Speedballing Shanghai and Nanjing

China Travel Log #4

Hey friends! Long time to chat. Well, two and a half weeks to be specific. To set things straight, I don’t have a remarkable excuse for why I’ve been MIA on here other than life’s been a cyclone of events. Yet again. (At this point, life moving at anything less than 200 mph would be nothing short of a miracle).

For the first half of June, my mom, Nina, and I had been chilling but also sort of not chilling at my grandpa’s house in Yanghe. The first weekend we arrived, we had a family gathering of twenty-something people. The weekend after that mirrored the first and was no less rowdy. I don’t know about you, but having so many people crammed into a house melts my energy faster than ice under the sun.

To me, a home is a sanctuary from the noise and chaos of the outside world. It’s a place where I can hide under the covers and read all day or randomly belt Hamilton lyrics out of order and out of tune. Of course, you can’t do that when you have twenty other people heating up your already stifling living room. At least, not without raising eyebrows and evoking a barrage of “it must be an American thing” comments.

Yanghe wasn’t just a socially draining experience. At times, it was emotionally draining as well. Thinking about the alternative life it represents had we never immigrated feels like trying to peer beyond the eddying currents of silt and debris to see the bottom of a depthless pool. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not ready to expound on this topic just yet. Maybe next week. Or the week after that.

Besides visiting family in Yanghe last month, we also spent a solid week exploring Shanghai and Nanjing. As you can probably guess, two cities in seven days was quite a blur. Each time I close my eyes and recall this past week, I’m swept away by a whirlpool of memories…

Shanghai

• Seeing Uncle Fei Fei for the first time in 18 years, our great aunt and second youngest cousin in 10 years, and meeting our youngest cousin and our aunt for the first time

• Being awed by the Pirates of the Caribbean Ride at Disney

• Conjecturing how they managed to make Mickey shaped egg yolks

• Watching a live Frozen performance in Chinese

• Watching Shrek 1 and 2 at our Uncle’s house

• Aesthetic pagodas near Yu Yuan

• Seeing my Mardi Gras necklace find a home on my Uncle’s wall

• Turtle stamps at the Shanghai Museum! Lots and lots and lots of ‘em

• Observing the Bund and being pushed this way and that by the waves of bodies while wondering what this place might look like in a hundred years  

• Finding out that salmon leather clothing is a thing among the Hezhen ethnic group

• Discovering lion-turtles are a thing in Chinese mythology

• Three dance parties in an hour at the Hotpot Factory

Nanjing

• Catching up with my former roommate from Davis for the first time in 3 years in Nanjing and realizing with ecstatic hope how easy conquering geographical distance is in the 21st century

• Exploring Fuzimiao, this pedestrian road bursting with…you guessed it—pedestrians  

• Visiting the Ming XiaoLing Tomb, where we encountered a few dozen six-hundred-year-old stone creatures, my favorite being, of course, the lion-turtle

• Seeing dozens of human remains in the mass graves around which the Nanjing Massacre Memorial is built

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This whole China trip has felt like trying to focus on a single object while staring out a high-speed train. The moment you lock eyes on a tree, a building, a cloud, it’s already sailed beyond the rim of your window. Within seconds it’s an inconsequential fleck melding with the blue-green horizon. Basically, there’s no stopping to smell the roses when you’re hurtling, both literally and metaphorically, at 200 mph.

But in my experience, it’s when we slow down and savor the moment that the blurs of color streaking by us solidify into individual shapes and the details sharpen into focus. I wish I had more to say about the streets we traipsed in either cities or the items we observed at the Shanghai Museum or what it felt like staring down at the bones of a three-year-old at the Massacre Memorial, but I don’t. Doing so, would be like mining for diamonds where you know there are none.

​Everything happened so fast and in such a compressed period that it almost feel like it didn’t happen at all. To borrow the words of Julius Caesar, “Veni, vidi, vici. (I came, I saw, I conquered).” I got my fill of pretty lights, good food, beautiful scenery, a couple hundred photos, and then, I moved on like your most typical everyday tourist, the one thing I wanted to avoid becoming when I began traveling last fall.

For the past year, the question of how much our memories shape our perception of reality has been percolating through my mind. If I don’t remember much of anything from Nanjing in a couple years, will it be as if I’d never went? In what ways will it affect who I am and the course of my life if I don’t even remember it? Or to put it more realistically, if I never expend the effort of recalling what I experienced and instead allow its details to gradually smoothen under the ebb and flow of time, was it worth going? I suppose you can ask the same question of almost everything you do in life.

​Is studying calculus till 2 am for days on end worth it if you never use it after college and forget most its principles within a decade? Is investing hundreds of hours into friendships that will weaken and gradually fade after you move across the country worth it? Is getting mad and holding a grudge over something that won’t matter to you in a couple years worth the emotional turmoil and drama?

​What I’m trying to highlight through these questions isn’t the fact that such pursuits are a waste of time or, on the opposite end, that everything happens for a reason. What I’m trying to highlight is the fact that humans are incredibly bad at choosing the most efficient route for their lives. If I’d known that I’d end up studying Communications and English, I’d have slapped AP Chem as far from me as possible. If I’d known that I’d end up freelancing and traveling after graduating last year, I’d have skipped the stress of searching for a job and sailed through my last quarter asleep.

​But, like I said, we’re pretty inefficient. And you know what? I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s kinda incredible that despite making countless wrong turns throughout our lives, most of us still manage to find our way or at the very least, keep trying. Navigating life is rather like navigating a maze. Every time you find yourself at a dead end or draw yourself into a corner, you’re actually one step closer to finding the exit. By eliminating all the wrong options, you’ll eventually find the right one. If you feel like you’ve taken a wrong turn, it’s not the end. It’s merely a detour to a better path. This is a pretty basic analogy, but you get the gist.

​I don’t know for sure what kind of an impact Shanghai and Nanjing will leave if the details are already eluding me, but then again, that’s not for me to say in this time and place. Fear of the unknown can only be conquered by making peace with the unknown. I haven’t fully made peace with the unknown yet, but being ok with only seeing a blur whenever I think about these two cities is a start.

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