Participant Background: Zoe Pastorfeld-Li has been teaching in Yantai, China since August, 2008 on Cultural Embrace's Teach in China program. She has extended to teach in China for another year, and we would like to share an old blog that she sent during her return back to the States, between her semester break.

I miss you already and still; being home was so good. MD/DC, New York and the Bay Area in Cali were all self-affirming in their own right, and I felt equally at home in each place. I realized what I love so dearly about America besides the obvious- family (by blood or bond).

Namely I love America for the music and diversity. It hit me that I was going back to China when I was boarding my flight from LA to Seoul and everyone was Asian. Don't get me wrong, I love em all, but I realized it would be a long time until someone asked me what's really good? or que onda? It would be a long time before I heard a live MC with something worth saying or a piano player that could wash my brain and soul with his improvisations.

These realizations make me proud to be American, and when I rock my giant Obama pin around Yantai I know people can see it in my eyes.

I miss my family and I miss America, and I now realize they are one and the same. When I first got to New York I felt a bit disoriented. I remember saying, "I am not here for the city, I'm really just here to see people." I knew once I had uttered the words that I was only trying to dupe myself, but it took the unfurling of the trip to realize that New York is the people and the people are New York, and the same for DC and the same for San Fran, ad noseum. The absence I feel in my heart when I am not in these places with you, is a pain that gives me strength and regenerates my confidence in what I am doing, seeing all that you are doing to become more courageous, wiser and kinder people.

Gandhi said we must be the change we wish to see in the world. And Lauryn Hill reminds me that change comes slow or not at all. My Dad echoed this truth by relating a Japanese organizational method for achieving true, but very slowly achieved change. This method was put into practice by a man who wanted to lose weight but simply loved french fries. Rather than try and kick the habit all at once, he began the first day of his diet by throwing away one fry and eating the rest. The next day he threw away two, and the third day three, and so on.