Author: Jeffrey Cui
Instagram: @jeffreycui
When my family stepped out of the Dalian airport for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that taxis in China are blue. We didn’t have taxis back in suburban New Jersey, and those that I did see whenever my family made the rare trip up to the city were yellow. The second thing I noticed was the thick scent of cigarette smoke as we stepped into one. So began my relationship with the mother country.
I remember staring out of the frosty car windows for the entire hour-long drive from the city outskirts to our grandparents’ apartment, mesmerized by my new surroundings. Around the airport, the most visible feature left by the gentle touch of the glorious chairman: a forest of planned apartments—hulking beasts of poorly lit gray brick and concrete—packed along the edge of the highway for what seemed to be a mile stretch. As we approached the center of the city, the dim street lamps and plain façades gave way to eye-burning neon signs that crawled like ivy on seafood palaces and convenience stores alike. Cars parked on what looked like sidewalks, and pedestrians with the same yellow skin and black hair as I did hobbled across the road amid the running traffic. I was dazzled.
Admittedly, before I went to China I didn’t know that they had lights and apartments and whatnot. At seven, it never occurred to me that Chinese houses had running water—it never occurred to me that Chinese houses would need running water. Abstractions don’t bathe, or do the dishes, or get thirsty. Books had left with me the impression that everyone in the Orient lived in majestic Tiananmen-esque complexes under yellow-glazed tile roofs, shielded from the rain by greased paper windows you could poke holes through with your fingers. Of course, this was a far cry from reality. I can’t say I was disappointed when I first stepped into the stairwell of my grandparents’ drab box of an apartment building. We had to stamp on the ground to turn on the harsh white ceiling lights. There were two doors on each floor, each pasted with colorful New Year’s decorations: bright red and yellow paper cut outs of dragons and fish, and banners running down either side with poetic couplets I couldn’t decipher. The walls did little to insulate the building, and I could still see my breath as I trekked up the stairs. There was no paint left to peel off of the bare concrete walls. Dazzling.
A couple years back, when I was fourteen or so, my family took a bullet train from my father’s hometown of Fushun to Dalian, where my mother’s side of the family lived. We had been visiting China almost yearly since our first trip ten years ago. By then, flying up to see family had become a chore. For two hours, small Chinese children ran up and down the aisles of the train, babbling in Mandarin with little to no parent supervision. The couple sitting across the aisle cracked open a rank jar of who-knows-what halfway through the trip. The passengers behind us yelled into their Xiaomi phones, and the ones in front of us complained about their seats, sitting shoulder to shoulder but raising their volumes as if they had a village to throw their voices across. There were no windows to stare out of—I sat in an aisle seat. All I could do was bury my head in my arms and sigh my way through the ride.
We got off the train, stepping out of the tobacco-smoke hot-box railcar and into the equally suffocating smoke-filled air of urban China. As our luggage wheels hit the blanket of soot and dirt that gently dusted the granite station floor, I remember my sister said exactly what was on my mind: “I hate this country. Why do we keep coming back?”
My mother protested. Her frustration was justified. After all, she had taught us to love China all our lives. She might have left her country, but she still sent her children to Chinese school on Saturdays and brought them back to show them where she grew up, who she grew up with. What reason could they possibly have to dislike China?
We don’t visit China as much anymore. Two of my grandparents have passed away, and now that my sister and I live away from home, we just don’t have the same opportunities to fly up to the mainland as we did when I was ten or eleven. But when we do, and I look out the snow crusted windows and at the people in the streets, I only have one question on my mind. Is that what the people back home see when they look at me? Do they see that old woman, sitting on a folded plastic stool in the middle of the sidewalk, smoking as she leafs through this morning’s edition of the People’s Daily? Do they see that blind man, playing the erhu on a bench in Central Park, so blissfully unaware of the thousands of passersby that walk past him every day? Do they see that middle aged couple in the faded jeans they bought as fresh-off-the-boat students in the 90s, nagging teachers about their child’s performance in broken English on parent-teacher night, because they don’t know better and can’t do any better? I hoped not.
When I went to China for the first time, I was mesmerized. Everything was so new—so unexpected. I didn’t know what to make of it, but my parents told me I belonged there, so I loved it. But soon I discovered what China really was: poor, dirty, and cheap—a far cry from the exotic east I had been told about. In America, I was Chinese, and I was judged accordingly. In China, I was American, and so I judged accordingly. I had finally found a whole country full of people I was more white than. My relatives tried to test out the few English words they knew on me. Whenever I went anywhere with my parents, they had to explain that I couldn’t speak Chinese. When I looked at the badly translated names on storefronts or poor knockoffs of American brands being sold in the street, I’d elbow my sister or giggle to myself. I spoke English. I had seen a real Apple store; I was an authentic American—The New York Times told me these people aspired to be me. It was exhilarating.
I suppose then, that the only reason I find myself disliking China is because we were both wrought from the same colonized dirt. No matter how much my parents managed to dig themselves out of that hole, I am still one of them: another face in the shifting mass of peasants that makes your iPhones, spits on your sidewalks, and shows up at the steps of your most expensive colleges to crash cars, snort cocaine, and wear Canada Goose. Or so I’ve been told. In some attempt to divorce myself from that, though, I’ve turned on my comrades and compatriots, as if loathing China will have bleached my skin a couple tones by the time our plane touches back down in Boston.
Do I have a reason to dislike China? No. These are people like me, like my parents, like my American neighbors. Nothing separates us and them other than the difference between the color of their skin and the color of skin I’ve been working my whole life to wear. Do I wholly dislike China? Also no. When I stepped off that plane, and took that blue taxi, and climbed up those concrete stairs for the first time, I also met my grandparents for the first time since they visited America. It was a warm welcome into the arms of a family I knew cared for me, and a country I knew that I would always somehow be tethered to. But when I think of China, what do I feel? Scummy condescension. Will that change soon? Unfortunately not. Do I have any way of changing that? I hope so. But just recognizing it, I think, is one whole step altogether.