Author: Zexi Wang
“ I am from Bosnia, take me to America
I really want to see Statue of Liberty
I can no longer wait, take me to United States
Take me to Golden Gate, I will assimilate ”
“U.S.A” was playing on the opposite side of Oldbank, the place we all knew. It was the song we all knew. Everything was a blur in the summer air, pierced by the loud crack of cheap beer bottles and cigarette smoke. The Old and the New Town, the Muslims and the Catholics, the foreigners and the locals.
When open-air bars were bustling with students, the Oldbank appeared exceptionally hollow at night. Contemplating the history in the crevices of the graffiti painted on the abandoned Oldbank, I wondered why I care - I wondered who I am.
I have long been haunted by these questions. I came to Bosnia and Herzegovina to seek answers, but they are yet to be found.
So, who am I, really?
I am from Guangzhou. Hong Kong, being in such close proximity to my place of birth, was a second home to me. Though I cannot count the number of times I have walked through the glass doors of the Hong Kong customs, in 2019, I was pulled aside by a customs officer, who explained to me that I was carrying contraband. The contraband in question? Newspapers. Newspapers that I casually bought just to have something to stare at without giving it a second though. Newspapers at your typical newsstand. Newspapers that were “too sensitive” to take out of mainland China.
That day, I felt like a stranger in my own home. I felt for the first time that I was attacked. I understood for the first time why my generation is rebellious. I saw for the first time that I was living in a truly formless and shapeless society. All of a sudden, there was an acute sense of otherness that threw off the balance of my inner self. I was enlightened for the first time to nuances of Hongkong-Mainland relations that I never knew existed.
It took me days to shake the feeling that I was a perpetual outsider watching my own life unfold in slow motion from outside the window. I could not be more familiar with the way back to Guangzhou, but that unprecedented experience jolted me out of my mental slumber, and toppled my recognition of society, politics, and nationalism. I realized that foreign lands could be anywhere - even my front door step.
Confounded and disheartened, I changed, almost overnight. I started to distance myself from my surroundings, thinking I would have a better view as a bystander, away from the rustles of the crowd and the suffocating opinions that everyone seemed to have. I was scared to invest my emotions, only to be disappointed and exhausted; at the same time, I was worried that my world would be distorted if I pulled too far away. I was too angered by the status quo, but scared of change.
But I changed when I went to Bosnia. Everything did.
I gazed up at the Mostar public park on the top of the Oldbank, an abandoned yet historic building that split the town Mostar into two. There was the Muslim Mostar on one side, and the Catholic one on the other. I projected my lonely inner self to those roaming residents who belong here. I felt detached. I felt like a rotten cocoon floating in the water, with nothing and nowhere to stretch. Language barriers to a large extent isolated me from the outside world, which I thought would give me a healthy detachment and create a certain distance from my surroundings that would help me become a better observer instead of participant. Quite the contrary, I struggled to stay afloat the entire year. I wrapped a cocoon around myself, cut out from reality.
In a foreign land, I didn’t know what things meant to me. The heaviness of Bosnian history was too much to bear, but it wasn’t my history to bear. Who was I, a foreigner, to care? Who was I, a visitor, to contemplate international relations? The United States is financially supporting Bosnia; Bosnian teenagers are moving to Germany in flocks; the Republika Srpska is pursuing independence... In the ethnography “Citizens of an Empty Nation”, the national state-making trajectory supported by the political elites and the internationals hollowed emptiness in the down-to-ground communities rather than reconstructing ethnic solidarity. In school, the assembly hall is named “Spanish Square”. A part of the ground floor is for the American corner designated by the American Embassy. Computers in the IT room and football field are supported by the Japanese Hyundai company. In Mostar where my school is located, city buses were donated by Turkey. The construction of the old Mostar bridge was funded by the EU. Road infrastructure was constructed by China’s national enterprises. Yet, I could not tell whether the ethnography was right or wrong.
People here did not treat foreigners any better because of gifts from their countries. My friends and I were threatened with guns, abused by curse words, and avoided by locals because of Covid-19 on a daily basis. Masks are gradually taken off on the streets, but my family was still stuck in quarantine. A polarized view has left me a narrow crack, forcing me to jump in.
Being a part of a grand international diaspora, I can neither immerse myself in the local community nor have a vivid picture of home back in China. I belonged to neither. Worse, crammed with tons of school work regarded as a student’s responsibility to complete to gain social and cultural capital, I found myself as if a ghost falling into nihilism.
Bosnia, Mostar, or even school in general, feels like a cage, restricting me from touching upon the infinity and beyond. The foreign lands did not treat me well; I could not find the distance I needed to deal with everything. Any place could be a foreign land to me: a foreign land isn’t just a place outside my country, but it’s also a feeling. It’s a feeling of alienation, otherness, unfamiliarity.
Upon the liminal maze that trapped me from my homeland Guangzhou, I found this foreign land a place where I could explore myself. Having come to study in Bosnia, I have realized that I never had a clear meaning of “foreign land” in mind. But I’ve picked up some clues: experiences, uncertainty, and arbitrariness. In this endless maze of exploration, I go forever onward.
“One day when you reach the end
One day you will understand
One day back to roots my friend
No place like a motherland”