Speaking Spanish as a young 5-foot tall Chinese woman wearing a Smith College hoodie got me confused stares and raised eyebrows more than once when I studied abroad in Spain.
By simply looking at my face, people wouldn’t expect Spanish to come out of my mouth. Most think I know Mandarin — I ashamedly do not — and because I was an English major, many wondered why I didn’t go to England to pursue my literature studies. But there I was, landing in Málaga, Spain, on a chilly January day to spend the next four months in a country where I had no heritage or family ties.
To rewind, I had chosen Spain so I could practice Spanish. I started learning the language in elementary school, a requirement at first, but eventually it became a language I loved and continued to learn throughout college. As a Chinese American adoptee raised in a white American family, I learned Spanish over Mandarin. Mandarin was a language I hardly knew, one that reminded me too much of the Asian roots I had rejected due to pressure to assimilate and fear of estrangement from my family. Conflicted between Asian and white, but not enough of either, I had happily embraced something distant from the two identities.
So in the spring semester of my junior year, my triplet sisters, Nora and Alice, and I enrolled in the Programa de Estudios Hispánicos en Córdoba (PRESHCO). Founded by the Smith College and Wellesley College in 1981, PRESHCO immerses students in Córdoba, a beautiful city in Spain’s southern Andalusia region that’s recognized as the birthplace of flamenco and celebrated for its rich, Arabic-influenced culture from historic Moorish rule. There, in the diverse city of the Mezquita Catedral (Mosque-Cathedral) and gorgeous, flower-filled patios, I would take classes at the local university, stay with a Spanish host family, and embark on a new life across the Atlantic Ocean.
But it was my first time living internationally outside of the United States since…
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