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.”