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.”

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.