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.”

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.

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