china

i miss you

there's something about china.

a parallel universe, a prologue to ancient history that has not been wiped clean¹, a pattern of trends on a different timetable.

i went to china every summer in high school, and each time it felt like traveling to the future.

wechat qr codes, food delivery on bikes, tiktok, years before they were brought to the US. the US makes fun of china for copying, but its them who doesn't trip over copyright laws, file lawsuits that have no answers, jump through loop after loop and glorify the spirit of private money and 'moving fast and breaking things' to innovate.

in the US all i hear are the stories of how china is lacking, how the US is more stable, how we have free speech, and how we can speak our mind about the government, and that in every way, we are better.

the politics could be in full flames against china, we could be in a full out ai cold war, news driving us close to insanity, but it just didn't match up to how it felt while there. sitting by the lake in the park, watching the old folks do parkour on the park structures, feeding the koi fish with bread every morning, buying fresh soy milk and salted duck eggs from the old man at the market, tranquility just isn’t special enough to be captured publicly. china in the news ignores the day to day, writes off the individual people and stories there.

ww1, when the germans and british stopped fighting on xmas to play soccer

how can i study the history of a country written by itself? studying history written by that country is like reading a memoir i wrote about myself – biased, not fully accurate. ugly parts edited out, pretty parts told in shinier light.²

i want to learn the perspective of the US outside the US. i want to learn it in another language, in another culture, see it from a third eye. i'll cross compare them – fill in the gaps with the good, the bad, the not-so-pretty parts.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, call it, "hard history." Hard history is made up of the stories that are often left out of textbooks. That's because much of history is written through a selective, nostalgic lens–meaning that it focuses only on the good parts while ignoring the bad parts. –Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking

there’s something about our foreign relations agendas that makes it hard to trust the news. hard to discern what’s right and what’s been motivated, what has been discussed out of writing.

there comes a time where no google search prime the answers, where wikipedia links glare back in red. there comes a point where the road stops, where the rabbit hole doesn’t go any further. there comes a point where the textbooks and history ends. there comes a point where truth is up to you to make a call, trace back the events, dig up the remains and piece together the scattered stories instead of intaking the hundreds of thousands of recycled reviews and screams of politicians that force feed their judgements.

this summer, i'm going to china to understand it all better. experience the political climate, trace the sentiments and feel how they trickle down into the day to day, how they infiltrate into the thoughts of the people and their conversations.

it's been awhile, china. i can't wait.

1. like the US has with the indigenous people

2. i could not bring myself to read andrew carnegie’s memoir for this reason, i cannot trust a tyrant’s words