In her column “Nostalgic Thoughts,” Alaina Zhang ’27 reminisces about the past and reflects on why we miss it at all.

An old version of Xi You Ji (“Journey to the West”) is playing in black and white on the TV. I’m sitting next to my grandma, and she’s peeling beans with her extra long left pinky nail. For some reason, there is a bag of soybeans on the table, and I reach for it. The little circular beans are smooth and cold, and I play with them on my fingers. On screen, as The Monkey King starts eating all the magical peaches in the heavenly palace, I realize that somehow the beans have ended up in my nose. I attempt to stuff a few more in my right nostril, then a few more on the left. 

Soon I am forced to breathe through my mouth. When I attempt to pry the beans out, I realize they’re stuck. 

“A-po!” I grab my grandma’s arm. She looks at me and immediately notices something is wrong. I tell her about the soybeans and hop onto her back. She carries me on the way to the hospital, and I can smell the scent of fresh vegetables from where my head lies upon her shoulder. Bikes pass by and we greet a few familiar faces. It’s summer and I am waving a fan to chase away the sweatdrops that begin to form on A-po’s forehead, and to scare away the mosquitos. 

When we finally arrive, the doctor takes one look and, with a pair of extra long tweezers, pulls out the beans one by one. I am a little scared but resist the urge to run away, and the doctor says I am very brave.

By the time we get home, I tell A-po that the other nostril still has beans left.

***

This is my mom’s story about her childhood. Out of the countless stories she has told me about her life in China, this one has always stuck with me because it seemed almost magical. When I was little, I would often try imagining myself as her, sitting in front of the TV and attempting to stuff soybeans in my nose. In our small apartment in Canada — where planes could be heard flying overhead every five minutes — the stories of my parents’ generation entranced me, taking on a mythical quality.

My dad trying to catch frogs in the mud with my grandpa, or writing a love letter in his own blood to a high school classmate. My mom savoring the taste of a luxurious 0.05 yuan popsicle and poking the individual pieces of protruding skin on my grandpa’s back when he sat in the bamboo chair lined with holes. I remembered all my parents’ stories and asked them to repeat them again and again. 

Somewhere along the way, I stopped longing for the childhood I never got to have because I immigrated to Canada. Instead, my nostalgia grew roots of longing for the type of life my parents lived in their respective childhoods and the idealized China I imagined for myself, had I been born in their generation. I knew that time made it impossible to ever live that life again. Still, whenever I was faced with decisions I didn’t want to make, friends I lost and could not regain, or the inevitable distancing between me and my grandparents and the heart-wrenching feeling that my Wuxi dialect was slipping away from me, I would find solace in imagining a childhood for myself during a past China. My parents find my obsession over their childhood silly. They always tell me I over-romanticized their life back then, and I suppose they were right. 

My immigrant nostalgia is like a pond. The eight years I actually spent in Wuxi, the life I would have lived had I stayed in Wuxi and the stories from my parents’ childhood — these are the tiny streams which meet and create the dapples in the pond, never quite letting the lily pad which is me drift in peace.