"and that must make life very hard for them"
We are a sad people. Lonely, lost, astray. We wander lost on the wind, dandelion puffs dancing in the wind over fields and streams, concrete roads and smog ridden air. We bind ourselves together; tangling our roots and seeds with others to create a floating island of people, of hearts and connections.
But across the sea, in places where the tongues speak differently and blood still pours onto the land, there are no floating dandelions on the wind. There are sapling trees growing in the fertile, wet ground. Thrusting their limbs into the sky, and reaching deep down for water and air.
I had always thought that because my grandmother came across the ocean with her roots intact, that I would too. My mother speaks the foreign tongue, knows the foreign ways. She, too, has roots in this strange American soil. She defies tradition, but still, she is of the earth. I thought, for seventeen years, that I had roots - that I was other and different.
But I am not. And it took my mother seventeen years to tell me this. I am not other, I am not different. I am a tree suddenly uprooted and flung into the changing wind - crumbling to nothing more than insubstantial cotton. But I am not American. And I am not Chinese. I always thought this strange split was only for children with skin neither shade nor tint. But here I am - lost myself, with nothing left to bind me.