I’ve never really been big on gifts, much less handmade ones. It’s not that I hate them, but as I grew older, they became less of an expectation whenever I was celebrating something. Up until college, most of my friends were the same too, so we never gave each other gifts. However, in college, two of my friends spent months making paintings of all the cities I’ve lived in: Beijing, Taipei, Los Altos, and now New York. It was my 21st birthday gift. Each city has some part in my identity, but like the paintings themselves, they each exist in their own little canvas without ever touching each other. That’s still the case, but now, they have never been closer to each other than they are now on my wall.
My dad was an expatriate, and by extension, we were an expatriate family. There’s a small distinction between expatriates and immigrants. Both are living outside of their native countries, but immigrants are permanent residents while expatriates are not. For me, this meant moving around between houses, schools, and countries almost every two years. Even now, it still feels like we’re moving around a lot, but at the very least, I know we’ll be in America for a while. I like to think we’ve finally become an immigrant family (although technically, my sister and I were born in San Jose).
Whenever I’m asked where home is, my mouth gets clogged with a torrent of locations. I went to high school in California, but now I live in New York for college, and I don’t go back to California much anymore because my family moved up to Washington. Before high school, I lived in Beijing and Taipei, but that part of my life feels so foreign now that it hardly feels like “home”. I’m probably overthinking it, but to me, this question is another way of asking where I belong.
While my parents primarily spoke Chinese, I attended a lot of international schools early in my education, where I mainly spoke English. It was weird to grow up in a Chinese-speaking environment while having English as my best language. My parents started to worry about my Chinese, so I was sent to a local Chinese school for 3rd and 4th grade to improve. I’m not sure if this is standard across all schools in China, but the first class started at 7:45am and the last class ended after 6:30pm. I remember the teachers would ask students to stand up if they got the easy questions wrong and publicly shame them. I was miserable for those two years, but now I’m grateful because I can speak Chinese fluently (at least with my parents).
My memories of this time feel more like a collection of summaries than a catalog of specific moments. I remember spending countless nights at my best friend’s house watching him play video games, and I remember the thick pollution clouding my asthmatic lungs while playing cops and robbers during recess, and I remember playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on our school laptops at sleepovers. Yet, I am unable to recall or replay specific instances of these events. Nevertheless, I look back on these nine years of childhood friendships fondly.
When I first moved to Taipei, my family lived near Sanxia Old Street (三峽老街). This painting was like a street view of Sanxia Old Street on Google Maps. I was pleasantly surprised and had no idea how my friends knew about this street. I recall the hot, humid air resting and accumulating into sweat on my face and the smell of baked pastries having a strong grip on my stomach. One particular pastry lives in my head rent-free: the golden horn. I’m not even sure if they’re unique to Sanxia Old Street, but at least for me, this pastry brings me back to Sanxia Old Street and my mom buying golden horns to warm up for me in the morning.
Moving from Beijing to Taipei was the English equivalent of moving from the UK to the US: you speak the same language, but the differences in accents, spellings, and specific terms (i.e., crisps vs. chips) were enough to make you feel like a foreigner. On the first or second day of school, I was asked to read a passage in my Chinese class. When I finished, the girl sitting in front of me said, “Oh my God his accent…” Thankfully, it was never an issue beyond surprising first impressions.
News got around that I was leaving for California after a two short years in Taipei. On the last day of school, we were all signing our yearbooks, and everyone came up to me to say one final goodbye. I still think about Sanxia Old Street and the vendors selling golden horns, but looking back, I realized that I wasn’t necessarily leaving Taipei but my friends and classmates.
For some people, those were truly final goodbyes, but thankfully, I keep in touch and hang out with some of them today. Now that some of my friends from back then are attending schools on the east coast, I finally get to see them again and have no real desire to go back to Taipei anymore.
Turns out, I showed one friend a picture of Sanxia Old Street and rambled all about how I used to go here with my family and eat golden horns. She later saved the picture and made this painting based on that. It’s not the first time I forgot about telling a story.
Minutes before I received these paintings, I got a text from a friend:
Aaron what street did you grow up on in Los Altos?
I walked in on them frantically painting in “Sylvian” onto a street sign. They forgot where I lived and painted a random street they found in the Bay Area. The funny thing was it ended up being a pretty good painting of the street I lived on, and my sister agrees. When I think of Sylvian Way, the trees that lined the road come to mind immediately. It brings me back to the sound of rustling leaves drowning out the humdrum silence of suburban Bay Area, and I often found myself admiring the magnificence of it all while walking to school. Nowadays, I’ve replaced that peaceful vibe with the incessant honking and shouting running through New York City.
It was after moving to California that I really got serious about competitive swimming. I joined a club team where I’d spend almost 20 hours of my week suffering through grueling practices. The combination of chlorine and constant sun exposure turned my skin tan and my hair a lifeless brown/yellow. At the very least, I was never alone because my teammates were also dying with me. I like to think that the camaraderie we built through our shared experiences still lasts today, even if it might not be as strong anymore because we all went our separate ways to college or stopped swimming.
I still chat with my high school friends on a daily basis. We have our big group chat where we talk about politics, memes, anime, girl problems, and everything in between. As I am writing this post at 3am on a Thursday night, I am on a discord call with them while passively watching them play Overwatch 2 (it had just been released). Although I no longer have a home address in California, I still feel connected through my high school and swim friends.
And now that brings us to here.
The lives I’ve lived are contained in each of these paintings. They represent the people who have made me feel more complete and grounded in spite of my vagrant journey through life. Nevertheless, I still find my mind hesitating to think that I mean anything significant to anyone. Maybe it’s the fear of disappointment, or maybe it’s some kind of defense mechanism.
The paintings do help, though. When I look at these paintings, I am reminded of all the people I’ve met and the way they made me feel like I belonged somewhere. It wasn’t so much about belonging in the same physical location as it was about belonging in each other’s lives. I might not live in Beijing, Taipei, or California anymore, and who knows how long I’ll stay in New York, but at the very least, I know the relationships I’ve built will continue to carry me through the passage of time. For now, that’s good enough for me. Two people spent months on these paintings, and like these handmade gifts, they hold me together and have a place on my wall.
I give handmade gifts five stars.