinese. Theoretically reading Harry Potter in translation in order to temper that last one.

Of course I miss my friends, especially the ones I won't see again in two weeks (although I think there's still the question of how I'll relate to them as Lucia, when they've known me for so long as Qiaopan). How lucky to be from the plurality institution, where dancing with Mary and talking literature with Young was a part of my life before Light. The others-- we've joked that we're more likely to run into eat other in China than anywhere stateside. Good thing America's government and her schools have such deep pockets when it comes to students of Chinese.

I miss being in a walkable city, having access to jianbing, mangosteens, and Korean food right down the street. I miss taking taxis to the tea market after class, making conversations en route with the cabbies who variously quizzed me on the US housing market or mistook me for Korean. But that's not enough to justify how I'm feeling now, wanting to go back as soon as possible. CET can't be recovered, but China can.

In a while (I promise hesitantly) I'll dissect this feeling some more-- this strange Saul Williamsian urgency to return to the motherland. It's not just that there's so much I haven't learned but want to, so much I still need to see-- these are all cliches, but they're true. And it's not that I like myself more in China. The opposite is true, I think. It's not that I'm more myself, just that I am more. For whatever reason, I'm a romantic only on Eastern soil-- a double-edged sword, but addictive enough I guess, like the strange sweetness of renshen wulong tea. I can't hold to that old pledge, feeling only socially productive emotions. But more on this later.

All of this is really terrible prose, I think-- hard to tell anymore. In Chinese I grew used to speaking in absolutes, in epigrams, like I'm swishing a fan or holding a sword all the time, like I'm projecting a faceful of operatic makeup. I've forgotten how to tone it down. Maybe I'm eager to go back so I can talk like a dramatis persona again, certainty issuing out of my mouth in speech bubbles, this dizzying unreignedness I don't allow myself in English.

I'll end with this-- thank you, Light/Greenberg. My words are clumsy and inadequate, but thanks all the same.

(I'll be back. My goal is to keep writing till I run out of the right lightly desaturated photos, and that might be a while in coming.)