Who am I after leaving China?

Yesterday, a beer commercial came to me. "In Shanghai, you can have curly hair or have interesting looks. Rehearse on the 27th and shoot on the 28th. Two men and one woman are required."

Alas, what a pity.

I'm sitting on the second floor of a B&B in Java, Indonesia. The muezzin's loud prayer song just passed through to my room from the mosque opposite, decisively covering up my European and American playlist. At this moment, Shanghai is a world far away from me, let alone commercial shooting, let alone beer. It is a convenient commodity that I can’t go downstairs to buy in Indonesia. Whenever I want to drink, I will talk myself out of it first; If he really can't be persuaded, he will walk for more than 20 minutes to a liquor store with a single variety, complete the transaction secretly and walk home.

In broad daylight, my feelings about life have begun to make me feel nostalgic and sad, but I haven’t replied to the message yet. There is a high probability that the other party will not want to hear so much, and they are not acquaintances. They only contact me if they have something to do. "I'm sorry, I'm not in China." I replied succinctly on WeChat. I pressed "send" and my heart ached - curly hair! When I was still living in Beijing, my curly hair once defeated all competitors in the Shanghai model market, and the producers of mobile phone advertisements spared no expense to invite me to run under the Oriental Pearl Tower and take selfies on a cruise ship on the Huangpu River in the quiet night.

However, that was my life - in China, especially in Shanghai, as a white foreigner, I could easily come into contact with the daily life of various film and television shootings. I quit now. To be specific, a year ago.

Eliminate loneliness in Chinese

In February 2023, I ended my six years of living in China. As a young man who escaped from Italy, many times, I was afraid of the moment when I left China - to return to a land that was full of stagnation, seemed close but could not provide you with a future. Fortunately, I found a way not to go back to Italy and entered a sojourn life of unknown duration. I changed countries every two or three months. Sometimes I was tired and sometimes I was happy. Although I left China, I signed a publishing contract before I left, giving myself an ideal state of having something to do no matter where I was. In the next six months, from Cambodia to Turkey, I used coffee shops as my office to immerse myself in writing. I completed a book reviewing my six years in China, and started my personal column to record the people I met on the road. and things.

Having lost the sense of order and advantages that China gave me, I tried to live a fulfilling life and try to find the direction of life. I sometimes regret my choices and sometimes feel confident. During this year on the road, the number of message reminders on WeChat has decreased day by day, and I often feel confused. While walking in an ancient Nepalese town, the haze in my heart finally dissipated, and what emerged was a somewhat troublesome question: Who am I after leaving China?

I did not immediately realize the urgent nature of this problem. For more than half a year before that day, the object of my confusion was not so clear, but only manifested as a kind of discomfort. I feel distant and even isolated from my friends in China.

In 2020, I have lived in a closed school in Beijing for a long time, and my connection with the outside world has become increasingly weak. I will chat with the cleaning lady about how to wash vegetables and the price of her ticket back to her hometown of Zhengzhou. Those conversations made me feel real, calm, and at ease. They were the kind of care and companionship I didn’t expect. After I write them out and post them on Douban, someone will correct my grammar and typos, and teach me where to add "zhu" to make the sentences more fluent. Some people say that my writing looks like a work translated from a foreign language, or like a vernacular text. A novel with a sense of history. Because I read about the cleaning lady from my hometown in my story, a Henan reader asked for my address and sent me a large package of Weilong spicy strips. One seemingly simple interaction after another made me feel incredibly happy. I was still sitting in front of the table in my dormitory, but while the spring was still there, my words passed through the big iron gate of the school as lightly as a swallow, and traveled across the country and even the world, creating resonance and emotional exchanges with people who were destined to me.

Later, I worked as an extra in a movie. I stayed in a hotel in Huailai, Hebei for five months. My neighbor and I became pen pals - outside the window was the gray small northern county, and on the screen of my mobile phone was the Shwedagon Pagoda in Xishuangbanna. Loneliness on set. I launched a writing group in Shanghai, gathering a dozen or twenty people at my house every Wednesday night—for fear of being suspected by my neighbors of being a pyramid schemer—and forming valuable connections. The writing club gave people who could not speak a few words in the company during the day the space to read tens of thousands of words at night, and gave me the long-lost feeling of belonging to a group of people.

In the summer of 2022, I left Shanghai and wandered around. A Douban news led me to meet Liu Shui in Hainan. It was a relationship that started because both parties could see each other's IP addresses, and continued because they were trapped together after the island was closed for epidemic prevention. A girl with red hair wearing a suspender belt and a 1.8-meter white man, we are always the most conspicuous outsiders in the town. Despite the locals' fear that we might carry the virus, we spent time in Dad's Tea Shop, rode electric motorcycles to watch the sunset, and changed the unit of time calculation to a cloud to calculate how long it would take to rain. On the beach, Liu Shui played "Human World" by Faye Wong on his mobile phone. As one of those who moved to Hainan after Shanghai was lifted from the lockdown, I seemed to be reminded by the lyrics, “If the sky is clear, there will be a rainbow.”

Every foreigner feels that he is unique

After leaving China, I seemed to have lost the ability to express myself naturally and connect with people. I didn’t know what to say when I opened my circle of friends, and my Douban was surprisingly deserted—except for more serious columns, I couldn’t casually write out interesting daily observations like in the past, and I felt stiff when I posted my posts. I fell into an online existence that Liu Shui described as speaking "not quite like a human being." Could it be that if it were placed abroad, ale would not work? It took me a long time to discover that this powerlessness was related to my identity in China.

I was driven by hustle for six years. If I didn't get out of this environment, I wouldn't be able to write this article - only after I put a certain distance between myself and my past life can I see its true appearance. Being a foreigner in China guaranteed me a steady stream of warm hospitality, legitimate curiosity from others, and unexpected job opportunities. I don't worry too much about what I have to do, as if I just need to follow the rhythm around me. I feel that the identity of a foreigner is not important, that it is not me, and sometimes I hate the prejudice or stereotypes that come with it: any conflicts related to you are classified as cultural differences, and strangers would rather be on the subway during the epidemic. I don’t want to sit next to you even when I’m standing, and the universal conclusion is that “the problem is too complicated and foreigners don’t understand it.” Disadvantages are mixed with advantages, and being a foreigner has definitely shaped my life over the years. All I can be responsible for is luck - choosing how to operate within this framework, whether to be a foreign teacher or an actor, whether to be in Shanghai or Chengdu.

Every foreigner in China feels that he or she is unique. This is roughly the result of Western individualism coupled with the preferential treatment enjoyed by living in China. This fantasy deprives people of the need for self-reflection: I am obviously very unique, so why do I need to think about such unnecessary questions as "Who am I?" There are always more pressing things to deal with - catching a high-speed train, taking a tutoring class, going to Sanlitun to meet friends. Even if you think about existential questions, no one will pay you for it.

If you leave, there will be emptiness and embarrassment. Empty because you have become a normal person again. When you go out, no one will ask you to shoot advertisements; you can no longer assume that everyone will be interested in you, and you need to start every social interaction from scratch; when you walk into a small restaurant, no one turns around (family members don’t understand, it’s really disrespectful). The embarrassment comes from the fact that you can't escape an identity that has nothing to do with you. At the end of last year, a platform asked me to write a manuscript, but we couldn't reach a consensus - they felt that my manuscript should be more or less related to my experience in China. However, I have basically exhausted all these experiences in order to write a book. Now that I have been away from China for a year, what should I write about?

I once benefited from a Sinocentric worldview and am now hindered by it. Obviously, this question needs to be addressed: If not "a foreigner in China," then who am I? To answer this proposition, we need to reconcile a kind of division - to overcome the binary opposition of "domestic and foreign" thinking, and let "ale" and "ale outside Chinese" become the same person, lest I be neither. The process is somewhat complicated.

The expressions "domestic" and "foreign" are the deepest traces of my thinking left by my six years in China - the belief that there are two worlds in the world, China and countries outside China. The concept of "foreigner" is enough to present such a polarizing filter, much like the "barbarian" used in ancient Greece to define non-Greek speakers, bárbaros, literally "stutterer", a term later coined by the ancient Romans The word was also borrowed by people (for whom barbari represented people who did not speak Greek or Latin). Over time, I accepted my savage identity and made friends with other savage people like me. From time to time, I would ask them to have a few drinks of savage wine and talk about what it was like to be a savage.

This kind of knowledge took root very deeply, until it became transparent, and even I, an outsider, was conquered by it. For a long time after leaving China, I was only interested in social events related to China: the world outside China seemed alienated from me. I started using words like "going abroad" and "abroad". I used to tell myself that I used these words to get closer to everyone’s language habits. But after using it for a long time and saying it too much, have you accepted the thinking behind these words? In my mind, China lives up to its “middle” status. Without realizing it, I became the language I used.

“I’m willing to read your shopping list if you write it.”

To redefine myself and get rid of the shackles of binary thinking between China and foreign countries, I started with my own social media profile. Originally an "Italian-born world writer". This makes me feel very contradictory: If even I make my identity of "Italian" so prominent, how can I dislike the platform that I contracted for wanting a "foreign perspective"? I deleted that introduction sentence and changed it to "nomadic writer" - where I go and what I do is more important than where I come from. The second half of the sentence has not changed: "I use Chinese to connect with the world." No matter where I am, Chinese is still the language in which I think, write, and live.

I try to make the work show my own identity changes. At the end of 2023, I was invited to participate in an electronic publication of a Chinese writing platform, which required me to submit three representative works. Without a doubt, my most confident writing took place in China. However, apart from a travelogue about spending the Spring Festival in Wulong, Chongqing, the other two articles I chose were an interview with a Thai tailor and my teenage memories in Italy. I was relieved to receive positive feedback from the platform: I was secretly afraid that they would say no and demand some of my signature Chinese articles. Being able to cook some other cuisines is finally a new way.

There is one more step to connect the two ales together. After I started writing in Chinese, I basically never wrote in English or Italian. During those three years, Chinese language and readers whom I had never met allowed me to find spiritual support, allowing me to meet my experiences with people who had corresponding feelings. In other words, I am too lazy to explain to my Italian high school classmates what global static management is. I would rather talk to people who already understand silence. The emotional connection created by those words is the reason why I can survive until the end of 2022.

What is a pity is that I have stopped communicating with readers who do not read Chinese. I meet people from different countries on the road and chat about each other’s lives. They often express interest in my writing. My standard answer in the past year is: "I am planning an English column, and I will share it with you when it is completed." This "I am planning" is a better wish than reality. I wish I still wrote in English as well as Italian. But now, Chinese has become my comfort zone. Foreign language columns mean challenging oneself to operate in an ecosystem that has nothing to do with Chinese, which means the possibility of failure, and may even bring back the sad memories of going door-to-door to submit resumes to countless newspapers in Rome - in comparison, Chinese is just a picture Clean paper, without too much burden from the past, makes my thoughts clearer. Therefore, I postponed the foreign language column for a whole year.

I was blessing each other on Christmas with a junior high school classmate from my hometown, and she asked about my writing. "ale, if you write in Italian, I'm willing to read your shopping list," she said thoughtfully. Encouraged by her and taking advantage of the fresh atmosphere of the Year of the Dragon, I made up my mind to open "Letters from Ale" and reconnect with friends who had not read me for many years.

In the past two weeks, I wrote in English the story of Mr. Tang and I, an accidental connection that happened at the end of the epidemic era. In just two months, we met on a green car going to Chengdu; he took the initiative to book a ticket and asked me to go to Shaanxi to see his clothing business. As a result, we were banned from the company for a week; we had to finish our work. After the COVID-19, I accepted Mr. Tang’s invitation again and took a bus to the countryside in Dazhou, Sichuan to celebrate the New Year in his hometown. At that time, I wrote a public account article in Chinese to record this story. Now it is difficult to translate it into foreign languages, and the words often fail to convey the meaning. However, if you think this is impossible, you are following the typical "Chinese special theory" - thinking that everything related to China is too complicated and unclear, so you don't talk about it. I don’t want to give up like that, I also want to try to communicate.

With the story written in English and Chinese, and once the Italian version is finished, the three ales will almost be put together.

P.S.: I know that talking about "foreign languages" is somewhat contrary to my pursuit of breaking away from the binary thinking between China and foreign countries, but I think "foreign languages" has a sense of nostalgia for the open era, and I just use it if I like it.

Thanks to Liu Shui ( @SallyMuseum ) for editing this article.

This article was created for the official WeChat account "Angel Looking at Hometown" .

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