When I was 20, I had the option to study abroad for a semester in Spain and chose to do so in Sevilla, a southern city that I believed—unlike a modern metropolitan center like Barcelona—would require me to improve my Spanish quickly in order to survive. I wanted to be thrown off the cliff of language learning, purposefully seeking out the most rural, non English-speaking option available to me so as to accelerate my linguistic growth.
Still, I was eager and overconfident. I had studied Spanish throughout middle school, high school, and was halfway through a minor in college, after all. Surely, after toiling over the language for nearly eight years, I would at least be able to get around—no problem.
I was wrong.
Arriving in Sevilla for the first time at two in the morning with a couple massive suitcases trailing behind me, I hailed a taxi and tried directing my driver to where I would be staying temporarily—a small Airbnb guest room in the middle of the city until I moved in with my Spanish host family a couple days later.
“Voy al centro de la ciudad,” I said to him, excited to finally put so many years of classes and homework to use. I’m going to the city center.
He asked me a follow-up question then. I stared back at him blankly.
“Qué?” I asked, hoping that the words would become clearer if he repeated them. I must have not heard him right; maybe I was just too tired from the long flight. He asked the question again, and then once more. But through the dropped endings and heavy drawl of the Andalusian accent, the truth slowly reared its undeniable head: I couldn’t understand a damn thing.
Eventually, I pulled out a printed copy of my Airbnb reservation and just started pointing at the listed address, giving the driver a thumbs up with my eyebrows arched in question, do you know where this is? He glanced for a moment at the paper and nodded in affirmation, transporting us into the quiet night. As smoothly paved speed ramps gave way to bumpy, cobblestoned streets, I let myself sink into the passenger seat, my head hung in slight disappointment but also carrying an amused chuckle about it all—a budding realization that maybe I didn’t know what I was actually getting myself into.
I stared out the window in a dreary haze, my eyes shifting in and out of dreamy focus. Compact buildings sprang up around us on both sides, but I couldn’t make out more than their mounded shadows in the dark. The driver suddenly stopped. I turned to look at him as he emphatically pointed at the ground, an alternative way, I suppose, of communicating with a non-Spanish speaker like myself, We’re here.
Except, I had no idea where here was. It sure as hell didn’t feel like the bustling city center that I was expecting; I mean, I thought that there would at least be some more streetlights. But it was my first time in Spain, and I was 20, and the local, seasoned taxi driver insisted that we had arrived, so I handed him a wad of euros and stepped out onto the barely lit street, my enormous luggage in tow.
I pulled out my phone then, trying to conserve every moment of a measly 3% battery, and messaged my incredibly generous Airbnb host who was still waiting for me to arrive in the middle of the night. I sent her my location and was swiftly informed that I had been dropped off about 15 minutes walking distance from her place. I glanced at the upper-right corner of my screen—2%. “Oh boy,” I said aloud to no one.
I opened Google Maps and memorized to the best of my ability when to turn at what streets, clicking off my screen as soon as I was done in order to save power. Without another soul in sight, I set off into the dark, murky city center, my large suitcases leaving an echoing trail of tuk tuk tuk tuk behind me as they glided across the uneven cobblestone beneath my feet. I hoped and prayed that my battery would somehow last me until I was able to meet with my host because otherwise, I was screwed, to put it mildly.
And yet, I smiled with the recognition that the universe had granted me exactly what I asked for. I wanted to be kicked out of familiarity, fully thrown into the deep end, to joyously thrash around before conquering this new, uncomfortable adventure. As I continued making my way through the dim core of the city I’d be inhabiting for the next five months, random spurts of laughter escaped from me, my grin wide. If this was only night one of my semester abroad, then so be it, shit, bring it on!
Sevilla’s renowned Las Setas in the daytime.
Moving to Spain was the first time I got a real taste of what my parents must have felt when they moved to the American South for graduate school in ‘91. Unable to fully speak the English language and with only a few hundred U.S. dollars to their name, I wondered if they felt a similar hunger for adventure landing in a new country like I did. I was aware, of course, of the crucial difference between our experiences—I was plugging in with the knowledge that I could plug out a few months later. My parents, in contrast, were standing out on the rocky ledge of unmoored adult existence, staring out at the open ocean of possibility for their lives, their path back home cut off by stifling political dogma.
With a well-humored smile, my mom often tells me the story of when they first arrived in North Carolina, how she expected the entire country of the United States of America to look like New York City from the movies: modern, busy, cosmopolitan. When instead she was confronted with the grazing cows and yellow pastures of Raleigh-Durham, she cried for days.
As strange as this may sound, I didn’t think much about our immigrant status as a family growing up. I knew that I obviously was not blonde or blue-eyed, but I didn’t think about how our awkward existence in this 95% white suburb of Chicago came to be; it simply just was. We had arrived, and that was it, a given fact of how I would spend the next twelve years of my life—toeing the line between two extremely distinct cultural worlds, spending nine months out of the year in Barrington, Illinois, and then, like birds migrating home at the turn of the season, flocking to China as soon as school released us into summer.
Mine was a Peking duck-loving, Sperrys-wearing existence. Childhood was split between weekend sleepovers at the pristine houses of my horse-riding white friends and playing in the streets of old town Beijing. Thanksgiving was a wonderful gathering with other Chinese-American families in the community, a smorgasbord of Chinese cuisine and microwaved mashed potatoes from Costco, the kids’ table complaining about wanting to try some real American turkey. Mom and dad, separated from their loved ones by a formidable 6500 miles, adapted to the local culture in the ways that they could, offering us a mishmash life of give and take, of fusion and duality. How ironic that the blurry outline of their Chinese immigration to America only started to come into focus when I suddenly found myself in Spain, of all places.
Still, I loved the challenge, living with a Spanish host family that didn’t speak a lick of English. As the only non-Spaniard and person of color in many of my classes at La Universidad de Sevilla, I spent the first few weeks of my time abroad completely unable to understand what my professors were saying in lecture. This was a real problem—it was no small task to comprehend organizational psych in English, and I was trying to do so in a language that was still revealing itself to me.
I was terrified to answer questions in front of my classmates in real time, unable to prepare my words and translate from English beforehand in my head. When my professors did that incredibly effective, annoying thing—calling on students randomly to make sure the entire classroom was kept on its attentive toes—I discreetly pulled out my water bottle for an unnecessary drink, hoping to decrease my chances of being called on when they saw that my mouth was full of water.
One day, still unable to comprehend about 80% of what was being taught, my Social Psychology professor put on a game of Kahoot: an online educational tool that generates multiple-choice quizzes whose questions and test results are exhibited for the entire class to see à la Jeopardy. After each question, a scoreboard is displayed as a way to essentially egg on the top scoring students for answering right and fast. Mercifully, Kahoot’s creators decided to show only the top three scoring players at the conclusion of each game, leaving the remaining scores shrouded in mystery for everyone but the individual players themselves. My sixty Spanish classmates and I logged onto the platform from our phones, hiding behind digital monikers like “El Presidente” and “señor stark.” That day, after a particularly grueling session, I walked home with the secret knowledge that bangzhang had scored 58th out of 60.
I was having the time of my life.
Digital proof that this American would climb 57 spots later that semester, screenshotted to convince my future self that this all actually happened.
Evergreen leaves of trees lining Sevilla's cobbled streets gradually drifted into heaping piles of yellow, orange, and red. When I wasn’t grabbing tapas with new friends or rolling through discotecas across the city, I could often be found rewriting my lecture notes, nestled in the university cafeteria—a large room with row after row of open tables that substituted as a workspace for students when no food was being served. I understood that I needed to work twice as hard as my Spanish classmates to do equally as well, so I spent many afternoons poring over notebooks with a black cup of coffee nearby, my headphones in.
A couple of months into the semester, I was sitting at the corner of one of these cafeteria tables and putting together a presentation on my laptop, my eyebrows furrowed in concentration, when a girl walked by and innocuously slipped me a note. I paused at first, feeling the stares of Spanish college kids around me, not taking my eyes off my computer screen, and then slowly moved to unfurl it. If I’m being honest, I can’t remember exactly what was written, but I can recall the basic intent: the girl was a messenger, and she had a Chinese friend who thought I was really cute, signing off with a WhatsApp number.
A few days later, as dusk turned to night one evening, I met with Cristina on the side of the Guadalquivir, a major river of Spain that cuts Sevilla into two halves. Indeed, she was fully Chinese, fully Sevillana, and very cute, having been born to immigrant parents in the south of Spain. Lit by the warm glow of surrounding streetlights and their shimmering reflections on the river water, our legs dangled into the open canal as we sat side by side. We chatted at length, our conversation a mix of Spanish, Chinese, and English. I didn’t know Chinese with a Spanish accent was possible, but here it was.
I was fascinated. Perhaps it’s the tunnel-visioned, self-absorbed American in me, but for one reason or another, I didn’t grow up thinking about Chinese immigrants in other countries. Perhaps I was so engrossed in my own quest of uncovering what it meant to be Chinese-American, so caught up in my own no-one-understands-me actualization of self, that it truthfully hadn’t even crossed my mind that there were Chinese-French, Chinese-Kenyans, and evidently, Chinese-Spanish children of immigrants who were also learning their nuanced place in this complex world.
Cristina told me about how she grew up—the summer vacations spent back in Guangdong, how she had her Spanish friends and then her Chinese friends, how her parents ran a Japanese restaurant because they believed sushi and udon would be more marketable to the masses than egg fried rice. I was surprised how much of myself I could see in this girl from Sevilla, our matching facial features belying our wildly different upbringings separated across the Atlantic. And yet, we were joined on some deeper level, a profound kind of understanding shared between children of immigrants everywhere, connecting us to each other more so than we’d ever be able to relate to someone who was brought up in the mainland.
I saw a parallel life path in Cristina, wondering what series of small decisions across generations had ultimately led to this unlikely arrangement, why I wasn’t in her shoes or she in mine. I asked about her parents—where they were from, what their dreams were for settling down in this southern Spanish city, why they came in the first place—and I thought about my own. We learned bits about ourselves by seeing them reflected in the other, helping one another to lay down new pieces onto the jigsaw puzzle of our jagged lives, the once nebulous bigger picture becoming a clearer, more coherent whole.
It was getting late.
“Quedemos otra vez,” she said, glancing at the time on her phone. Let’s hangout again.
“Vale,” I replied. “Wo gen ni zou hui qu ba.” I’ll walk you home.
Nairobi or Beijing? You tell me.
According to renowned relationship coach Jillian Turecki, when it comes to creating meaningful change in our romantic lives, we have to start by getting clear on the relationship we have with ourselves. Before being able to mix and interact with the dreams, faults, and triggers of another fully formed human being, we must equip ourselves with a solid, foundational knowledge of our own psychology.
At the time of this writing, nearly five years have passed since meeting Cristina; I haven’t seen her since. Nonetheless, our conversations still linger in the recesses of my mind, quietly ushering me to seek out Chinese pockets of community around the globe. In every new country I visit, I am drawn to Chinese restaurants and regional chinatowns, hoping—when I get lucky—to strike up a conversation with the immigrant owners about where they’ve been and where they’re going. In learning about their meandering, improbable life paths, I hope to better orient and understand my own.
I am often awed by the breadth and resilience of the Chinese diaspora, sitting down for a steaming plate of dumplings in northern Rwanda or biting into juicy bao in the heart of France. From Copenhagen to Nairobi, I’ve embarked on this personal quest of identity within the larger context of my Keegan journey, observing how local food menus have shifted to accommodate the native palate, adapting to the flavors and preferences of the area. I observe what new, exciting fusion items have been added and take note of what traditional foods have been omitted. In turn, I wonder what hybridized gems live inside my own body, what elements have been hidden or have disappeared entirely.
For so long, my multinational being operated from a place of lack, belonging not fully here nor fully there, caught in the isolating betwixt of East and West. But somewhere along the way, this cultural mix has blossomed from rootless angst into a source of strength and incredible power.
When I was growing up with my nuclear family in the suburbs of Chicago, halfway across the planet from any kind of familial support or assistance, it often felt like it was us against the world, my small but mighty family unit taking on the whole of an unfamiliar life in a foreign land. For so long—apparently out of reach from aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents—I thought of my psychology as wholly my own, walled off by the unique, intersectional nature of my existence as a child of immigrants. I now realize that my story is and has always been inextricably tied to that of my family's, a brief chapter in a narrative that spans lifetimes, a small step in a sweeping epic that continues to be written.