Submission by Maya Xia Ludtke
生于江苏长在美国，我的身世之谜

The first nine months of my life are a mystery.

我生命中的最初九个月是一个谜。

A tiny jade bracelet and a photograph of an inexplicably circular face on top of a torn red sweater make up my memory album.  A few stapled pages of ambiguous papers constitute my birth record. I do know that I was found in Xia Xi, a farming town of flowers and trees. Though I was nervous about shattering the stable but fragile image I had created in my mind about those nine months, this past August I went to Xia Xi and began to crack through that tableau and experience what my life could have been.

一只小玉镯和一张穿着破旧红色毛衣的圆脸女孩的照片就是我全部的记忆。几张钉好的模糊纸张是我的出生记录。我知道我是在中国花木之城夏溪被找到的。那九个月在我脑海中已存留着永久但又脆弱的影像。虽然我对破坏这些印象感到紧张，但在过去的这个八月里，我回到夏溪，走进和感受我本应经历的一切。

There, I met the girls I could have grown up with, and with them visited the places where I would have spent each day. I was overwhelmed by simultaneous feelings of deep connection and unbridgeable distance.  As we struggled to narrow the chasms created by language and culture, I found familiarity in their faces and the trees enveloping us.

这那里，我遇到了本会与我一同成长的女孩们，和她们一起去那些我本应每天都去的地方。我同时感受着亲密深切的联系和无法逾越的距离，这让我不知所措。在尝试缩小语言文化带来的差异的同时，我在她们的面孔上看到亲密，在环绕着我们的丛丛树木之中感受熟悉。

“So, what are you?” the girls asked me. “ You look Chinese on the outside but you are American on the inside.” At first, I detested this description. If the substance of my being is not Chinese, I might as well be white. Once content with describing myself as “Chinese American,” now I was hit with its vagueness. Where do I belong between being Chinese and becoming American? In some ways my new friends were right; our many fragmented conversations during the three weeks we were together affirmed the differences in how our minds had developed to perceive the world.

“那么，你是什么人？”这些女孩问我。“你外表看上去像中国人，但是内心是美国人。”最初，我厌恶这种说法。如果我的外表不是中国人，我本该是个白人。曾一度满足以“美籍华人”自居的我，如今却被这模糊的说法伤害了。中国人？美国人？我在这两者之间到底属于哪个？在某种程度上，我的新朋友们是对的。我们一起相处的三个星期里曾有过很多零散的对话，这些交谈证实我们看待世界的方式是如此不同。

“You are so lucky, you have no discipline, easy school, and freedom,” the Xia Xi girls would say with certainty and envy. “All we get to do is study.”

“你可真幸运。你不需要遵守什么规矩，学业轻松，还自由，”夏溪的女孩们会如此笃定而又嫉妒地说。“我们呢，只能学习，没别的。”

I felt guilty about my “luck” and the truth in their words. Still, their idealistic views about America and the ease of my life perplexed me. They had quickly dismissed my out-of-school activities and community service as lacking real learning. Yet, soon I realized how their understanding of “smart” contrasts with mine. Being smart is the high ranking a teacher gives them; studying is their only way of getting there.  These tight borders command their childhood.

我对我的“幸运”和她们言语中的事实感到内疚。但她们对美国和我安逸生活的理想化看法让我很困惑。她们对我的校外活动和社区服务不屑一顾，不把那看做是真正的学习。然而，我很快意识到她们对“聪明”的理解与我截然不同。老师给她们的高名次意味着聪明；而学习是唯一的途径。这些严格的界线控制着她们的童年。

I permeated those borders as we talked about growing up, gender roles, equality, and relationships. No one before me had given them the space to talk about such topics.  As a girl born in Xia Xi and living in America, I was the most foreign person the girls had ever met.  They had never come in contact with anyone who looked different than they do. When I told them about the many friends I have who look different than I do, they were astonished. Being with them gave me deeper appreciation for the diversity that my life in America gives me.

在我们对成长、性别角色、平等和人际关系的讨论中，我慢慢跨越了这些界线。在我之前从未有人给予她们讨论这些话题的空间。生于夏溪、长在美国的我是这些女孩们遇到过的最不同的人。她们从没有和看起来不同于她们的人接触过。当我告诉她们，我的很多朋友看起来比我还要不同时，她们震惊了。与她们的相处让我更加欣赏美国生活赋予我的多样性。

For those I met in Xia Xi, family is blood and ancestry. “You do not know your real parents?” strangers would ask me soon after we met, sympathetic and eager to help me find mine. “When is your birthday? What orphanage were you from?” To me, their words “real mother” sit heavy in my mind. Even if I’d spoken their dialect fluently, I am not sure I could have explained. I have a real mother, who raised me and loves me. My biological family might not be whom I romanticized them to be and finding such strangers would not instantly conjure love. Instead, it was in the welcoming care that countless strangers showed me - in placing watermelon slices in both of my hands, pulling a comb through my hair, and attempting to cool me in 110-degree heat - that I found home in Xia Xi, and that was enough.

对我在夏溪碰到的人来说，家庭是血脉也是祖先。“你不知道你真正的父母是谁？”陌生人刚碰到我时总这样问，充满同情，还热心帮助我寻找我的父母。“你哪天出生？你是从哪个孤儿院出来的？”于我而言，她们口中的“亲生母亲”在我脑海中萦绕不去。即使我可以流利地说他们的方言，我也不确定我能够解释清楚。我有一个真正的妈妈，她抚养我长大并且爱我。我的生身家人也许并不是我理想中的那样，找到这样的“陌生人”也无法立刻拥有爱。反而，爱是我在家乡夏溪中碰到的无数陌生人给我的热情关怀：把切好的西瓜塞到我的双手，为我梳头发，在110华氏度的高温中试着让我凉快些。有这些爱就够了。