I bitch enough about no longer being officially American any more that you guys are probably stick of hearing about it, but the last few months have been kind of crazy, trying to figure out how to transition from a student visa to a foreign worker one, while at the same time trying to make it to India for Benny and Kareena getting married. It doesn't sound like so much, but back in my old life, I had a coworker from India who had a hell of a time getting back into the country after visiting family back home, and that was before Trump was elected and ICE officially adopted "fuck you, foreigner!" as its guiding principle.
Fortunately, I've been able to work it out with my new job so that I can go "home" to Hong Kong when my student visa expires, travel from there to India for a couple of weeks, and then return to California on my new work visa. It is not necessarily the most possible travel over the next month - I'm not being routed through Cape Town or anything - but even flying first class, I'm kind of dreading it. It's a lot of being in the air for a move that seems like it should be less trouble and to watch Benny get married.
That's, like, really weird. Part of it is that after nearly two years of Benny doing his own thing, he's suddenly asking for my opinion on a while bunch of shit, and I don't want to look at someone with a thinner version of my original face and think he looks kind of sexy in that tux. It's fucking disturbing. But I've kind of got to fill him in on some stuff, because a few second and third cousins from Hong Kong that I meet as a kid have RSVPed, and Max can't really fill him in on what he might be expected to remember. I'm also the only person he feels he can practice his Cantonese with aside from Max and "Bingbing", and I guess I should help there. He's not very good, having started learning with good intentions but let other things take priority, and now he's trying to cram what I learned since I was a kid into one summer.
Oh, shit - I just realized that practically Chinese person at this wedding will be some sort of relative, and they'll have no idea that's the case, but because I'm single, hot, and rich, practically every auntie there is going to be encouraging them to get close to me. That's... Ugh. I mean, okay, we're taking about distant cousins that I'm not biologically related to anymore, but still, I'll know, and who knows how avoiding them might look.
It's weird enough to want me too just give the whole thing a pass, but Annette says she'll never forgive me if I do, because "Indian wedding" is some sort of bucket list thing, and, besides, when will Benny and I ever get a better chance to tell my parents who we really are? Would we have to wait for someone to die? And is their son getting married even a big enough event in their lives for this to work?
No time to back out, though - lots of flights and hotels booked, and it might be my last time to hang with Annette for a while (and she's also reminded me that if I'm not there to help her not be overwhelmed among a bunch of people speaking Cantonese, the whole basis of me becoming Yuan-wei falls apart). She's already in New York, trying to find something in the publishing industry, which she says is some weird déjà vu considering that she's already moved there once and watched Marybeth look for this sort of job.
She's cleaned my apartment here in Boston out, too, taking everything she could fit in a U-Haul that I wasn't going to cart to California, much less Hong Kong. It's not everything, though, so take this as a heads-up: There's going to be some good Allston Christmas stuff outside my place this weekend.
-Jordan/Yuan-wei
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