Residing in Nepantla
I wish to write about my marriage, because it might be an unusual occasion. Me and my wife Diana are from two neighboring countries——China and Burma. But we met and started our lives elsewhere: Chicago, Taunggyi, and now London. Between these lodgings, there is a constant back-and-forth of homes——Kunming and Yangon. While Taunggyi is the physical borderland of Yunnan-Southwest China and Shan State-Northeast Burma, I realize that Chicago and London are also coming to be the borderlands of Diana and I. And as long as we are together, we will forever live in the borderlands of each other. “But I find people using metaphors such as ‘Borderlands’ in a more limited sense then I had meant it, so to expand on the psychic and emotional borderlands I’m now using ‘nepantla’.”¹ Nepantla is a Nahuatl word from South America meaning “middle”. The American Chicano writer Gloria Anzaldúa reinterpreted it as a “space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds. It is a limited space, a space where you are not this or that but where you are changing.”² With her intuitive words that carve bones and hearts, I dare to imagine a life anchored to a moving stone, settling in the nepantla of unsettled, making it a soft ground for a new home.
1. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/entrevistas. (Routledge, 2000), 176.
2. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 276.
2. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 276.