Protected: Her Life in Seattle Doesn’t Translate to Beijing

I have a soft spot for immigration narratives that mirror my own: leaving your home country for college in your late teens, when you’re too fully formed to disappear completely into your new surroundings but still adaptable enough to camouflage yourself. You end up passably integrated into both places, yet belonging to neither. Recently, I have encountered kindred spirits in the protagonists of Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours (who skips the Victorian novels she is supposed to be reading because “I felt it would take too much effort to move between Brazil and the United States and then England in the course of one day”) and Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training (whose time in New England necessitates a constant recalibration of what India and Indianness mean to her). M Lin’s “Yulan” is a delightfully ambivalent addition to this steadily expanding micro-genre. 

In the years since she left China at the age of eighteen, Yuchen has sanded off her regional specificity, and she now speaks both Mandarin and English “with no particular geographical association—so blandly she bored herself.” In her mid-thirties and established as an artist in Seattle, she returns to Beijing for a visit, confidently displaying the cosmopolitan ease that means she can fit in anywhere—but if you can make yourself at home anywhere, how do you know where you belong? “How could she be less Chinese,” she ponders, “if she was, immutably, Chinese?” Having resisted full assimilation in the US while retaining connections to her country of origin, she finds herself faltering. “She diligently translated herself back and forth, but the truest things about her always fell through the cracks.” A reunion with old friends in Beijing makes it clear how far her life has diverged from theirs, and how much it costs her to stretch herself in both directions. The ending of the story strikes the same bittersweet note that I felt at the end of Celine Song’s Past Lives.

“Yulan” is in M Lin’s spiky, distinctive debut collection The Memory Museum, which moves fluidly through many different worlds, sometimes lingering in the spaces between them. Told in a restless, roving voice, Lin’s stories have an enjoyably unmoored sense of perspective. The “yulan” is a type of tree whose scent triggers a vivid sense memory in Yuchen. At one point in the story, we briefly inhabit the yulan’s point of view; in that moment, it feels like exactly where our consciousness needs to be.

– Jeremy Tiang
Author of State of Emergency