CHAPEL TALK
CHAPEL TALK
Between Two Worlds Yubing Yang ’21
Delivered October 19, 2020, in Clark Memorial Chapel
T
he receiving of the red scarf is part of a ceremony for second graders being enrolled into the Chinese Young Pioneers — a national organization for children that feeds the Communist Party. However, as a first grader, I knew little about what was happening at the time. Alongside my classmates, I could not wait to be handed our red scarves and wear them patriotically every day, like those second- and third-graders we played with and looked up to. Yet, I completely missed out on the enrollment ceremony that I had been looking forward to all year when my mom decided to bring me along for a one-year research stay in the US. Needless to say, I had major FOMO (fear of missing out). As much as I was excited to step foot in “the land of the free” and experience American pop culture, I was also anxious about leaving my friends back in Beijing and not being able to receive my first red scarf with them. On my first day of elementary school in Michigan, everything was new to me, from getting off the yellow school bus for the first time
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POMFRET WINTER 2021
to looking around and recognizing people who looked different from me. However, despite the foreign environment and new faces, I found a strange sense of familiarity when the teacher asked us to stand up, put our hands over our hearts, face the American flag, and read from a poster in the classroom. Though I did not realize it then, throughout my short stay in Michigan I had been drawing parallels in my head between the nationalistic indoctrination that underpins the polarized relationship between these two political rivals, both of which I now reside in and call home. Returning to Beijing to finish elementary school, I then immigrated to Massachusetts with my family. The junior boarding school I attended had a decent number of international students, but it was still dominated by white Americans from the surrounding towns. Whenever my birth country was brought up, I knew there would always be an awkward pause followed by questions unasked and thoughts unsaid. Even if they were not expressed, I knew what they entailed.
