I’m now entering the fifth month of my China sojourn, attempting to adopt a second foreign culture. Years ago, after reading several fictional and non-fictional accounts of the American invasion of Iraq and being fascinated by the beauty of Arabic calligraphy for years, I adopted Arab language and culture as my interest. I wanted to learn a language that was very distant from European languages like English and French, and my goal was to be able to speak to the most people possible, so it didn’t hurt that Arabic is the fourth or sixth most spoken language on Earth depending on whose list you consult and how you count speakers. (After telling my Nigerian Arabic language partner at IU that I learned languages based on how many people I would be able to speak to with it, he joked, “My friend, if everyone went by that rule then nobody would ever learn my native language [Hausa]!”)

No matter how much we claim to be citizens of the world, or that we find all languages interesting, language nerds always have a favorite. It also holds that some languages or sub-cultures just don’t click. During and after middle school, a pivotal period for shaping my taste and tolerance of exotic sounds, I was mesmerized by Bollywood music, Raï, and traditional Japanese Biwa music, among other genres from around the world that may be too foreign to most American ears. On the other hand, I never got into K-Pop, anime, or the actual movies attached to the Bollywood songs I loved. I missed the boat on those art forms and often found them corny and bewildering. I felt much more at home with the idea of being a modern day orientalist, quill in hand, devouring Arabic texts by candlelight at the desk of my study.

Now I embark on a new lengthy and expensive adoption process. It’s daunting to start from zero all over again, even exhausting. I’ve made the decision that this is the last time a new language gets V.I.P. treatment from my brain (other V.I.P.s include French, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi), by which I mean that any other new language I decide to learn will be for fun, at most only dabbling in it without the pressure of setting “total fluency” as my goal. I can feel myself reaching the limits of my patience already. During a lesson in McDonald’s the other day in which my Chinese teacher taught me about using measure words in the context of ordering certain quantities of food (“I want two cups of coffee” “three boxes of cookies” etc.) I found myself thinking “I’m learning how to say this again?” It was only a momentary twitch of mental resistance, but one that I haven’t experienced before. I took it as a sign that I’m ready to stick with languages I’ve started learning so far, including Mandarin, and only improve on those.

A few times over here I’ve gotten the feeling that I’ve abandoned my Middle Eastern child. I get nostalgic for the soul that I find in Arabic shaabi music that I have yet to find an equivalent of in Chinese music. Soul is a completely subjective term, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to say Chinese music doesn’t have it. But so far I’ve mostly been exposed to a lot of the Chinese pop that plays in taxis and stores, which frankly doesn’t feel like it has its own unique flavor. A lot of it sounds heavily influenced by J-Pop and K-Pop which is in turn just an East Asian twist on American Pop genres. Of course Chinese music is incredibly diverse, so it’s impossible to make any one statement that applies to every genre. There is a very meditative and cerebral appeal to traditional Chinese instrumental music, especially when knowing that the music was composed by a monk more than a thousand years ago. That is a different and very valuable expression of the human soul. But at the moment I miss a different kind of soul. Fiery vocals, the fluttering, soaring voices of Egyptian singers like Hakim that reverberate with every emotion along the human spectrum. This nostalgia for Arab culture has led me to spend the last month listening to Warda the legendary Algerian singer and several Egyptian shaabi musicians.

I don’t know if I’ll ever truly master any of the languages I’m trying to adopt, or even if I managed to pull off the usage of my adoption metaphor in this post. (I could have just as easily used a dating metaphor for languages, for example, “I feel like I’m cheating on Arabic with Chinese.”) All I know is that “adoption” is the word that felt right for what I’m doing. I’m not adopting these cultures in that I’m dressing like them or believing their dominant ideologies, I’m adopting them in that I’m deciding that I now identify as a student of their culture. I thought that I had picked my pet foreign culture for good and that culture was Arab Islamic. Now here I am in China and I’m still adjusting to life after love of Arabic.