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.”

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.

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

s h a n g h a i

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