Long time no write. I thought I’d have to refill these fountain pens, but it turns out a little bit of hot water will do the trick. There’s still some in left, but the nib is slightly stuck. A dab in hot water and everything resumes fine.

After coming back from China, it seems like all I’ve been doing is housework. I wonder why there’s so much housework to do. It’s not like he hasn’t been doing any housework. In fact, he did so much when I was away and when I first came back. But there are still so many chores. Besides driving him to work every Tuesday to Thursday, I have a pile of regular indoor cleaning to do, plus another huge pile of yard work. He has been quite helpful with a lot of yard work, like leaf-blowing and lawn mowing, leaving me with only skillful jobs such as pruning. I hope things can settle down more after this month, and that I can find my routine very soon.

I have many thoughts after visiting China. Most of them I left on social media, here and there, with much-dramatized descriptions. I’m thinking about what else I can keep to myself by writing in my diary. Much of me has been shaken, or at least, changed, after going back to China. I kept saying that I realized what kind of bubble I’ve been creating for myself for so long, in a way it also means I finally came to realize how other people are different than me and how I’m different than them, and it means my experiences and learnings cannot translate to them at all. I also got a rather direct taste of “complicated context” when I was in China. What people mean when they say something – the words they say, the topics they discuss, are completely normal and perfectly ordinary when understood in their local context. But before, when I saw what they said through the mediation of technology, when I saw those words on my phone and computer screens, I remember I was mostly shocked and full of disbelief that there were people who say such things and have such beliefs. It struck me that I am the abnormal one that stands out, at least when among them, the other Chinese. This only became evident when I returned to China, like a droplet of oil that can’t dissolve into water.

This observation is amusing if you look at it from another angle – I can actually blend into a crowd of Chinese rather well because I am Chinese, much better than I could in the U.S., where I inevitably stand out as a person of color. So what’s happening in China is this: people don’t see me as an outsider because I look just like them and I dress and talk just like they do. But inside of me, I know I’m not one of them since I’ve been away from China for too long and I can only qualify as “a foreigner but one that can speak and write Chinese.”

I got treated as a Chinese while I knew I was no longer.