Upon hearing my ethnic name, people often ask “where are you from?” I would pause for a moment and answer “Dalian, China” or “Clemson, South Carolina,” depending on my audience. Then, I would immediately realize the incompleteness of nationality as a convenient label, rather than a series of rituals and experiences that contribute to my identities. My past rituals in China, some as juvenile as riding around my Chinese hometown with a Communist flag attached to the back of my shiny new scooter, and some as ordinary as saluting the same flag as a child without understanding the implications of authoritarianism.
These rituals would then resonate deeply with the rituals that I have performed in the United States, such as singing the Stars Spangled Banner for the first time in broken English back in the sixth grade in the Deep South. Astounding memories of national pride oftentimes come together and manifest themselves into one story for me, a story of replacing boundaries with intersections, a simple answer with a string of identities, and most profoundly, of replacing nationality with locality.
Locality comes with no label, or many labels and all of them are valid in the context that they belong. The more I travel between China and the United States, the more I realize the convenience behind the question “which nation do you align with the most?” “Well,” I would then answer, “Politically, I have been very vocal in my support in the Democratic party here in the United States, and I had campaigned for a few politicians on local and national levels, and I pay my part in creating tangible change as a millennial.
But, when I visited North Korea, I was able to resonate with the government censorship there, due to similar experiences growing up in an authoritarian nation. When I set foot on the seaports of Venice, Italy, I felt at home because my father is a sea captain who spent six months a year traveling up and down the Indian Ocean.
Sometimes I’m Mexican because my extended family also has a culture of sticking together and placing emphasis on the art of food, and most of the time, I am all of the above.” However, this answer is much longer than “China” or “America”, so naturally, I stick to the easy way out.
Locality is everchanging --- the China that my mother knew in her twenties is not the same as the one I spent ten years of my life in. When she was born, there was not yet 56 registered nationalities in China, and parts of China were still rented out to various European nations. And when my great grandparents were born, my home-city, Dalian, did not exist, as the general area was still under sovereign rule by Japan.
And when I was born, China was still enforcing the one-child policy that was repealed a few years ago, an action that brought sweeping change to family planning. To simply say “I am from China” or “I am from the United States” pose the danger of a single story, a story that mistakes nations as immobile subsections instead of temporary boundaries where rituals and experiences flow freely as human beings carry out their daily tasks.
The rituals I had performed as a child followed me to adulthood, as I still resonate with people when they explain the strange comfort of living under the one-party system. They are not destroyed, only transformed, into millions of stories that never settle onto one name, one nation, or one label.
Every single person on earth is a local to their rituals, and every single person is diverse in their own manners. Instead of asking “where are you really from?” we ought to begin the conversation with “where are you a local?”
