My earliest impression of the West was from a popular Chinese quiz show. 正大综艺, roughly translated as "The Magnificent Variety Show," started airing in 1990. Everybody I could know as a toddler watched it religiously. The show featured clips of the gallivanting reporters adventuring in various European hotspots, followed by short trivia questions with guests. Often there was a foreigner with colorized facial features, speaking extremely offkey yet admirable Chinese.
The unabashed level of cosmopolitanism and urbane exoticism, of European row houses with roofs red and blue, bordering meandering canals or cobbled walkways, starkly contrasted with the environment of most viewers. Back then almost everybody lived in a cell in a honeycomb, inside some drab grey concrete midrises. The less fortunate were in a farmhouse, often a single incandescent bulb dangling on wire illuminated the hearth with dirt walls. At least when I watched the show, the Chinese pavements outside lined with peddlers of goods and groceries, the openair cookstands enshrouded in mist, paled in comparison, to the serene meadows and orderly street of the old European bourgeoisie.
When I found myself in the West, it was in 2003 deep within interior Alaska, an hour or two of driving from the actual Arctic Circle. I wasn't transplanted into the postcard, moreso into a blank canvas that I had to repopulate myself.
First there were the ubiquitous corrugated iron and aluminum boxes, so utilitarian in form that rarely revealed its utility. Then there were decades-old wooden huts and shacks, forming the majority of the common dwelling. In more dense areas, by American frontier standards, one could find concrete structures most under 5 stories tall. The color scheme was an interminable whiteness for the majority of the year, strangely reminiscent of Chinese watercolor painted in sparing negatives. For the rest season and a half, the whole landscape came alive with foilages greens and brown.
I could only describe my entrance into America, as rebirthing as a toddler at 10. I was handed another tabla rasa without tools, and had to fill it with brand new signs and symbols of a new language, mapping what they signified. Far from being jaded enough as a preteen, I took in people and things looking like nothing before as they were, without the preconceptions that preoccupied or sometimes even intimidated my parents.
After three years I entered high school. By then I had no more qualms about the place that I called home. I was fully competent in the language, sometimes felt even superior to the locals who learned an imperfect version via osmosis. My English was acquired the same way many adult Chinese student-immigrants had to toil through: memorizing whole tomes of language test prep material, oddly nicknamed as gems such as ruby or sapphire -- much like the Pokemon games popular among children. At times I was even asked to tutor new arrivals and their spouses, in "authentic English" from someone who still had a decent command of Chinese.
I was barely 14 then, not too far removed being a preteen, not old enough to be a troubled adolescent. Gradually though, it became more clear that I was staring down a branched path in my development. The more time I spent playing volleyball with the Chinese club, and tutoring some of the students I had, the less concerted effort I could put into befriending people in my school and be invited to their gatherings.
Other young immigrants in my situation, more likely belonged to families that converged in large metropoles in California or New York. These diaspora populations were large enough to furnish similar aged immigrants. The interior Alaska town of Fairbanks had a population of barely 50k, after very generously counted considering its extremely sparse settlement pattern. In the 2000s there were just under 100 Chinese, 70 of which were graduate students. From this cohort, myself included there were 4 Chinese children around my age, all arrived around the same time. We happened to live within the same 2 multiplexes 10 meters apart. We were kind of close in the first year or two, and drifted apart as each chose slightly different trajectory on the prior mentioned branching paths.
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