1. Shenzhen

Shenzhen is the most beautiful of cities. 

An airy glow wreathes the spacious roads; vibrant greenery and flowers bedeck the highways; the swooping bridges and buildings are at once delicate and imposing. And always in the distance: the fog-hewn lavender of the mountains and the steel-blue expanse of the seas, lending a powerful gravitas to the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley. 

Even in the less modernized parts of the city, where scabbed apartments and bearded trees share the cracked pavement with sun-spotted fruit hawkers, there is a wonderful take-no-shit authenticity to Shenzhen. Here, I feel the same elation that I do in any big city, but there’s also something else that clicks - a sense of belonging. Whether walking past the gleaming economic sector or nestled in a wicker chair as my Yeye (paternal grandfather) lectures me on the origins of the Xia Dynasty, I feel safe. 

Maybe it’s that Shenzhen grew up with me: it seriously glowed up in the last few years. Maybe it’s that my family always returns to Shenzhen on our visits to China, so that I’m already familiar with its roads, restaurants, and customs. 

But I think it’s Shenzhen’s energy that attracts me - as a town that grew from a literal hole into one of China’s technological and economic centers, I can understand and admire the tenacity of its people. There’s a certain kinship that comes from discussing politics with the taxi drivers in Chinese; there’s the glowing solidarity of sharing a huge meal (and a vicious game of mahjong) with my family; there’s the joy in the simple sight of people with my skin and facial features bustling down the streets.

And then there are the drawbacks.

“Oh, look, she got fatter!” my nainai (paternal grandmother) gushed as I entered my grandparents’ apartment.

“Definitely,” my yeye (paternal grandfather) said. Nainai proceeded to pinch my arms and back.

I’d expected - no, dreaded - this moment. In the coming days, as we visited relative after relative, I would bite my tongue in anticipation of their stares.

In China, more than anywhere else, I’m highly conscious of my physical appearance. It’s true that my grandparents and many of my older relatives grew up with very little to eat; they don’t want me to be thin. But it’s more than that. In any foreign environment, where my social status is uncertain or inferior to those around me, I resort to my visible appearance to bolster my self-esteem. It’s a defense mechanism, and a pretty shitty one at that. But it’s common, and it’s very natural.

Here, my accomplishments - writing, dance, my magazines, activism - don’t translate into a different tongue and a different culture. Mental health and poetry aren’t tangible to my family friends and relatives; the only time I piqued their interest was by mentioning Stanford.

It has a lot to do with the expectations around women, too. Traditional marital expectations are rooted even in modernized areas; the Chinese feminist movement is markedly quieter than that in the U.S.; high heels and makeup swarmed the streets of Shenzhen and Shanghai. And yes, Chinese women have made significant strides within the last few decades. But - and I’m not discounting my own sense of displacement as a reason for my discomfort - I felt pressured here; at times, I felt an incessant itch for my makeup and more fashionable clothes (I’d left them in the States).

I didn’t start picking apart what I ate, or weighing myself daily. I didn’t start the obsessive exercise regime that’d marked my eating disorder. But this awareness was still draining - there is nothing more frustrating than being dogged by your own body.

I firmly decided against conformity; instead, I vented to whoever would listen (my mom - I really wore her thin with my complaints) and rebelled whenever I could.

I got a pixie cut; I disparaged wine culture and toxic masculinity; I ranted about a misogynistic joke my uncle made; I talked loudly to my dad’s business friends; I stomached wasabi and sichuan peppers on a dare.

In retrospect, some of this was immature. But it wasn’t entirely conscious, either; I was simply trying to reject something I feared accepting. To me, being a woman in China felt like turning against so many of my values and beliefs.

And I don’t think I have that figured out yet. Nor do I think that Chinese womanhood represents backwardness or misogyny; truth be told, I don’t know enough about China to judge half its population.

But in Shenzhen, a city that has reenvisioned and exceeded standards of cleanliness, beauty, sustainability, and innovation, it’s easy to hope.

2. Taiping

Three images to capture Taiping: the food, the mahjong, and the mosquitos. 

If you’re Asian (and even if you’re not), you probably know that food is our ultimate expression of love. My Popo (maternal grandmother) embodies that. Every time we return to Taiping, my mother’s hometown, Popo welcomes us with hundreds of zongzi, all handmade in the days before. 

Zongzi, similar to tamales, are pyramids of sticky rice wrapped and tied in plantain leaves. Inside the rice can be meat, eggs, red bean paste, or any filling that goes with rice (basically anything). My Popo makes two varieties: sweet (she hand-harvests lychee wood, which she wraps in the rice to dye it red and give it a subtle fragrance) and salty (salted egg yolk, pork, and soybeans). 

In this small town, where my glasses fog up from the humidity and half-naked children sprint through the dusty chapped roads, where the air filters lazily through gleaming broad-leafed trees and gunfire Cantonese bursts from the lips of its people, food is nothing if not a family activity. We go to brunch (zao cha) and dinner at noon and eight P.M. respectively, often with six aunts and uncles, half a dozen children, and one or two older great-aunts or uncles. At the restaurant, our pack dominates two or more tables, chattering merrily over platters of cha siu, freshly-caught fish, spiced stir-fried vegetables, and delicacies crafted from eggs, pumpkin, or tea leaves. On Friday, the day before our departure, my entire maternal family came to dinner with us: three biological aunts and one biological uncle, accompanied by their spouses; a total of eight cousins ranging from ages two to twenty-one; two great-uncles and two great-aunt (the other three sent their sincerest apologies that they couldn’t attend); some other quantity of aunts; my Popo and Gonggong (maternal grandfather); my mom, dad, and brother. 

The power and solidarity behind my family, the selflessness and good spirit that defines each of my visits to Taiping, never fails to astonish me. Here, a single cousin has no less than a dozen parents and doting caretakers; a baby is passed from aunt to uncle to grandmother to mother with a natural ease that I rarely see elsewhere. When my fifth aunt placed my newest baby cousin, an adorable two-year-old boy with a budding love for soccer, into my arms, I nearly yelped: I had to hand him to my twelve-year-old cousin, who immediately started twirling him around as he burbled contentedly. 

This sort of communal parenting doesn’t imply carelessness on behalf of the biological parents, but a trust stemming from a wonderful and unconditional unity. Seeing my mother in her hometown, sliding effortlessly into the role of caretaker as she innovates a new toy out of a box of gum and a chopstick to entertain the younger children, reminds me that my family - often mere faces on a phone screen during a WeChat video call - is truly my safety net and backbone, one that gives and demands in equal measure. Seeing three rowdy generations under one roof, as my Popo rules over the dinner table with her pot of congee, explains why my parents work with such a ferocious tenacity and bend over backwards for my brother’s and my education; they truly believe in pushing the family forwards through their own work. 

In Taiping, I tried to adhere to these values, too - I painted one of my cousin’s nails a bright pink and sat in on her dance class; I laughed with my other cousin as she spilled all the tea about the boys at her school (I also gave her a few bits of dubious relationship advice); I poured (spilled - physically) tea for my grandparents and great-relations; I taught two of my other cousins some useful English words for their exams (excellent, hella, and shit); I chased after my two of my baby cousins as they ran around the fishtanks in the restaurant. 

But despite my love for my family, despite the shared smoothies with my fourth aunt, the shopping with my fifth aunt, and the countless mahjong games with my uncles, I’m always drained after a few days in Taiping. While I understand that large families are exhausting for even the most extroverted of people, my time in Taiping always reminds me that my values are always somewhat - and sometimes very - different from the rest of my family’s. 

Trying to reconcile the self-sufficiency that my education and experiences in American have drilled into me with the selflessness that defines my family in China - I often find myself struggling with this. Recently, I’ve come to realize that these two values don’t necessarily conflict; my Popo and mother, the former of who brought up five younger siblings by herself and the latter who was the first in her family to go to college, are nothing if not self-sufficient. In fact, selflessness takes an extremely strong sense of self, one that I’m not sure I have. 

The day before our departure, I found myself alone with Popo in the dining room.

I was working on something (a poem?) but I snuck a glance at Popo. I’d often defined her in relation to the rest of our family: the indomitable matriarch, always with a baby in one arm and a witty retort on her lips. But without her army of aunts, uncles, children, and siblings, she didn’t seem diminished in any way, nor any less herself. She sat at the mahjong table, absentmindedly arranging tiles - I thought she was trying to play a game by herself before I realized she was placing all the tiles in concentric circles. 

“Hey, Popo,” I said in Mandarin. I stood up and headed to her, stepping gingerly around a puddle of spilled milk. “Do you know how to play?”

I only know six words in Cantonese: one, two, three, airplane, thanks, and shit. I’m sure some other words are in my subconscious somewhere, but I haven’t ever taken the time to recollect them. 

“No,” she said. She too spoke Mandarin, although heavily accented with her Cantonese - in a way, Mandarin was a second tongue for both of us. 

I was slightly surprised - everyone in my family knew how to play. 

“How about I teach you?” I said. I pulled up a stool and sat down next to her; she shrugged and nodded. Gently, I guided her wrinkled hands away from the table. I gathered fourteen pieces: two matching tiles (the eyes), and four sets of three consecutive or matching pieces. 

“This is your goal,” I said. “You win when you get fourteen pieces like this.” 

She studied the tiles, her forehead furrowed. I stared at her hands - they were sun-spotted and wrinkled from years of work, her nails encrusted with dirt. I have very different hands: pale whereas hers are golden, unblemished where hers are callused. 

I set up the rest of the tiles as if we were playing against three other people, explained a few more rules to her. Despite my haphazard Mandarin, which fit clumsily over my tongue like a poorly-adjusted retainer, she took to the game quickly. 

I gave fourteen pieces to her and thirteen to me, then simulated the game. Mahjong, like all other popular gambling games, is addictive because it balances strategy and luck, and Popo was plenty strategic. She quickly learned which pieces to discard, to judge the worth of a tile relative to the other players’ hands and the already-played pieces. 

We played four games, me guiding her hand for the first three. She won twice before we quit for lunch. 

This simple reversal of roles, with me teaching Popo a game which my paternal grandparents taught me, didn’t fill me with some grand epiphany or emotion. But I did realize, with a spurt of gratitude, how these quiet moments define my family as much as the chaos of my cousins or the chattering of my aunts. 

Later that afternoon, as Popo was taking a nap, I pit myself against Gonggong, my fifth aunt, and my fourth aunt at the mahjong table. 

Although I’m a proud mahjong champion among my immediate family and friends (I’ve won five times with dragons - probably more as a result of luck than anything else, but still an accomplishment I love flexing), I was not prepared for Taiping mahjong. 

My grandfather began throwing out tiles before I’d even finished uncovering and arranging mine; he played with a gunfire intensity that scored him two victories in less than five minutes. We started playing with money, and I lost all one-hundred yen that my fifth uncle lent me in half an hour. 

“Be easy on Ana,” my fourth aunt scolded my fifth as I grudgingly pulled out my own wallet for more money. “She needs the money for college.” 

That night, I had some more luck: I earned back forty yen (enough to purchase one salad in Palo Alto) against my dad, fourth uncle, and fourth aunt. 

“Look how much you’ve improved,” my fourth uncle said, smiling proudly. “I have taught you well.” 

“Lies,” Baba snorted, tossing the die. “My parents taught her. Plus, you’ve lost all your money to me.” 

The day afterwards, I left Taiping for Xi’an (where my paternal great-aunt and uncle live). Leaving Taiping is always a strange experience; as I closed the taxi door behind me, I couldn’t decide between my feelings of relief and nostalgia. Although Taiping is undoubtedly the most foreign of Chinese cities - with everything from the language to the eating schedule completely different from mine - it’s also a town that has always welcomed me with open arms, a pot of warm congee, and the familiar clatter of mahjong tiles.

It occurred to me that the next time I visited my maternal family, I’d be at least eighteen, one whole ass adult. By that time, will I have learned to speak Cantonese, as I’d promised myself I’d do when I was fifteen? I couldn’t help but smile as I imagined conversing with my aunts, uncle, and grandparents in their native tongue - would Taiping change for me, then? Would there be some sort of greater understanding between me and my maternal family? Or was Cantonese only one of many bonds between me and them? 

I turned around to wave good-bye, but I was a little too late - the apartment was already gone. 

4. Taiyuan

I have very conflicted feelings about Taiyuan. 

Toxic masculinity, wine culture - these immediately jump to mind. Besides, Taiyuan is a small city - it seems to fold in on itself, stewing and churning in the chaos of insignificance. And while I grew up in a small city (Bellevue represent!), I could respect Bellevue for its serenity. Taiyuan is the wannabe sibling of Shenzhen: all of the fire, none of the drive. 

But it’s still where most of my paternal family lives. Aunts, uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, [insert relative name]-twice-removed-and-thrice-removed. On Thursday evening, we congregated at a restaurant around a magnificent oak table. 

Relatives whom I hadn’t seen in half a decade accosted me and my brother. I sang the ABC’s with my baby cousin; my aunt chattered about colleges with my mom; my male relatives got drunk on 42% mao tai. 

I was uncomfortable. I couldn’t help but compare the experience to Taiping, which seemed like a PG version of the scene here: fewer aggressive relatives, less wine and alcohol. Despite the language gap between me and my Taiping relatives, Mama’s side of the family was much more familiar. 

In Shaanxi Province, home to several of China’s legendary heros (Guan Yu, for one), masculinity and wine culture go hand in hand. Everything from dining to toasting is strictly structured: seating arrangements are made around our grandpa-once-removed; one shot is downed for every relative who proposes a toast to us. Nan xi han da zhang fu - a phrase basically meaning “brave/very masculine man” - is passed from mouth to mouth like watermelon. 

And as for the women - boisterous and fiery though they were, I couldn’t help but feel as if they were filling in the cracks left by the men; they didn’t start any conversations or make any moves to change the topics, but laughed along after their husbands/fathers/sons.

Just respect the customs here, I thought, as one of my uncles made a rather misogynistic joke. But the day afterwards, we drove an hour and a half to Pingyao, a neighboring city, to watch a show discussing Pingyao’s history. The short story of the spectacle: a guy recruits 232 men to rescue a seven-year-old child. The guy and all 232 of his men die on the way back, though, leaving the child (and the audience) to reminisce on the values of ancient China. 

While the set was breathtaking - two large streets styled after ancient China, complete with authentic lengths of silk and a drum performance - I found myself cringing more than once. 

One scene depicted the soldiers about to rescue the child. Before the march, the soldiers bathed (some performing impressive karate leaps into basins of water) and shouted impassionately about their bravery; then a host of women ran delicately onto the stage and toweled them off.

Huh? I thought, more startled than irritated. 

“The mayor of Pingyao had handpicked two-hundred thirty-two of the most beautiful and slender women,” the narrator said, his voice dripping with sorrow. “If the soldiers were to die on the campaign, they would still have one last, blissful memory of these women toweling them off.” 

Sounds like their sex lives are kinda lacking, I wanted to mutter. But the scene changed: the general of the 232 men had decided to choose a wife before he left on his campaign, so that he could bear a son and continue the family line. 

A dozen women entered the stage, all dressed scantily. Body part by body part, they exhibited the smallness of their feet, the delicate length of their arms, the slenderness of their waists, the barely-concealed swell of their breasts, their faces pasty with powder and blush. Then they began to (for lack of a better word) twerk to show off their hips and butt: the most important childbearing part of a woman. 

What? I thought. There literally is no reason for them to include that scene other than the appeasement of guys’ horniness. All around me, men were lifting their cameras. I couldn’t tell what the women onstage were thinking - had they just become desensitized to this? Or was this normal for them? Was I overreacting? Worse, was I insecure because these women all had bigger boobs and slenderer waists than me? What was happening? 

The show progressed. The protagonist chose a wife, married and impregnated her, left Pingyao, and died. Then the woman bore her son.

“I’ve had my husband’s child,” the woman said. “My job is done. And now I die.” 

You gotta be kidding me, I thought. What are you, twenty years old? But the lights faded dramatically on her, and the audience let out an appreciative sigh for the glow-in-the-dark embroidery on her wedding garments. 

Yeah, I know it’s unfair to hold history up to the criteria of third-wave feminism. And I know there are books and college majors discussing culture/feminism (to which I will say I can respect a culture, but not when it sacrifices the basic dignity and safety of women). But this show debuted three years ago. It discusses an extremely oblique part of history. And the women...for a good hour after the show concluded, I kept trying to figure out why they included that scene. How it could push the narrative forward, how it could add some dimension to an already-layered set design....

Foot-binding is real. Misogyny is (and I can’t believe I’m actually saying this) real. Men choosing women based off body shape is real. Family and childbearing as pillars of Chinese culture is real. But the twerking, hip-swirling, boob-spilling exhibition depicted in the show? Not real.

I decided to stop wasting time trying to justify what my mom, my brother, and I all thought was a highly uncomfortable and misogynistic scene. The simple truth is that the show was not trying to preserve Chinese culture, nor trying to expose an unjust part of history. To the contrary, it was sexualizing history, reducing women to scantily-clad farces to appease a sweating, sunburned, horny audience. It was letting the story - and an interesting discussion of China’s values - take second-place to the capitalization of women.

“Imagine if I chose my husband like that,” I joked with my mom on the drive back. “Have them line up in a row and show me their feet, abs, faces, hair, dicks....”

I couldn’t wait to leave Taiyuan.

On Friday morning, we woke up early to clean my great-grandparents’ grave. 

I wouldn’t call it a grave occasion (heh heh), but it was important. I dressed in the most appropriate clothing possible: white pants and a gray t-shirt (and about half a gallon of insect repellent). We drove an hour to the cemetery, which occupied a snug alcove between some breathtaking mountains. 

I had performed the ritual several times before, but it’d been five years since the last one. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins pulled into the parking lot - I helped them carry the bags of food, cleaning rags, wine cups, and flowers towards the graveyard. 

The tombstones in China are much bigger than those in America. The nicer ones we saw bore gold engravings of the deceased’s name(s); incense spiraled lazily from where recent offerings had been made. 

We wound through a hill of onyx tombstones before arriving at my great-grandparents’ grave. 

Wordlessly, my array of relatives began to assemble the offerings, the wine, the flowers. With wet rags, they wiped down the grave until the onyx gleamed. 

Then we lined up and began bowing. 

We started with the grandpas and grandmas, then the aunts and uncles. When it came time for Baba’s bow, he murmured a prayer, the incense drifting gently past his face. 

“Great-grandpa and great-grandma,” he said, kneeling, “I’ve brought your great-grandchildren. I hope you are happy; I hope you will preserve the Chen family.” 

It seemed to hit me now: the weight of my name. How Chen was so much more than part of Baba’s WeChat ID, so much more than one of the countless characters I cannot write. And I didn’t know how to feel about that - proud? Ashamed? As I bowed, knelt, and kowtowed before the tomb of an ancestor I had never met, rooting my three sticks of incense in the pot of ashes, I just felt confused - there was a spider next to my right knee, a huge black ant crawling up the side of the grave. Should I pray? Pray for what - the wellbeing of my family? Those words felt trite, insincere in their predictability. 

Thank you for bringing us together, I thought instead. I stood. 

And as we scattered chrysanthemum petals over the grave and poured wine on the earth, as my grandfather arranged the food upon the tomb, I realized that this was what I could genuinely understand and appreciate about the ritual: the quiet unity of three generations - four, if you consider my great-grandparents - from across the world.

On Saturday, before we left for Shanghai, my family gathered in our great-uncle’s apartment for a game of mahjong.

His apartment struck me as immaculately clean, with a bit of a retro vibe and a shelf spilling with books. As I took a place at his mahjong table with one great-aunt and two other great-uncles, it occurred to me that perhaps I really hadn’t seen enough of Taiyuan to make any judgement about it; perhaps in my longing to leave, I’d missed out on opportunities to genuinely enjoy the city.

Or maybe I was just thinking from the imminence of goodbye.

It’s funny, how the rules of mahjong reflect the culture of each city. Taiyuan mahjong is very different from Taiping mahjong. With my maternal family, the game is played rapidly, the rules as straightforward as the players’ tongues. In Taiyuan, the tiles are handed out at a much slower pace; a series of rules I’d never heard of (we also used poker cards, another set of dice, and a rule of four arrangement that confused me for a good ten minutes) gives the game a methodical lull. 

“Come back soon!” one my great-aunts called after me, as I stood up, hugged my relatives, and walked towards our taxi.

No way, I thought. I smiled instead and nodded - here, I was a granddaughter, a daughter, a cousin, a woman. I had my duties, just as they had theirs - they would support me, and I would treasure that support.

“Of course,” I said. Closed the car door behind me.

Even if I had judged Taiyuan harshly, I was unmistakably happy to leave.

5. Shanghai

If you put together the bustle and business of New York, the culture and elegance of Paris, and the modernization of Shenzhen, you’d get something akin to but not quite exactly like Shanghai. 

Truth be told, I didn’t stay long enough in Shanghai to fully grasp its culture, but I could understand how and why it’d secured a status alongside all the aforementioned cities. In a strange way, it felt like the stylish, classier older sister of San Francisco, a feeling I couldn’t quite grasp. 

It was also in Shanghai that I started hating the “我” character. 

“我” means “I” (the pronoun, not the letter - if you’re a newcomer to Mandarin, we don’t have letters). One of the first scenes that greeted us upon our arrival was a megalithic building, black glass rupturing the steely clouds. On it were projected the same words that would inevitably pop up in any famous location we visited over the next few days: “我 <3 上海.” I love Shanghai. 

A variant of that phrase, “我爱北京,” is printed on a keychain that hung on my desk corkboard, a souvenir of my visit to Beijing almost ten years ago. 

I began to associate the 我 character, the unifying element between the keychain, the Shanghai building, and any touristy item anywhere else in China, with my own status as an outsider. In the slew of cities and souvenir shops we visited, with names strung from oblique characters such as 绍兴, 苏州, and 杭州, the 我 character became the only word I could identify. 

And I hated that: I hated how my illiteracy glared at me through places meant for real tourists, for freshly-converted RMB, for the sunburned white faces and gawking English tongues that swamped almost every temple and museum we toured. 

I also hated the irony of it - that 我, the simplest and most fundamental expression of identity, was a mocking mirror of my own stunted nature. What is an “I” by itself, without any anchor or elaboration? What is a “我” without an adjective, an article and noun, a verb? Like me, “我” was adrift. And it wasn’t free in its untetheredness; it was lost. 

Now, this begs the question: why do I even remember how to write “我” when I can only barely remember the other pronouns?  It’s not too complex of a character, but neither is it the first thing you learn at Chinese school. Truth be told, I tried to teach myself Mandarin when I was fifteen. I actually got pretty far - I learned about 300 characters in two months - before I had to focus on school and everything else. 

As I turned sixteen and seventeen, as all the characters I’d learned winked out of my memory, “我” dug in its heels. It bled into my doodles. On my planner, in the margins of half-hearted notes, on the screen of my school laptop, I took to scrawling it everywhere and in every color imaginable. Once, I even drew it on my skin, red wandering my elbow’s barren yellow.

I guess there’s another sense of irony in that, that in a city famed for its international status, in the only city where white tourists didn’t react with surprise when I talked in fluent (and loud) English, I felt so strongly obliged to take sides, and to take the side with which I was most unfamiliar. 

But this isn’t a novel perspective - in the wake of China’s technological rise, coupled with massive gains in Asian American media, a cultural purgatory isn’t rare for any ABC (American-born Chinese) who stops and thinks about their identity. I don’t know how this tension manifests in anyone else, but I wanted to fit into Shanghai; I wanted a clear boundary between me and all these outsiders. Yes, I wanted to say, I have yellow skin and black hair; yes, I am Chinese.

I thought that getting out of Shanghai would help with my overwhelming displacement: it would be easier to lose myself, easier to lose an “我,” in any other city.

Then Tuesday came; we checked out of our hotel in Shanghai and piled into a taxi. 

“What’s our destination?” the taxi driver asked. He swiveled around to look at me - my parents were still bundling suitcases into the trunk. 

“Suzhou,” I said absentmindedly. I wasn’t prepared for the glint in his eye, nor the words that came after.

“Ah, I know that accent. So you’re from America.”

6. Suzhou

We were five minutes too late to see the Minister’s Garden, a Ming Dynasty destination famous for its architecture and greenery. That turned out to be a blessing: instead, my family spent the evening wandering through the centuries-old streets of Suzhou. 

Suzhou is a literary and artistic haven: comparing it to any other city wouldn’t do it justice. It was in Suzhou that poets and writers perfected the craft of literature down to the arrangement of desks and the positioning of pens; it was in Suzhou that jade and calligraphy rose to fame. A quote sums it up: “above, there’s Heaven; below, there’s Su-Hang.” Su-Hang refers to Suzhou and Hangzhou, the gems of the Southlands. 

Suzhou is stunning. Waterways shimmer gracefully between the watercolor architecture; an apothecary nestles between a bookmark-painter, a candy-weaver, and an antique library. 

It’s a city that fully understands and grasps the present, but keeps its feet in the past. I.M. Pei, one of the world’s most renowned architects and the designer of the Suzhou Museum, pretty much sums up Suzhou’s attitude towards art and history:

“Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.”

We visited the Suzhou Museum and the Minister’s Garden the next day: neither can be captured in words. I can say, though, that the architecture of the Suzhou Museum perfectly complimented its exhibitions; the black-and-white minimalism lent an airy, swooping quality to the calligraphy and paintings.

But I think pictures will do those sites more justice; what I want to write about, instead, took place in the streets. 

My family bought quite a few items in that ancient alleyway: a pouch from the apothecary to fend off mosquitoes (it worked until we got to Hangzhou, which is famous for its poisonous mosquitoes), delicacies made from roses and hibiscus, a box of dragon’s-beard candy. 

Dragon’s-beard candy is made from peanuts, coconut, rice flour, and sugar; it’s similar to cotton candy, but with a subtler and warmer taste. It traces its history to the Han Dynasty, and the master who handmade it before my family was nothing if not proud of his culinary lineage. 

“Twenty years of dragon’s beard!” he declared, as my dad asked him how long he’d been working. “I’m a master.” To my surprise, my dad - who is not usually a generous tipper - insisted on giving a huge tip for a box of candy. 

We headed deeper into the alleyway. Then something caught my eye: a small shop nestled in the corner, with barely enough room for two people. The walls were lined with bookmarks, gentle colors roosting on shelves of weathered wood. In the corner of the corner was an old man, hunched over a blank piece of paper. 

Fascinated, I approached him. He was painting a bamboo pattern onto a bookmark. 

He looked up. “Hello,” he said serenely. He had a sort of knowing smile; his face was as worn as the sparse furniture in his shop.

“Hi,” I said. And then, “your bookmarks are beautiful.” The designs featured everything from blossoms to bamboo to birds to images from Tang poetry. 

He nodded, nodded again to my dad, who’d entered after me. On his desk was an array of brushes, a palette, and a ceramic bowl of water. 

“Can I watch you paint?” I asked. 

He nodded and resumed his work in silence. After a few minutes, I started looking around. 

“Do you have any designs with peach blossoms?” I asked, suddenly struck with the idea of gifting a peach-blossom-bookmark to my middle school math teacher (long story behind the peach blossoms). 

He raised his eyes. “No,” he said. “But I can do one right now.” 

“No, that won’t be necessary - ”

But he’d already dipped his brush into a pink pigment. Before I knew it, peach blossoms were blooming on a blank bookmark, followed by the steady strokes of a black branch and spots of green. 

It was stunning; it was humbling. The detail to the petals: he used at least four shades of pink and red. A bird appeared next to the clusters of blossoms, feathers golden and blue. 

He looked up. “Is there anything you’d like to write on the side?” 

“Um,” I said. “What about ‘master of mathematics’ or something like that?” 

He nodded. In slender strokes, he transcribed my phrase down the side of the bookmark, waited for it to dry, and then tucked it into a protective sleeve. 

I marveled at the finished product: it was beautiful. 

“Thank you,” I said. 

“It’s my duty,” he said mildly. “Is there anything else you’d like? It’s twenty-five yuan for one bookmark.”

Are you kidding me? Manufactured bookmarks in the States cost three times as much. 

“Sure,” I said. “I like your bamboo design. It’s beautiful.”

“Will do,” the artist said. He pulled out the bookmark he’d been working on and continued tracing thin green strokes into the paper. 

In that moment, I understood why my dad had given the dragon’s-beard maker such a huge tip. In this little haven of artists and artisans, the residents breathed and loved and lived within their crafts; they nourished themselves on it. This sort of artistic purity is so rare that we outsiders must view their humbleness and good humor and low prices as selflessness. And with our materialism, we repay this selflessness in the only way we know how: money. 

“Here,” he said, the smile still on his face. I wondered what his apprenticeship in painting had entailed, whether he’d taught himself or was part of a lineage of bookmark-makers. I wondered what memories were tucked into those countless wrinkles. “Shall I write your name?” 

I opened my mouth, closed it in embarrassment. 

“She doesn’t know how to write her name,” my dad said. He’d been silent the whole time, watching the master paint the bookmarks, studying the art on the shelves. 

“Oh?” He looked bemused. 

“I’m from America,” I explained. The excuse felt flimsy: each time I said it, I seemed to wear it one inch thinner. 

“I can write it for you,” my dad said. The artist passed him a piece of paper and a pen - on it, my dad inscribed three Chinese characters: 陈若云. My Chinese name. 

I swallowed down a lump in my throat. Although I’d shrugged off the uneasiness from Shanghai in the last few hours, it returned in full force. What seventeen-year-old didn’t know how to write her own name? What Chinese girl couldn’t write - or even recognize - her family name?

The bookmark maker, to his credit, made no comment other than a “well, you have time to learn.” And then he wrote the characters onto the bookmark. 

As we bid goodbye to him and shuffled sideways out of the shop (the entrance was too small to fit two people), I couldn’t turn away from the suffocating knowledge that two of three people had known how to write my name in the last five minutes, and that not one of them had been me. Suzhou’s streets suddenly seemed too narrow, as if the walls were going to squeeze me through the pavement and out of the city.

If I hadn’t belonged in Shanghai’s metropolis, I definitely didn’t belong here, in this sanctuary of the past. 

“You okay?” my dad asked. “You’re very silent.” 

“Just thinking.”

The evening turned out to be one of the best nights of my life, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was always one step behind everyone else, a blip in the synchronous beauty that was Suzhou.

And I’m not sure if that feeling will ever leave. My Nainai (paternal grandmother) gifted me with 3000 Mandarin flashcards before I returned to America, and that daunting plastic stack has become yet another symbol of the distance between me and the blur of yellow faces that has become them. But, being a stubborn optimist, my clumsy attempts to relearn Mandarin (although it’s going surprisingly smoothly, perhaps because of all the work I put in two years ago) feel encouraging at the very least. There’s something soothing about tracing the characters over and over, something akin to the rhythmic lull of Mama’s Mandarin and the steady folds of dumpling dough in Baba’s hands. 

I want to love China, in the same way that people try to love the parts of themselves they cannot change, and what I saw of Suzhou and Shanghai intensified that desire to a near-painful extent. 

Just yesterday, I learned how to write the names of some Chinese cities, Shanghai among them. On a whim, I wrote out the phrase that had made me cringe for so long: 我爱上海

I couldn’t help but laugh. Even though they were crafted by my hand - or perhaps because of that - the characters looked ridiculous. I erased them and continued tracing the 海 I was practicing. It means “sea.” 

No hard feelings, I thought for no particular reason at all. I wasn’t sure to whom that was addressed: myself? The phrase I’d just erased? The ambiguous American tourists? The natives in Shanghai? 

I gave up trying to dissect my feelings, and started tracing my name instead: 陈若云. In the morning light, it was hard to feel anything but a peaceful contentment.

7. Hangzhou

Hangzhou: home to mosquitoes that raised three-inch-wide welts on my legs, home to suffocating humidity and mournful drizzles, home to fried toads and duck tongue delicacies. 

I think a culture’s (or a person’s!) personality is encapsulated in its food. Shanxi Province is boisterous and loud, thus the huge portions and heady flavors; Suzhou is as subtle and sweet as its biscuits and candy; Chang’an’s ruggedness accounts for its searing chili peppers; Shanghai’s sauces and desserts capture its boldness and vivacity. Hangzhou is no different. It has the same mildness as Suzhou, but its vinegar-heavy cuisin ranges on the sour side. 

Nonetheless, I liked it. People here share the earnestness of Suzhou - both are part of the Southlands, after all. And like Suzhou, historical sites and relics had been preserved with an almost religious dedication - Buddhist sculptures and temples soar over jade waters and moss-bearded cliffs; pagodas swoop above lakes blossoming with lilies. 

Hangzhou is also the home of Alibaba, one of China’s largest conglomerates with a specialization in ecommerce, retail, and tech. We toured the company’s headquarters with one of my dad’s friends. 

“I want you to appreciate China,” my dad told me. “It’s very difficult to understand what China is like from the U.S.” 

So I listened while my dad’s friend gave us some interesting facts about Alibaba and its founder, Jack Ma. Admittedly, I don’t remember much of what he said; I was fascinated by the modern art onsite. We passed three sculptures of nude men, their strides frozen, backs bent in what looked like penitence or shame. We passed another sculpture: a man hunched over, hands gripping his head in agony. 

“What is this about?” I said. I stopped my bike (Alibaba lends bikes to its employees for free), and turned to our guide. The statues in their vivid blues and greens were striking against the delicate gray glass of the buildings. 

“Ah,” he said. “I’m not quite sure, but I heard that they represent our founder’s philosophy. Jack Ma. He thought that a man should always be humble.” 

“Okay,” I said. I wanted to ask him who designed the statues, but he’d already moved on. 

The statues have stuck with me. Jack Ma’s philosophy had manifested in a foreboding and imposing way unmatched anywhere else. Huawei’s Shenzhen site (we toured that too) didn’t have it; Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Twitter didn’t have it, although the last time I toured those U.S. companies was a decade ago.

I later realized why the statues had taken me aback - I hadn’t expected such a colossal display of personality in a Chinese company. I’d started to homogenize China into a seamless machine - all the women wore the same makeup; all the workers displayed no superfluousness; all the meals were served in the same fashion. But here was the pinch to my arm called Jack Ma. His philosophy didn’t stop at the statues: he’d also incorporated huge walkways over ponds. He’d designed his meeting spaces after Ming Dynasty architecture.

Later, we toured Tencent’s offices in Shenzhen. Tencent, although not as artistically striking as Alibaba, still gave off a vibe of its own: with its indoor basketball and badminton courts, rock-climbing walls, library and hip cafes, and jogging tracks, it resembled Google in its blending of work and life. My dad attributed Tencent’s and Alibaba’s individuality as a result of their youth. In comparison to Huawei, an enterprise closely related to the government and several decades older, Tencent and Alibaba have found significantly different footholds. 

I suppose it was in Hangzhou that I started prying at the cracks in China: looking at the individual rather than the whole. I looked - or tried to look - past the series of shu-shu’s and a-yi’s and family friends - and it was hard. Back in the States, it was easy to see past a facade. Here, not so much. 

But hey, there was the cashier who let us buy slippers even though we were one yuan short of the price. There was the silver-haired businessman who soliloquized about his love for wine and wasabi. There was the young father with two chipped teeth who insisted on teaching me two moves of kung-fu to defend myself in college.  

So why had I grouped these people - my people - into something without a face? Probably as a defense mechanism; probably because I barely knew the language. Even in Suzhou, where I’d stopped to breathe and watch the bookmark master paint, I hadn’t considered him as a person, but as something ethereal. 

And thus, while following my dad’s instructions to understand China, I realized the necessity of understanding something else: the Chinese person. 

8. Guangzhou

Guangzhou is located at the very bottom of China. Unlike the mildness of the Southlands (Suzhou and Hangzhou), Guangzhou is exceedingly hot and crowded. We tried to tour the Pearl River on our first night there - it turned out to be nearly impossible, considering the mass of tourists. The subways stretched the possibilities of public transportation with their sheer human density; the escalators at the stations were rigged to stop when too many people tried to get on. 

Guangzhou is also known for its dim sum. As one of the former commercial capitals of China, it retains an impressive population and economic sector; it also has a much older vibe than the newer cities of Shenzhen and Shanghai. 

I made a friend from Guangzhou last summer. I’d contacted her early in June, asking if she’d be available when I came to her hometown. It felt surreal to see her again - last year, we’d been posed on the edge of uncertainty, in the hazy purgatory between college decisions and applications. Now, as we hugged each other and sat down to talk, things felt eerily calm. Truth be told, I felt a little awkward - I always stumbled over my Mandarin when talking with people of my own age. 

She’ll be attending the Imperial College in London next fall; she’d applied a variety of American and European schools. Apparently, she’d opted out of the infamous gao kao, or China’s college entrance exams. 

“Oh?” I said. “So you just don’t want to go to school in China anymore?” 

“No,” she said. 

I guess I couldn’t blame her: China’s gao kaos are notorious. In the U.S., test scores aren’t the defining factor in an application system that (supposedly) holistically evaluates grades, scores, letters of rec, extracurricular activities, and a slew of other variables. In China, seven tests at the end of senior year are the sole barrier between high school and college. 

Some say this is a reflection of China’s values, but I think it reflects China’s enormous population first and foremost. Application officers are simply overwhelmed by the number of students who apply every year. And this is even more applicable for middle school students - in Xi’an, reportedly, only 40% of middle school students test into high school. 

“So do you do any clubs?” I asked. “Or sports?” 

She shrugged. “Badminton,” she said. “But so does everyone.” I liked her for her authenticity - she was frank but not overbearingly so; she was very down-to-earth. “And we don’t really have clubs; school ends at five and we have two hours to ourselves before we go to tutoring.” 

“Yikes,” I muttered, as she described the tutoring sessions that would start from seven and last until nine at night. She had traveled to a town several hours away to take her AP tests and SAT’s. “I’d never be able to do that.” 

A strength of the U.S. education system that I came to appreciate during my time in China is its flexibility and (in certain schools) emphasis on creating a well-rounded citizen. The U.S. puts much of the power of education in the hands of the state and individual school systems. China, on the other hand, gears its education towards economic modernization, towards creating an efficient and able workforce. 

Neither approach is wrong. But for me, someone whose life centers around non-academic activities, I couldn’t imagine growing up in China. I’d never been a great test-taker, and China’s education system revolves on tests. 

“So what do you want to study in college?” I said. 

“Environmental engineering,” she said. “I wanna be a professor.” 

“Oh!” I said, smiling. “That’d be so cool. I might become a professor, too.” 

She looked at me with the kind of excitement that only comes with sharing an aspiration. As we babbled about the research we wanted to do and where we wanted to study abroad, I found myself relaxing; I found myself enjoying her presence. 

It’s a strange feeling, talking with a friend in Chinese, in China. In all my previous visits I’d only spent time with family - I’d vehemently resisted my parents’ urges for me to make friends with teens my age. A certain childish pride and the embarrassment of my own illiteracy had always kept me from socializing in China. 

But now that feeling disappeared. Our eager discussions of our futures seemed to bridge some unspoken distance between us - in a string of English, Mandarin, and the occasional Cantonese, we discussed everything from college to the tourism industry to Asian American culture to mental health. 

When my dad finally came to take me to dinner, I hugged her and promised to keep in touch. I felt light, almost beyond happy. 

We were having dinner at Hai Di Lao, one of the most acclaimed hot pot restaurants in China.

One of Guangzhou’s famous thunderstorms had started up. Waves of rainwater beat against the taxi as we honked our way through the streets; traffic lights and pedestrian blurred into a chaotic mass of noise and colors. 

We stopped before the restaurant. My dad shouted a thanks to the driver - we stumbled onto the street. 

The rain came thundering down; I laughed as the street blurred into smears of red and gold. Pedestrians jostled me, umbrellas a swarm of colorful plastic. Motorcycles puttered past, ferrying fruit hawkers and young couples through the deluge of cars and buildings. With each breath, I seemed to inhale the miasma that was Guangzhou. I couldn’t see anything before me; I couldn’t see anything behind.

And it felt perfectly blissful, getting lost in the downpour. 

And I realized this storm felt a lot like my experience in China: disorientating, wild, breathtaking. Maybe I should stop trying to make order out of my motherland; heavens knows it has enough of that. Maybe I should stop trying to take things so seriously.

Then Baba pushed me forwards. “Come on!” he shouted, his voice barely audible beneath the din of thunder and traffic. “Don’t just stand there!”

He took my hand and pulled me towards the restaurant.

Footsteps splashing blind, we ran.