Conversing across Cultural Boundaries: Rewriting "Self.".

Four years ago today, I went through Customs in San Francisco and for the first time in my life set foot on a foreign land, a country that exists more as a fiction than a reality for most Chinese people. As the friendly officer pointed at my name and said, "Xin Liu?" I realized, in panic, that I was no longer the Liu Xin in China whose family had lived in the city of Wuhan for thirty-six years (ever since her birth) and in the same neighborhood for twenty-five years. For the first time in my life I felt that I was nobody, a person without a history, a person who had nothing but a passport to prove her identity to people. In the past four years, this feeling of disorientation and lack of identity has both scared and motivated me, for it is the desire to know who I am that started me on a search for the "self," a process that has changed and reshaped me both as an individual and a writing teacher.