0. China

The best way to think of this series, “Motherland,” is as something between a novella and a collection of short stories. I arranged these chapters/articles in the order of the cities I toured, each discussing a different issue or observation on China and/or Asian American identity. Yes, this meant publishing the blogs in reverse chronological order, which can feel disorientating. I think you’ll be okay if you follow the numbers; besides, each article can stand separately.

About the articles themselves: I tried to maintain a nonpartisan voice. My goal was to simply discuss China through the eyes of a Chinese-American, a perspective that Asian American media has just begun to explore. I understand that everyone experiences China, a country with thousands of years of history and over a billion citizens, in a vastly different way. These are simply the observations I made.

Without further ado, here’s a brief intro.

adapted from the Editor Statement of It’s Real’s July issue

It’s that time of the year when we turn our heads and realize, wow - we’re closer to 2020 than the start of 2019. 

This thought always fills me with a mild nostalgia. I felt the same way standing in Shenzhen Airport, staring at the fog-wreathed trees outside. I’d spent most of July in China, touring an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of cities along the coast. The experience had been jarring. It wasn’t just the armies of relatives that greeted us wherever we went, nor the strange foods, nor the bombardment of Mandarin signs (anyone who knows me knows that I can read around 50 Chinese characters). 

No: it was the sense that the person I’d grown into over the last two years - a person who’d consistently defied, disappointed, and exceeded the expectations of her culture, family, and friends - had left no room in her for China.

This wasn’t anything purposeful. The past two years (I last visited China in 2017) had simply molded me to America. Everything from my style to my mannerisms to my values reflect this, and this hit me hard in China. 

Seeing the troubling wine culture and the toxic masculinity, seeing the obsequious pandering to white tourists, seeing the unyielding hierarchy of social interactions...it felt surreal at best, painful at worst. But being the bull-headed optimist I am, I tried to take things in stride. I tried to learn from the people we met, from the signs flanking the roadways, from the sun-tanned hands of my grandmother.  

And I did learn - I learned about the pressures students here face (school from 7 AM until 5 PM, then tutoring until 8:30 PM). I learned about the miles and miles of apartments, breaths crammed into cells stacked twenty floors high. I learned why so many Asian Americans struggle with mental health issues yet aren’t willing to seek help. 

More than once, I found myself on the verge of panic: I couldn’t be a part of this. I couldn’t juggle the perspective of an outsider, the skin of an insider, and the values of both. 

But you can say that things got better as time went on: after visiting Suzhou, Shaoxing, and Xi’an, all stunning historical centers, I began to appreciate China. I began to treat it as just another culture, complete with its flaws and beauty. There are moments when I genuinely felt proud to be Chinese: standing before Shanghai’s dazzling Pudong River, holding my baby cousin in Taiping, watching a master artist paint a bookmark in Suzhou. 

I recently began submitting my poetry to magazines again. One of the magazines surprised me: I was required to write an artist’s statement. 

Usually, I prefer my poetry to stand alone. But this prompt seemed justified. How does identity shape your work? 

It was late July; I’d just returned to the States. And so, drawing from the well of my time in China, I began to write. For some reason, I thought of the qing dye, a shade of green-blue produced during the Ming Dynasty. Despite its startling beauty and immense popularity, the technique for making qing dye has been lost to history; even today we can’t replicate it. 

So I started describing how writing poetry was like making qing. I wrote about the asymptotic nature of both, about the gap between tradition and modernity. 

Then I realized my identity was the same - I will never quite rid myself of the American part of my identity. No matter how close I’ll be to China, I’ll always have one foot in the States. 

And more importantly, I realized that this was okay. If my month overseas had taught me anything, it was that my motherland was larger and more complex than I could’ve ever understood from across the ocean. In a country with so deep a history and so vast a land, there would always be enough room for me. Likewise, I would always have room for China.

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t a b l e o f c o n t e n t s

1. shenzhen | mental health + modernization

2. taiping | extended family + second tongues

3. xi’an | journalism + what it means to be an editor

4. taiyuan | toxic masculinity + womanhood

5. shanghai | asian american identity pt. 1

6. suzhou | asian american identity pt. 2 ft. alleyway candy + artists

7. hangzhou | individualization + industrialization

8. shaoxing | culture vs. industry + why i write

9. guangzhou | education + endnotes

10. china in pictures

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. 

3. Xi'an

I’m writing this on the train from Xi’an to Taiyuan, a four-hour ride that swept past several stunning fields and cliffs.

Xi’an is very different from Shenzhen. While both cities have seen immense growth in the last few years, Xi’an bears a lot more history: it has been a cultural, political, and often military center since the Tang Dynasty. And the city does an impressive job of balancing its roots with its modernization. Case in point: the Bell Tower, a gorgeous five-hundred-year-old structure, stands at the center of a busy roundabout, rather like the Champs-Elysees in Paris. 

I always associate Xi’an with the color gold. I was twelve the last time my family visited. We spent our nights navigating the lantern-lit marketplaces while my brother and I consumed hawthorn berries drenched in honey; at evening, a warm, homely sort of aura seemed to wreathe the monuments and buildings. 

To elaborate on the food: Shaanxi food boasts tri-color cold noodles in peanut sauce, huge slabs of fragrant plum cake, mangos and papayas with yogurt and honey, beef sauteed with red peppers and scallots, colorful vegetables stewed with fish and mushrooms. I think Shaanxi does the best of balancing sweet food (Shanghai’s specialty) with the salty/sour food of the south. A word of warning, though: Shaanxi and Xi’an give huge portions. 

We met our paternal great-aunt and her husband in Xi’an. She greeted us with one of the two homemade meals we had in China: steamed man tou with cinnamon, spiced cucumber, cold rice noodles in peanut sauce, freshly-caught yellow trout. 

My great-aunt is very spirited: as she bustled around the kitchen with platters of grapes and peaches to welcome us, she stopped only to pinch my arm (“you got fatter!”) and to pour tea. She has an overwhelmingly youthful quality - adept with WeChat and technology, she wears eyeliner despite the humidity and comments on politics with a refreshing authenticity. 

She stands in sharp contrast to my great-uncle, who reminds me a little of Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda. He has a gentle potbelly and a stooped, lanky quality about his tall frame; endearingly, he always wears a warm wise smile. 

Later, he would also remind me of the artisans we saw in Suzhou: dignified, graceful, serene. For lack of a better word, he is extremely cultured. His room abounds with rows of calligraphy brushes, carefully-shelved vases from the Han and Qing Dynasties, bamboo spiraling delicately atop his windowsill, rows upon rows of books, and drafts of art reviews from the magazines that he himself edits. 

He runs two magazines - one on Chinese culture, the other profiling Xi’an’s police force. 

Curious, I picked up an issue of the latter. It was surprisingly thick for what I’d considered to be a niche topic - there were passages on recent arrests and crimes, interviews with current and retired police officers, discussions of protests, history, and ethics. Despite my broken written Chinese, I got the general vibe of the magazine: it was praising the police. 

Funny - although I’m far from qualified enough to comment on this, I’ve heard about the Chinese people’s discontent with police officers. I’ve read independent journalists discuss at length police brutality in China, similar to pieces profiling the goings in the United States. And I couldn’t help but think about how a magazine praising the police would never take off in Seattle. 

But hey, I knew I was nowhere near qualified enough to comment on the police in China. I tried to focus on the magazine itself: it was artfully compiled. 

“I run a magazine, too,” I said to my great-uncle. He gave me a wrinkled smile and a nod (he’s not a man of many words). As I pulled up It’s Real on my laptop, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d shown the magazine to a family member in China. It also occurred to me that I didn’t know how to say “mental health,” “diaspora,” or “destigmatize” in Chinese, the key words to understanding the content of It’s Real. Was this a reflection of my culture? Or was it just a lack of vocabulary? Both, probably.

“Oh,” my great-uncle said, as I scrolled through the June issue (shoutout to Emi and Sanya for pulling through while I didn’t have wifi!). “It’s culture, right? Oh, I can’t understand English...are these poems?” 

“Yeah,” I said. “And yeah...it’s about culture.” 

“What part of culture? What subjects do you address?” 

The question was vague enough for me to give a half-assed answer. “Just art and writing,” I mumbled. 

But later, on the DD (Chinese equivalent of Uber) back to our hotel, I realized that I hadn’t wanted to explain what It’s Real was really about to my great-uncle. I’d only shown him the magazine because I’d wanted to keep talking with him, to explore a common ground that I shared with no other relative. And I’d really wanted his approval, considering how I’d already begun to look up to him. 

I could’ve asked my parents to translate “mental health” or “destigmatize” or any of the words I’d needed to explain It’s Real - but I hadn’t. Why not? I kept asking myself. Had I just not wanted to bring up such a heavy topic on our first encounter in five years? Was I afraid that he wouldn’t understand, or worse, that he’d look down on me? In America, I’ve always been very proud of It’s Real: of its mission, growth, team, you name it. But in China.…

Then I started thinking of my great-uncle’s magazines. I started comparing It’s Real to Xi’an Police. It’s funny, considering how different the two publications are - one praising the police force and the other discussing mental health in a very different language - that this was the first time I’d really thought about It’s Real in relation to another magazine. 

Halsey has a quote: “Artists have come to a time in politics where they have two choices: to distract the world from all the awful stuff that’s going on, or to make people aware of it. And neither choice is wrong.” 

Are my great-uncle and I examples of those two choices? Him trying to distract from some of the dirtier realities of Chinese policing with a buttress of facts and details? Me trying to open up discussion about mental health? But no…the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the two publications were quite similar. We were both trying to offer nuanced and informative - but ultimately hopeful - outlooks on controversial issues. And he wasn’t exactly trying to distract his audience…he was just trying to praise the police. Would it be too simplistic to reduce our publications down to a Halsey quote? 

I think I usually end all my essays with an “I don’t know,” but I really don’t have a solid answer. I guess our magazines are just too different for me to compare, and I don’t want to go into the touchy subject of publication in our respective countries.

The day we left for Taiyuan, my great-uncle and great-aunt came to say goodbye. I hugged both of them, promised my great-aunt I would come back to Xi’an and learn how to make man tou, then stepped into the car.

“Hey,” my great-uncle said. He tapped on the glass - I scrolled down the window.

In his hand was a copy of their forthcoming issue of Xi’an Police.

“Oh,” I said, surprised.

“Take it,” he insisted, pressing it into my hands. “When you learn how to write Chinese, you can be an editor.”

I grinned. “Thank you,” I said, putting the magazine into my backpack.

“Keep writing,” he advised. He had a Gansu accent - he spoke with a bit of a lisp. Behind us, a taxi honked impatiently. A humid wind slouched by. “Someday, I’ll be able to read your magazine. And I’ll tell my friends all about it.”

I smiled. Our taxi began to pull away.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d love that.”

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.

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.

Epilogue: China in Pictures

s h e n z h e n

t a i p i n g

x i ‘ a n

t a i y u a n

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s u z h o u

h a n g z h o u

s h a o x i n g

g u a n g z h o u