existential crisis or something close

shit, i really miss home lately. i don't know why it just hit me the other night, after going to an exhausting 9/11 counter-protest. sometimes i wonder why i'm here? why am i chanting in these streets that don't even care if i recognize them as home. and these people around me probably just think i'm a foreigner or tourist anyway. why do i even care? i know i care because the same thing could happen at home--violent police, xenophobia, racists--i know it's everywhere. a japanese visiting scholar was in the rally, he came to me and c., asked what we were chanting about? we said, "bigots go away," he said, "bigots are small-minded people?" we smiled and said, yes, very small-minded people. it's sad that bigotry is perhaps a universal concept and human experience across cultures. it's not that hard to make that conceptual connection. but what about fighting against the bigots here? what does that mean to all the injustices happening at home? what about those bigots with the same skin color, speak the same language, and grow up on the same land as i do--don't i have more leverage to fight them? will i feel less powerless, more meaningful than how i feel here?

it's hard to be stuck in two different spaces all the time. reading all the news from home and wish i could be there and put in my body. it made me really sad to think that at least in the next 5 years i would not be able to live in taiwan. and more likely to be longer. i know a good thing about being in academia is that the nature of the work is transnational. but research is one thing and organizing is another. i feel like if i would ever wanna risk something that big, i want to risk it for the people and the land i truly care for. like how fanon pretty much abandoned his psychiatric work and joined the revolution in algeria. maybe it's because of the dislocation i'm feeling alone again. i wanna be with people i don't have to feel culturally self-conscious with, i want to speak the language i used to, i want to write, and discover life back home. i feel extremely sad to think about what i would have missed.