The Middle Ground Journal

“Don’t Cry for Me, Minnesota”: A Farewell to My Home State – by Marin Ekstrom. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports

My college graduation coincided with the exciting news that I received a teaching assistantship in Zhuhai, China, for the 2015-2016 academic year. I was not only happy to actually have employment (at least in the short-term), but I looked forward to living and working abroad and learning more about Zhuhai, the Guangdong Province, and China as a whole.

However, this sense of excitement has a flipside: given that I will be in Zhuhai for ten months, it made me reevaluate my love for my own “homeland”: Minnesota, USA. Strangely enough, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about embracing my American identity. I admire many aspects of the USA, such as its can-do pioneering spirit, and try to realize the freedoms and privileges…