When I first arrived in Los Angeles, and then again just before I was about to leave, I experienced two incidents of racism that left me in tears. Strangely, both happened in fast-food restaurants near my university campus, and both involved homeless men. It almost feels symbolic now, as if my time in the city had been marked by two encounters that echoed each other from beginning to end. The first time was at McDonald’s. I had only been in Los Angeles for a couple of days. Everything still felt unfamiliar—the streets, the public transportation, the way people ordered food, even the small talk between strangers. I remember standing there with my tray, trying to decide where to sit, when a homeless man suddenly threw his fries at me and started shouting. I don’t remember exactly what he said. I only remember how quickly everything happened, and how every pair of eyes in the restaurant suddenly seemed to turn toward me. No one came to help until a staff member walked out from the kitchen. I stood there frozen before I started crying. In my twenty-four years of life, I had never experienced anything like it before. The second time happened at Wendy’s, almost a year later, when I was getting ready to graduate and leave Los Angeles. By then I knew the city much better. I knew which streets felt safe after dark, how to avoid certain subway stations, and how to pretend not to notice people who were shouting at no one in particular. I knew what my peers liked to wear, what cafés we spent hours studying in, and that people here often complimented strangers without expecting the words to carry much weight. I thought I had learned how to live here. Then a homeless man walked directly toward me. He started making exaggerated kung fu gestures, throwing punches into the air. Then he shouted for me to go back to my country. This time I didn’t freeze. I told him to fuck off. It only made him more aggressive. His voice became louder. He stepped closer and closer. Behind me there was only a table and the wall. I remember my heart racing as I tried to decide whether I should leave, whether he might follow me, and whether anyone else in the restaurant was even paying attention. Finally, I raised my voice and asked for help. A Latino man stood up and started walking toward us. That was enough. To my surprise, the homeless man immediately backed away and left the restaurant. I remember thanking the man afterward, although I can’t remember exactly what I said. I should have bought him a meal, but I was too overwhelmed to think clearly. What I do remember is crying again, even harder than I had the first time. It wasn’t only fear. It was disappointment, and something heavier than disappointment. Heartbreak. Almost immediately, I remembered something a white American classmate told me. He was a law student at the school next door, a place as steeped in elitism as my own business school. “That must have been weird coming to America for the first time. I’ve lived here all my life, so I know LA is not really the most tourist-friendly city.” I told him he was right, and I told him about what had happened at McDonald’s. “Yeah honestly they only bother people who aren’t from I have no idea how they can tell.” Aren’t from. It sounded like one of those casual observations people make without expecting it to stay with you. But standing in Wendy’s, hearing someone tell me to go back to my country, I suddenly remembered it word for word. Perhaps the Southern California sunshine had been warm enough to make me forget, for a little while, the small label printed on my passport. That was the first time I understood that racism, together with white privilege, reaches into parts of ordinary life that I had never thought about before. I had imagined these things appearing in job interviews or promotions, in institutions or offices. I hadn’t imagined they could catch me while I was simply trying to buy a meal. I hadn’t imagined that something so ordinary could become enough to ruin an entire day. What unsettled me most wasn’t that two homeless men had shouted at me. It was realizing how quickly an ordinary moment could become a reminder that I didn’t belong. A lunch break, a burger, a table by the window—none of these felt political until suddenly they were. I sometimes think that it would not matter how long I lived on this piece of land, how much of its history I learned, or how many local friends I made. There would always be moments reminding me that I was still someone from somewhere else. Someone not from here. Perhaps that is the hardest part of being an immigrant, or even just a temporary visitor. You can slowly learn to recognize a place, and even grow attached to it. You can begin to imagine a life there. But sometimes all it takes is a stranger, a single sentence, to remind you that your belonging has never depended only on how you see yourself. It also depends on how the world chooses to see you.

《亢奋》第三季 In God We Trust 迎来了它的大结局，这部陪伴了我们七年的剧彻底完结了。最终季虽然有不少争议，但它依然触动我，原因在于它反复地询问着我们几个问题，这些问题《亢奋》问了三季、《了不起的盖茨比》问了百年、连我自己这两年，尤其是从24岁以来，也一直在问：人真的可以重来吗？能得到救赎吗？还有一个最有意思的问题：当我们谈论上帝时，我们在谈论什么？(What we talk about when we talk about God?)