Aye I Longwhite: An American-Chinese teenager’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom and beyond Read Online Free

g Lin and I ended up doing our language exchange every other day, when I wasn’t playing basketball.  I was the star on the basketball team.  Basketball, even in my academic magnet school in the US, was played at much a higher level than my Shanghai school, which had the best basketball team in the district, evidenced by the many championship trophies displayed in the dusty case hidden at the back corner of the gym.  I was definitely mediocre on my US team, a bench warmer, but here, I was the star.  In the US, being the star athlete would’ve put me in the popular crowd, and I would’ve been batting away cheerleaders throwing themselves at me.  Here in China, they couldn’t care less.  It was the equivalent of being the top chess player in a US school’s chess club, which ironically would’ve gotten me a lot further with girls in China.  I frankly was ok with my anonymity, but I was amused by what was important to my new Chinese classmates.  Sports meant nothing; academics everything.
    Chang Lin was different than not just the girls but almost all the other kids in school.  She didn’t aspire to ace the tests and go to the top university and get a base level job in the government bureaucracy.  “I want to go to the America!”
    “Just America.   We don’t say ‘the America.’  In fact, just say US.”
    “I want to go to US!” she enthused.
    “Umm, you need to put in the ‘the’ in front of US.  The US.”
    Undaunted, she beamed, “I want to go to the US.” 
    “Why?”  Why would a student in the best school in the best city in the best country want to leave the one place everyone else in the world wanted to get into, and to go to the US of all places!  “Why not Nigeria or Mexico or Brazil?” These countries had a young, vibrant population driving their economies, not like the old, sick Western countries that were clinging to vestiges of past glories.  More importantly, these countries early on read the global super-power tea leaves and sided with China over the US.   Even though they were tiny compared to China, China gave them preferential treatment as a reward for their early support, before everyone else piled in.
    “This place is too close.” 
    I gently whispered “closed,” even though I knew what she meant was “too restrictive, confining, dull.”
    “Too closed,” she cont inued, accepting my correction and interruption without losing track of her thread.  “I want to be free!  I want to be me.” 
    I was impressed how she summarized the American culture so succinctly.
    Playing the devil’s advocate, I countered, “But the quality of living is nowhere compared to things here in MK.”  “MK” stood for “Middle Kingdom,” the literal translation of what the Chinese called their own country, “Zhong Guo.”  The English net abbreviated it to “MK.”  “Quality of living,” that was a phrase I had learned from my mom’s expat package discussions. Since Shanghai was so much more expensive than where we had lived in the US, we were given a monthly bonus to equalize the increased “cost of living.”
    “Who cares? I don’t need very much.  I will only want what I have.”
    Again, I admired her wisdom in quoting Buddha.   Want what you have and the corollary, not want what you don’t have.  I didn’t tell her that was a very un-American way of thinking.
    “But what will you do there?”
    She now quoted my other favorite master, Yoda.  “Do?  We are not human doings.  Be.  We are human beings.”
    I felt that my objections were going nowhere, like fighting water.  I decided to join her instead of continuing to spar.  I remembered a quote from our Classics class from the quixotic master Lao Tzu.  I intoned in Chinese, accentuating the rise and falls in the tones:
    When I let go of what I am,
    I become what I might be.  
     
    I’m not sure if this was contextually correct, but it sounded good, and I was rewarded with a raised eyebrow from