🌻 seeking shangri-la - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
I’ve never really understood diaspora angst. For many Asian Americans, it often seems to manifest as a kind of self-orientalization—a misremembered longing for the farness and otherness of the motherland, an exaggerated distance in geography and history alike. Here (the West) is treated as a contemporary and multicultural capitalist hellscape; there (the East) is ancient, nostalgic, and culturally pure. It reminds me of my Chinese relatives’ confused reaction to visiting American “Chinatowns.” These urban neighborhoods, with their pagoda-style roofs and gaudy red facades, look nothing like the China of the 21st century. They are reifications of exotified aesthetics from centuries ago, and in the years since, look less and less like their inspiration.1 But I find it impossible to feel nostalgia for a country that looks so radically different with every visit. My Shanghainese relatives have stayed mostly put—my mom’s family in Hongkou, near the central Huangpu river, and my dad’s side in
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