I’m sitting in a Starbucks – the one at the Coastal City megamall complex a few blocks north of my school. I took the bus to get here thinking that I needed to restock on frozen dumplings and could also use another space heater since it’s getting a little chilly again. But I guess I also just wanted to get out and move around a bit.
For that reason I feel a little silly every time I wind up in one of these Starbucks cafes. It’s guaranteed wifi for my itouch, but still – sometimes I wonder, what am I doing, why did I come thousands of miles to sit in a Starbucks when I am practically from Seattle (close enough)?
It looks like home and feels like home and tastes like home, but it doesn’t sound like home. The ever so slight dissimilarity might be what is getting under my skin.
That or the red holiday cups. Yen asked me if I was going to be lonely over Christmas. I replied that I didn’t feel like it yet since it didn’t FEEL like Christmas – having warm weather unchanged since October, coworkers that don’t mention it and not yearning for a cathartic break after an apocalyptic finals season; these things made me forget that it is already December and that I’ve been in China for more than four months now.
But a gust of cold wind and the darkly sweet taste of a grande toffee nut latte both sink into my bones like home, like reminders that shimmer imperfectly against the traffic fumes along the bus stop and the glittering neon of Chinese mall advertisements, like the Chinese that I hear in the air always flickering in and out of the borders of my understanding, with differences ever so discreet and mild but still like the whispers of a simulacra telling me that I’m not quite in the right place after all.
Hum. ‘Darkly sweet’ is kind of a poor descriptor there. A lightning bug compared to the right evocative word (although I’m aware that the consumer charm of the words ‘toffee nut latte’ kind of spoil the effect from the start). Something to work on, I suppose.
