Oh look, she says with exaggerated cheer, it’s a new section in the blog!

I meant to write weekly updates when I first moved to Shenzhen, but a lot of stuff got in the way: trying to figure out Houhai, applying for summer internships, visiting extended family, adjusting to a new pace of life (I’ve never lived in a city before), looking for cheaper apartments, buying way too much boba for my own good (milk tea, like all foods, is on another level in China), sightseeing, biking over the terribly paved roads in Shenzhen, figuring out the WeChat shopping/scanning system, memorizing a map of the city, etc. etc.

Acclimation was rough. The adjustment period took several weeks—I’ve only ever come to Shenzhen as a visitor—and it was made even harder by the vestiges of my survival mindset from the States. I spent the last nine months quarantining in Seattle, panicking every time someone coughed in public, and staring at a screen. During my first few days in Shenzhen, I couldn’t help but feel the city breathing down my back, as if all the terrible things that had happened in the U.S. had chased me across the Pacific. I was also considerably burned-out from fall quarter, and the energy I could dredge up was quickly spent on mundane, sapping tasks like house hunting. Too bewildered and harried at street-level to take many pictures, I ended up filling my Instagram stories with bird’s-eye views: pretty, but hardly the reality of my experiences. It took four entire weeks, quite a few breakdowns and anxiety attacks, and several attempts at creating a daily routine, before things started improving.

And improve they did! I realized that getting lost—which I did more times than I can count—could be an extremely, extremely beautiful experience. In no particular order (as was the case in 2020, I’m too lazy to make some sort of cohesive narrative, or to spend ten minutes cracking out some nice imagery), here’s a list of those experiences:

• I tried twice to bike to the sea and got lost both times. The second time, I wound up at a park in the center of Shenzhen. On a series of benches next to a lake, one-hundred old men sat in a long row, each matched with a partner in a game of Chinese chess. They were playing in complete silence, and the experience was surreal in a way I can’t fully describe. Was it a tournament? A club? Either way, I hadn’t ever seen so many elders in one place.

• I also ended up biking after sundown (after getting lost again) and cutting into a night market. It was like being underwater, pressed against motorbikes and pedestrians and stray dogs and cars, my tires struggling over the banyan roots that erupt from the pavement, my voice (shouting a repeat of something like get out of my way) lost amidst the hawkers and vendors and the bright, bright lights.

• Taking the subway! I’m very fond of the Shenzhen and Shanghai public transport systems.

• Shenzhen is close to the equator, so the weather was very warm (think t-shirts and shorts) until the week before the New Year. Buying my first 冰糖葫芦 in years and eating it in the bitter cold made me childishly, ridiculously happy; my family never visits during the winter, which is when 糖葫芦 is usually sold. For those who don’t know, 冰糖葫芦 is a skewer of hawthorne berries coated and roasted in sugar. 10/10 would recommend.

• My apartment had terrible wifi for the first two weeks, so when I had work calls, I would take a taxi or subway to an office building with stable wifi. Once, half-asleep in the back at 5 AM, my eyes still stinging from such early exposure to contact lens and makeup, I caught the sun rise over Shenzhen. Watching the city glitter silver, then blue—it was eerie and beautiful and almost subversive in its nuance, as if the buildings were telling me watch, this is how we speak.

• I am still terrible at grocery shopping, especially when it involves an apothecary. This isn’t exactly an experience, but it’s worth mentioning for shits and giggles.

There are very few people who can consider themselves natives of Shenzhen. The city is new enough—and international enough—that almost everyone is from somewhere else. If you say your 老家 is Shenzhen, you tend to receive a few raised eyebrows.

(My mom, however, is one of those rare Shenzhen natives. She grew up alongside the city: she studied and worked in Shenzhen, with the exception of her college education in Beijing, until she emigrated to the States.)

Even given Shenzhen’s refreshing everywhere-ness, however, I still can’t quite fit in. This isn’t anything new or unexpected: my Chinese sounds distinctly non-native. It carries the exaggerated dipthongs and rough enunciations of English, the harshness of a part-Cantonese/part-Dongguan-dialect (virtue of my mom’s Cantonese family), and the mild Beijing 儿’s that my dad (despite being from western China) insists on using. It took my new ballet teachers only fifteen minutes of mostly non-verbal communication to deduce that I wasn’t a local.

This perpetual state of outsidership defines Asian-American identity, and we react to it in drastically different ways. I’ve always been determined not to approach China like a tourist, the way that some Asian-Americans do out of a fear of inadequacy, general apathy, or after years of otherizing people who look like them. Out of a longing for some sort of camaraderie, I was determined to hit every box on the native-Chinese checklist, to stretch myself into the cultural, social, and behavioral image of a Chinese woman as demarcated by Chinese women—it didn’t matter if I had no idea how WeChat Pay or the DD (taxi) system worked. I didn’t have a community of Chinese-Americans-in-China, the way I have many Asian-American communities in the States, and I couldn’t help but fixate on the portrayals and experiences of race, whiteness, and Asian-ness, as if doing so would help me retain a firmer grasp on one identity. The stuff I saw, though, was disheartening.

In a sort of reverse tokenization, every billboard and advertisement features at least one white person and no other people of color, as if someone (or many someones) isn’t confident enough to feature an all-Chinese bulletin. There’s the ever-present array of whitening beauty products. In the more risque commercials, it’s always a white woman who’s strutting through a bar or down a walkway or toying with a(n Asian) guy—I’ve yet to see an Asian woman do the same, and I’ve been watching. I also feel strangely aggressive towards white people here, not least because some of them insist on talking in poor Chinese to me (or other Chinese people) even after we’ve proven our fluency in English. You are literally not entitled to practicing your Chinese on us; most of the time we don’t even want to talk to you. Insults aside, maybe it’s because I feel insecure as an Asian-American; my identity is already slippery in the States, and it feels even more so here. If I can’t pass as Chinese—if I have to be the American in China, then I don’t want anyone to be more American than me: wouldn’t that be a semi-invalidation of my identity? It’s the opposite in the U.S., where scarcity mindsets define my relationship to other Asian-Americans. We’re taught to believe that there’s only a certain amount of room for us, and that we aren’t the ones entitled to that space. Case in point—I always tend to be more jealous of fellow Asian-Americans than I am of white people. This colonizing bullshit can get really tiring. Oh well, at least we Asian-Americans have the best memes.

So—pivoting away from my annoyance/anger/exhaustion and towards some better vibes—this sense of outsidership was probably a huge reason why I attached myself to the nearest ballet studio. I went through so many emotions in the last few weeks, but gratitude overshadows everything else—I left my formal dance education at age 16, and college and COVID got in the way of maintaining my technique. It’s such a blessing to have found mentors with the right balance of patience, humor, strictness, and understanding, who don’t let me explain away the holes in my technique, and who remind me not to be too hard on myself. The last part is pretty radical for me (I’m used to teachers who are so fixated on the concept of perfection that even good execution is not worth praising), and it coincides perfectly with a new, healthier mindset towards dance and self-worth. I’ve fought so hard to keep ballet in my life, and that fight doesn’t feel lonely anymore.

That being said, I STRUGGLED in my first week because I didn’t know half the terminology used in class. I completely misinterpreted one teacher’s command to go up on relevé (let out a sigh of relief and started stretching while the music was still playing and everyone still dancing). I also had no idea what the word for “heel” was (spent a minute wondering why another teacher was yelling at me while ordering me to sickle my foot). I also stare blankly or frown at a teacher while they’re talking quickly, and I’ve therefore become the butt of some good-natured jokes.

So, dance has absolutely been a highlight of Shenzhen. Learning (yet again) how to love ballet was the most unexpected and welcome of gifts, and—given how I just applied for my five-year residence permit!—I hope it’s one I can keep for a while. Heck, if Stanford is still online next year, I’ll just take a gap year and spend it here. Even if it isn’t, who knows? I need to take some time away from school and academia and hoop-jumping anyways.

So, how was Shenzhen?

All things considered, there’s nowhere I’d rather spend 2021. I think the motto of the city pretty much speaks for itself: 来了就是深圳人. While I can’t quite call myself a 深圳人, I can say that I feel welcome here. I feel safe enough to lose and trust myself, and I know by now that that’s no small blessing.

新年快乐！