If Tyrannosaurus didn't have feathers, would it not be a featherless biped?
I got back to SoCal via SNA, and called a Lyft home. My Lyft driver was an older white lady, around 70. She was liberal, left-wing, and we talked about politics during the short drive. It was interesting to see an older perspective of someone born just a decade after World War II, who had seen America change so much. And she was someone who had witnessed those broken promises of what America had ought to be. She was promised a good life. She was promised a retirement. And now, she was driving Lyft to pay for her groceries. I told her I was in a PhD program for English, and she laughed.
I knew she thought that I was an international student, since she constantly referred to America as her country, and what her country had done for me. So when we were talking about property values and cost of living, I casually mentioned that my parents were born in Hong Kong and that the property market there was through the roof, but that I didn't know too much about it since I was born in Washington state. She was surprised, but she went with it and spoke differently after that. I was "one of us" after that.
I guess I can speak English perfectly, as my native language, and that I'll still always be a foreigner to people of a certain generation, no matter how well-meaning or even left-wing they are. I'll always be associated with a land, and a country, and a people who I encounter as phantoms as in a dream. When I see these other-Chinese, we speak and stare at each other in mutual nonrecognition, knowing that with a few twists of fate we each could have stood where the other did, thinking different words, in a language we both understood.
