“Why don’t you eat dumplings?” My little cousin looked up at me.
“I... I don't know... I am not used to.” I felt flustered. All of a sudden, everyone in the house stopped the ongoing conversations, waiting to hear how I would respond to this question.
It had already become a tradition to answer this question at every New Year’s dinner. Grandma passed me a bowl of rice, while my cousins who were all raised in the north could not hide their excitement with the dumplings containing various carefully made stuffing in them. It was usually at this point that a sense of homesick silently broke out inside me. I started to wonder what my friends were doing in Nanjing at this moment. I even had the idea of leaving the table and flying back to Nanjing in a minute.
“Welcome home! You are finally back to Yantai, Baobao. I haven’t seen you for such a long time.” Grandma’s voice interrupts my thoughts.
Wait... Back? Home?
“Let your grandpa drive you to the beach tomorrow. I hope you are as excited about the sea as when you were a little girl.” She giggled. Yes, the sea. We did not have such a natural present in our hometown. Oh I should clarify that, by referring to “We,” I meant the people who were from and belonged to Nanjing, like me. We must admit that we admired the sea’s presence, and we were jealous of the gifts and bliss it brought to the Yantai residents. Nonetheless, we could not capture their subtle emotion and attachment to the sea.
She strived to get out of her dialect whenever talking to me. After she found that I could not fully understand what she meant, she had been doing this for me all the time, even not allowing a remnant of accent.
However, she could not help correcting her pronunciation from time to time. I could hear her trembling words. This made me nervous, because of a sense of pressure. I carefully watched and controlled my behaviors and response, wishing not to embarrass her any more. Am I making her struggle? No, I could not watch my grandma suffering from this linguistic and unimportant thing. Obviously she worried that I could not understand her, while I was worrying that I would disappoint her by exposing a tiny sign of confusion. I looked her into her eyes. Her pupils became more blurred than when I saw her last year. She was seventy-five. But there was something that did not ever change. That was, the bright, flickering and firm eyes, no trace of any hesitance to announce her love for me.
I picked up a dumpling and ate it. Freshly cooked, it was still too hot for me to swallow. Surprisingly, however, I had never felt so warm and grateful after eating this magical thing.
According to Yi-fu Tuan’s theory, place and space are two different definitions. Space refers to the pure physical existence, while place is an advanced and more complex version of space. With people assigning feelings, emotions and definitions that come from their experience in the space to it, the space gradually becomes a place. The main incentive of writing this scene as my memoir on how place and I are related is to reveal my finding that place brings changes to me, which can be both implicit and explicit. To be more detailed, place can sometimes shape me in the ways that I am not conscious about or realize. However, at the very end, I have to admit that it is my experiences in these places that make me the individual who I am now.
Since I was born in Nanjing, my mom and I travel to visit my grandparents and relatives in Yantai that a city in the northern China, nearly every year. Reasonably, my regular visits and contact with the place and the local should have built a solid relationship between the city and me. And thus, Yantai has considerable influences on me that shaped my identity and personality. However, from my own inner state, due to culture differences between Yantai and Nanjing, I often cannot actively get involved in the community in Yantai. Recognizing the cultural differences makes me unable to identify myself as a person that has been under the influence of this place. I felt incapable and reluctant to acknowledge Yantai as a place to me, classifying myself as a tourist who not only does not need to follow the norms in Yantai, but also cannot undergo changes that coming from the impact of it.
The scene in the memoir reflects that the power of a place’s influence on a person is irresistible. That is to say, although I tend to describe myself as an outsider of Yantai, the fact is nevertheless inconsistent with what I thought: I am not detached from its influences. In the scene, my complex emotions that are evoked from my grandmother’s words “home” and “back” implies that I am both physically and mentally attached to Yantai. Obviously, the regular visits to it enable me to accumulate experience of living in Yantai. During my stay there, I collected information regarding various aspects of the place using my five senses, which are essential according to Tuan’s theory. For example, living by the sea, Yantai people closely associate their life with it. They feed on the sea by capturing ocean animals and plants; they interact with the sea by habitually taking a walk on the seashore and listen to the ocean wave; they take care of the sea by forbidding all the fishing activities every June that is growth period of the marine organisms. With life led by the sea, Yantai people treat the sea as an emotional and spiritual existence. They are closer to the nature and hence leading a low-speed lifestyle. Coming from Nanjing that is an inland and very urban city, I find my temperament becomes more gentle and mild like the local people. Peaceful feelings arouse from the deep corner in my heart. These changes not only mold my personality, but also give me a sense of how different lifestyles work in different places, and enable me to recognize the characteristics of places and their residents.
Objects also connect me with Yantai. In the memoir, things are no longer only simple physical concepts. Instead, with my experience, I assign meanings to them and they turn to be symbols. One outstanding thing in the memoir is the dumpling. In China, due to climate and historical disparities, there are conceivable dietary differences between the south and north. For example, in the southern cities, people tend to prefer dishes with sweet flavors rather than the salty type made in the north. In addition, most southern food is made of rice rather than wheat. The conversation about the dumpling with my cousin implies the fact that I do not follow the typical northern diet. However, representing luck and happiness, dumpling carries the wishes and love of my family. Different from some other southern people’s perception, to me, dumpling is not a mere kind of northern food any more. On one hand, it is rather a geographical mark. On the other hand, it reflects my attitudes towards Yantai. In other words, although I cannot follow the traditions and norms of the place, I choose to treat them with admiration and develop it as a way to show gratitude to my family. This subtle relationship takes me to accept not only multiple cultures, but also extends to become a philosophy that makes me appreciate and reflect on diverse views in life.
Interactions between individuals in this scene impact my perception of the place. In the scene, my nervous and anxious reactions to the Yantai dialect reveals the emphasis and dependence I used to put on language as a tool to devote to a place. It is admitted that dialect is one of the distinguished product of Yantai. However, as I switch my attention to the things under the dialect, I got the more valuable things, that is, the emotions expressed by the language. At the same time I believe that language is the most important part of understanding a place and indeed an effective complement, I also believe that authentic emotions and genuineness play the fundamental roles of communication. In this situation, I consciously rotate my attention to the aspects that are not only about language itself. This process provides me a comprehensive way of understanding a place’s culture and to embrace the emotions evoked by the experiences and people in the place.
Since I was born in Nanjing, my mom and I travel to visit my grandparents and relatives in Yantai that a city in the northern China, nearly every year. Reasonably, my regular visits and contact with the place and the local should have built a solid relationship between the city and me. And thus, Yantai has considerable influences on me that shaped my identity and personality. However, from my own inner state, due to culture differences between Yantai and Nanjing, I often cannot actively get involved in the community in Yantai. Recognizing the cultural differences makes me unable to identify myself as a person that has been under the influence of this place. I felt incapable and reluctant to acknowledge Yantai as a place to me, classifying myself as a tourist who not only does not need to follow the norms in Yantai, but also cannot undergo changes that coming from the impact of it.
The scene in the memoir reflects that the power of a place’s influence on a person is irresistible. That is to say, although I tend to describe myself as an outsider of Yantai, the fact is nevertheless inconsistent with what I thought: I am not detached from its influences. In the scene, my complex emotions that are evoked from my grandmother’s words “home” and “back” implies that I am both physically and mentally attached to Yantai. Obviously, the regular visits to it enable me to accumulate experience of living in Yantai. During my stay there, I collected information regarding various aspects of the place using my five senses, which are essential according to Tuan’s theory. For example, living by the sea, Yantai people closely associate their life with it. They feed on the sea by capturing ocean animals and plants; they interact with the sea by habitually taking a walk on the seashore and listen to the ocean wave; they take care of the sea by forbidding all the fishing activities every June that is growth period of the marine organisms. With life led by the sea, Yantai people treat the sea as an emotional and spiritual existence. They are closer to the nature and hence leading a low-speed lifestyle. Coming from Nanjing that is an inland and very urban city, I find my temperament becomes more gentle and mild like the local people. Peaceful feelings arouse from the deep corner in my heart. These changes not only mold my personality, but also give me a sense of how different lifestyles work in different places, and enable me to recognize the characteristics of places and their residents.
Objects also connect me with Yantai. In the memoir, things are no longer only simple physical concepts. Instead, with my experience, I assign meanings to them and they turn to be symbols. One outstanding thing in the memoir is the dumpling. In China, due to climate and historical disparities, there are conceivable dietary differences between the south and north. For example, in the southern cities, people tend to prefer dishes with sweet flavors rather than the salty type made in the north. In addition, most southern food is made of rice rather than wheat. The conversation about the dumpling with my cousin implies the fact that I do not follow the typical northern diet. However, representing luck and happiness, dumpling carries the wishes and love of my family. Different from some other southern people’s perception, to me, dumpling is not a mere kind of northern food any more. On one hand, it is rather a geographical mark. On the other hand, it reflects my attitudes towards Yantai. In other words, although I cannot follow the traditions and norms of the place, I choose to treat them with admiration and develop it as a way to show gratitude to my family. This subtle relationship takes me to accept not only multiple cultures, but also extends to become a philosophy that makes me appreciate and reflect on diverse views in life.
Interactions between individuals in this scene impact my perception of the place. In the scene, my nervous and anxious reactions to the Yantai dialect reveals the emphasis and dependence I used to put on language as a tool to devote to a place. It is admitted that dialect is one of the distinguished product of Yantai. However, as I switch my attention to the things under the dialect, I got the more valuable things, that is, the emotions expressed by the language. At the same time I believe that language is the most important part of understanding a place and indeed an effective complement, I also believe that authentic emotions and genuineness play the fundamental roles of communication. In this situation, I consciously rotate my attention to the aspects that are not only about language itself. This process provides me a comprehensive way of understanding a place’s culture and to embrace the emotions evoked by the experiences and people in the place.