On hugs and books

I have, without really thinking about it, been speaking English with everyone I have encountered who doesn't speak German or Farsi. As much as it saddens me that this English boycott is failing right now, I can also look at it as a milestone, because it does not make me want to cry when I speak English to people and I have not normally started crying when something happens to make me notice that I am not in Germany. I imagine that it has gotten easier since I came back to my hometown after my unsuccessful apartment hunt, because when I went to my university city it was actually the first time I had ever been out without my family since coming back to the states, and I was constantly in shock every time I went outside of the hotel. After that, going out somewhere with my mom or dad is a piece of cake compared to venturing out by myself.

There is one piece of the overall culture shock that I have only just noticed that I feel like I should talk about, and that is hugs. The act of hugging someone differs completely in the US from everywhere else I have been. In Germany, it is normal to hug someone, at least in my experience. I got so used to hugging all of my friends and everyone while I was there, that the lack of hugs in the US took some getting used to. The first people I spent time with other than my family when I came back to the states were my mom's Iranian friends. Being Persian myself, I have often been part of the whole hugging thing that Iranians do. When Iranians are together, they hug eachother, even if they have only just met. The point is that, just like in Germany, I was already hugging my mom's friends that I had only just met as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

The next few times I met people for the first time in the states, however, I hugged them just like normal before realizing that I obviously shouldn't have. As a girl, I suppose it is more forgivable, but I was definitely not prepared for a small fact that I had completely forgotten about: people in the states do not hug eachother ever. "Ever" is probably an exaggeration, but my point is that the American definition of a "space bubble" is much larger than probably anywhere else. The differences between US culture and every other culture I have ever had exposure to are vast, and hugging is one of these differences that has always confused me.

Now for some more of my rambling on a different topic. I went to a book signing today, to listen to an emerging author, Yiyun Li, talk about her books and her life as a writer. She came from China as a college student, intending to study math and physics but then became a writer. One person in the audience asked a question that I too had been wondering: why Yiyun Li writes in English and if she also writes in Chinese. Yiyun Li answered this question by saying that no, she doesn't write creatively in Chinese because the kind of writing she associates with Chinese is writing everything except for the truth, as a code that she used when she kept a diary so that her mother would not find out that what she wrote was a diary. It is also interesting to me that she claims to not have been able to speak English with people when she first came to the US even though she had learned English and could read in English, and yet not very long later she has published a handful of novels and short story collections in English.

As an aspiring writer, I have often wondered what it would be like to write in German. My sister once said, jokingly, that I should write my book that i'm writing in German. I responded with "do you have any idea how annoying that would be?" because I would have to translate everything i've already written into German, and then somehow come up with the same way of writing and everything in a different language. The only way i would translate my book is if it's already finished and I just want to translate it for practice or because I have nothing better to do.

Though I doubt I could ever write something in German that is even worth publishing, I have written creatively in German before, mostly for random assignments in school. At the end of my first year of studying German, I had to write my own fairy tale. It only had to be a couple paragraphs. Then, after only a couple more months of studying German, at the beginning of my 2nd year (though I suppose that was technically the 3rd year because I skipped year 2) I had to, once again, write a fairy tale and make it 2 pages. I took the same story I wrote before and wrote the whole thing again from scratch, and it was strange how much better the exact same story was after only a few more months of learning German. I sort of want to write the same story again now, almost 3 years later, and see how much better I can make the same story. If I actually do that, i'll be sure to post it.