On a warm July day, you’re likely to find Mary Cao strutting down Canal Street while window-shopping for a new and authentic lunch spot. That is, unless she’s sitting on a pier in Shanghai slurping soup dumplings. Mary is part of a new generation of immigrants that frequently travel between the U.S. and their birthplace because of a refusal to believe that someone can only have one home.
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Mary’s grandfather, an intellectual who was persecuted by the Chinese government, was sentenced to work in a labor camp so that he would be censored. Her parents, fearing the same fate, escaped the country and sought political asylum when they arrived to the United States along with Mary.
I remember crying when I got home and telling my dad that I hated it here
“I didn’t really like it in the beginning,” Mary said. “The kids in school were kind of mean to me, the food was gross, and the teacher changed my name on the first day of school. She said it was too ‘ethnic’ and decided to call me Mary. I remember crying when I got home and telling my dad that I hated it here.”
In an effort to make her feel better, he decided to go out and buy her favorite meal, Xiao Long Bao, or soup dumplings. “I think that was the first time I remember being genuinely happy in New York,” she said. “Everything looked so different, but not the soup dumplings. They looked exactly the same as how they did in China and that got me so excited.” However, a few seconds after her first bite, she started crying again. The meat inside was unlike any she had in China.
They told me I didn’t understand what a home was…that you can only have one.
It took her a few years, but eventually she adjusted quite well. Her parents decided it would be a good idea to visit the rest of their family in Shanghai for the summer. “I remember telling my friends I was visiting home,” she remembers with a beaming smile. “They told me I didn’t understand what a home was…that you can only have one. It was confusing but once I was back in Shanghai, I felt just as at home as I had in America at that point. Nothing beat my grandma’s soup dumplings. It was just such a nice change of pace to be searing my tongue with soup instead of mac and cheese or chicken nuggets, you know?” While the beginning of her trip was fun and exciting, Mary grew increasingly uncomfortable when she started to notice the reasons why her parents left. Her father explained why she wasn’t allowed to use Google and it frightened her that one of the places that she called home limited the freedom of its citizens so harshly.
Now Mary goes back and forth between China and the U.S. regularly. Whenever she starts to feel like she’s drifting too far from her roots, or just misses a real Chinese home-cooked meal, she plans a trip back to Shanghai. As tears well up in her eyes, she proclaims, “It’s just so hard. The first thing I always start to miss about China are the soup dumplings. I miss the bamboo pot that they come in, and blowing the steam with anticipation. But when I do that, I’m looking at China with rose-tinted glasses. How could you love and miss something, but be so angry with it at the same time?”
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