Guests who could not make the event idly sat around on their laptops and twiddled their thumbs. One particular MS-I-in-waiting, who currently is working as a middle school teacher in China, paused in his Saturday research of loan processes and application procedures to reflect on the difference that a year and seven thousand miles makes. A difference of pacing, mostly. Even though he paid arguably more attention to the minutiae of his future life than his elbow-rubbing peers were doing, that was only because he had the time for it and little else to occupy himself with. Finding an apartment? Investigating his loans? All possible because he only went up to a podium twelve times a week to deliver a lesson plan that took at most three hours every time to create.

But then again, he was also just starting to pay less attention to that life.

His erhu lessons had been on hold for many weeks, and his Chinese had largely stopped improving. He had not run for a few days and the book he had always intended to finish writing had been unsuccessfully terminated three times already. Now and then he would read some primer points about musical synthesis out of a tutorial book he had had to go to Malaysia to find, but mostly only while he was waiting for the food to arrive at his preferred Japanese-style restaurant in the mall nearby his school.

His mind was on other things.

In a brief moment while wandering though the slides of a mandatory loan entrance counseling session online, he remembered that he had a blog that he hadn’t regularly updated for a while. Why was that? It used to be that upon a new experience here, the impressions would burn in his head and demand to be written down into some kind of significant coherence. That happened less and less, he found. At a certain point this year, we all stopped traveling and just started living here. Maybe he should have made more Chinese friends, or stuck to one goal and seen it through instead of splitting his time and pursuing many projects half-assedly. Mom always told me to just do one thing and do it well. Well, at least I found the wisdom of that advice here, and not in school.

In a month he would be 23 years old. Christ. 23? What happened to being 22? He had figured that when this point came he would be a little disoriented by the lost year, even though it was a gap he had intentionally created and planned for. Had it been worth it? Could he play the erhu, did he have a book to show for his time, was his Chinese any better? Well…a little, a few chapters, and kind of. But what about the other, bigger questions that he thought he came to China to uncover? Of self-identity and perspective, of cultural exchange and heritage appreciation? Had he accomplished what he had sought in those?

Had he at least figured out what his questions had been in the first place?

He liked to think that he had, even if an easy summary wasn’t on the tip of his tongue right now. His detailed, if infrequent, blog essays had delved into these investigations in a way he couldn’t easily reproduce pithily. All right. Academic approaches aside, how did he feel? In touch with being Chinese yet?

Yeah, actually. In a strange way, the more he experienced all the fallacies and inconsistencies associated with that notion, the more comfortable he felt with it. And the more comfortable he was with it, the better he could appreciate his community, both Asian American and diverse American at home and abroad, in a more reflexive way, in his gut. He knew it wouldn’t get knotted up by small slights and would stay steady when he did have something to stand up to. Because he knew what it was he was standing on, now. He owned that piece of himself. He knew by the piece’s peace.

And that, he supposed, made it all worth it.

Maybe I’ll go to the Shen Da Chinese Corner sessions these last two months. Why the hell not? Eh. He shook his head and went back to the loan page.

His unfinished novel sat behind the screen.

His future classmates slept.

A life in three parts.

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.