I visit Chinatown roughly once every two weeks. It’s not exactly a source of comfort; rather, it brings an uncanny feeling. The version of China displayed here exists outside my time period, as if it were frozen in time before I was born, and now I travel here through some sort of time machine.
I will always proudly be the tour guide for anything Chinese for my friends in the city. There's a certain thrill in flexing my not-yet-full-grown cultural knowledge and having others appreciate the little that I do know.
Yesterday, I took my friends to a dim sum place tucked away in Chinatown, a spot I'd never visited before. I was trusted to order whatever I thought was good, including a bottle of yellow liquor about which I knew little.
Flashback, I had my first taste of Chinese liquor when I was 9, on my grandpa’s 60th birthday. He encouraged me not to fear the boldness that our culture has to offer (not in a toxic way). "Adulthood won’t be so scary if you get a taste of it now," he had said.
At the restaurant, the host told me this liquor is common in Southern Chinese culture. It’s buried underground when a mother gives birth and is dug up to be shared between the mother and daughter when the daughter marries. Everyone laughed, joking that I should tell my mom to bury some now so it’ll be ready for my marriage at 42.
Learning about the weight that 18 years—or more—of fermentation carries was beautiful. Drinking is a weighted cultural celebration that makes you feel weightless. How cool is that.
My face used to burn with embarrassment when I realized I was ignorant about things I was expected to know about my culture. But as I became more accustomed to this gap in knowledge, understanding that there’s so much of the cultural world I haven't tapped into, that shameful feeling began to fade. I moved to the US at 16 and have only visited my homeland once in the last 4. I visited in Feburary this year and that experience struck me more with fear than excitement.
There’s nuanced complexity to being caught between two worlds—Chinatown’s version of my culture and my own evolving relationship with it. It reminds me of how much there is still to learn, to rediscover, and to make my own.
Maybe one day, I can weave my culture into my story as those captivating footnotes you can't ignore. Not the kind everyone skips over, but the ones that make you pause and see the story in a whole new light.
