I’ve been looking at all my old pictures of Beijing. This upcoming trip marks my third visit to the city, the first one being in 2003 on a family vacation and then once more in 2010 on a school trip. Even though neither visit lasted more than two weeks, I feel as if I know Beijing well, and maybe this will be a homecoming for me. It’s been five years since my family moved to the United States from Asia. Due to the nature of my father’s job, we spent four years in Tokyo, and then five in Hong Kong. Those nine years were the bulk of my pre-adolescence, and are responsible for much of who I am today. While I love my life in New York and at Cornell, a part of me knows that this is only half of my identity. The light at the end of the tunnel of higher education was always to find a road that will lead me back to where I come from, and I hope that these next five months start to pave the way.
Don’t be fooled by my cool exterior. Had my father let go of my frail body, I would have slid down 5,000 miles of Great Wall. And I knew it. Not pictured: clenched fists and the terror behind my eyes
Eight-year-old me only remembers snippets of her first trip to Beijing. It was clearly wintertime because the Great Wall had a ribbon of ice that spanned its whole length. I was so small that I remember being terrified that if I let go of my father’s hand I would slip and slide down all 5,500 miles. Next memory. Sitting in a cab and watching as the driver stopped by a fruit stall on the side of the road to buy us four 柿子, one for each of us. Shì zi, he kept saying and offering us the fruit. Shì zi! It’s delicious! Eat it! He was so insistent. I was cackling at this point, repeating the word and denying the offering as only an eight-year-old can. They were persimmons. I’d never seen such a thing in my life and I wasn’t about to try one in the back of a taxi in a country I’d been in for all of forty-eight hours. There’s no punch line to this story, and yet it’s the most ancient inside joke in my family’s repertoire. It’s been fourteen years and I’ve still never dared to eat a persimmon.
Every China hand remembers doing this in middle school, right?
My second trip to Beijing was with classmates from Hong Kong. We’d been shipped off to a Mandarin immersion camp and every day at the crack of dawn we would wake up, walk to the garden and start the day off with a lesson in Tai Chi. I actually loved that. I wish I still had the discipline to greet the morning fog and gently stretch out my aches, my joints and calm my busy mind. Alternatively, the Mandarin language classes offered through this program were…hard. I failed every assessment. I lacked the work ethic expected by the Chinese teachers. They didn’t count towards a school grade, but I definitely left Beijing with some dignity behind me.
I know Beijing is a city transformed since my first visit in 2003, and this trip will be different for a slew of reasons. I am 21 years old, I have new eyes, a new filter. My Mandarin has improved markedly; in fact I hope to achieve semi-fluency at the end of the trip. I have countless more memories of Beijing. I’ve been a tourist, and I’ve been a student. I’ve been a ravenous consumer of many bāozi. One thing probably won’t change however, I might still be failing my Mandarin tests.