through the shanghai smog

reflection on 3 weeks in the motherland

sunlight was nowhere to be seen the first week i was at Shanghai. instead, a thick fog settled. made a home of the city, a constant reminder of its air pollution. its presence dulled my senses & kept me from venturing outdoors on my own.

during my trip to china, i was awash in a hazy daze—days blurred into each other as i followed a routine of going to the gym, walking to Aldi’s, yearning for interactions with peers. maybe it was the language barrier testing my elementary-level Chinese at the coffee shop; or the persistent sting of cigarette smoke in taxi cabs; or the very literal air pollution wherever i walked—but i felt like i was living life with smoke over my eyes.

i had nascent dreams to make something meaningful when I went back to china—my first time back since middle school, i was now educated with some understanding of Asian-American discourse. i read interior chinatown. i adore Li-Young Lee. i devoured The Poppy War on the 10-hour flight. to turn my consumption to creation, i wanted inspiration for my own portfolio of identity-based work— a poem, perhaps, or a moving photo series.

instead, i left with empty hands, more questions than answers, and a nagging sense of guilt. adjusting to daily life was harder than expected. i grappled with inconsistent VPNs. i struggled to use my phone to buy eggs at 7-Eleven, as any form of payment had to be through a superapp like AliPay or WeChat. i failed to research shops to visit in my vicinity, squinting at tiny Chinese characters on the cluttered screen of MeiTuan (China’s equivalent to Yelp & Groupon).

the front gate at yu garden — had to reverse image search bc i forgot the name :/

there’s also the more complicated friction I felt—that although I shared the same genes and features as passerby, i couldn’t be anymore out of place. I couldn’t help but compare my sense of belonging in shanghai vs copenhagen; despite walking for a mile in the latter city without seeing another asian, i still felt more comfortable there. in interactions with shanghai locals, the dissonance between expectation and reality of my language skills was brutally exposed, as i asked for navigation help with the vocabularly of a third grader.

part of it is my fault. i neglected Chinese school growing up, demotivated by my heavy American accent constantly under fire by teachers. i read manga instead of manhua, watched anime instead of c-dramas. how could i expect my culture to welcome me with open arms, when i was the one who turned my cheek in the first place? when my young cousin eagerly asked me does everyone really carry guns in america?, i resisted a retort on censorship in china. (if i knew the right translation, maybe i wouldn’t be able to control myself.)

how could i expect to create something beautiful re: reconnecting with my culture, when i can’t seem to understand it? when my american upbringing, my preference for other east asian cultures, perhaps some tangled inner sinophobia means i don’t want to understand it?

from another substack writer, i stumbled upon a word to capture my feelings: immigrant guilt.

“Still, I don’t know what I expected to feel standing in the parking lot of a Long Island strip mall. I’d hoped my ancestral ambiguity, sometimes a murky cloud hanging over my identity, other times a brick wall, would disperse or crumble into dust. My gung gung and late po po would appear, arbiters of the Chinese culture my adolescent self repressed. They’d scold me in a language I don’t understand, and I’d welcome it—after all, how better to connect with one’s forebears than immigrant guilt?”

from China View Restaurant [Permanently Closed]

guilt haunts me writing this post. who am I, this second-gen banana, complaining about feeling guilty? it’s a feeling that’s anti-productive. feeling guilty without action doesn’t absolve me of it, yet it’s all-consuming. it’s a feeling i thought i moved on from and that i could find closure with by visiting with my parents and seeing family again.

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family reunions are a dramatic affair—it’s tradition to meet up in a private room, decked out with a huge lazy susan that display a never-ending deluge of delicacies in the center of a dozen people. relatives greet us in explosive cheers, thrusting hong bao¹ into my hands & circling the room to clink glasses with my parents. i observed cousins and uncles and sons-of-sons chuckle and bicker, my dad’s great aunt piling my mom’s plate with fried fish and fatty duck, the kids glued to their phones. out of respect i don’t glance at my phone, even though i have no one to converse with.

i give up on asking what i’m eating — too many dishes to keep up

this is the type of environment i miss out at thanksgiving, when it’s just my nuclear family. relatives who help you move into your apartment, who entertain your business ideas, who pick you up when they fail, who look at your children and say look at how big they’re getting. my dad’s cousin hears i like art—a former self-trained architect himself, he launches into a lengthy ramble on chinese art. his passion is endearing, yet i feel like i’m underwater—i can see his mouth moving but the sound waves diffract and refract on their way to my ears. i nod as if i understand. go visit other parts of china. travel and see the art. call me and i can take you. i politely smile and nod as if i would.

there’s an enduring history between my family and our extended relatives in china, and i fear it’ll ends with me. can i imagine traveling to china by myself, keeping up this tradition of big family dinners with people i barely know and faces i hardly recognize? it doesn’t feel right not to, but it also doesn’t feel right to do.

photo walk from visiting my dad’s old part of town

taken on the start of lunar new year

i wonder, what if my parents stayed & i grew up here?

“do you believe in ghosts? no. i believe in

being haunted. i wish you could be done with a place

and have it not haunt you. i am wishing for

too much. Shanghai, which is 上海, which is

“upon-the-sea,” which is fairytale. i used to be afraid of

how unknowable the sea was, its vast reach.” [Nancy Huang] 

shanghai, you are still unknowable to me. you reek of unknowable smells in the streets, fill me with the unfamiliar texture of squishy wheat gluten & bitter leafy vegetables. you are the 黄浦江² running away from me. you escape my metaphors, my prying eyes and attempts to understand you. i want to understand this fairytale land from my parents’ stories passed on during childhood. once they dreamed of america — now they stay awake thinking of you.

past lives, 2023

you are a city i never lived in, but you live in me all the same. i am trying to hold onto this tenuous connection, clumsy as my fingers may be, for i fear what’ll happen when i let go.

1. 红包, (hóngbāo), traditionally given by older generation relatives to younger ones. i wonder, how will i pay this tradition forward, will i meet the next generation of extended family?

2. Huangpu River — regarded as Mother River of Shanghai — No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man