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. 

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.