cqchen life

无源之水，无本之木

Water without a source, a tree without roots

For as long as I’ve thought critically about it, my family’s roots have always been a mystery to me. As I’ve grown up focused on my own American life, I’ve caught just glimpses at lives impossibly distant from mine, always buffered by years and miles and language.

In the past few years,as I found myself often in new heights and even higher dreams ahead of me, I simultaneously felt an exponential innate urge to know my own family’s past behind me . It’s also at the same time the window closes on the other side, at least for the older generation of my relatives. I know that with the time it takes between, each remaining crossed path is to be especially cherished. 

Thus, on the first week of my visa run/two-week break from the CAPS office, I embarked on a solo quest to stay with family in China. 

Well, I can now say I can travel through China alone, something that has felt daunting more than most other countries.. In just a week, I’ve pretty much maximized navigating solo transit — international and domestic flights, metro lines and high-speed trains, taxis and private cars. Along the way, I’ve sharpened my WeChat usage skills and Chinese speaking skills significantly, 

The bulk of the trip was spent with my uncle, my dad’s older brother, in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China, where apparently 10% of Hunan’s population has migrated to for better job prospects. It’s a warm city, both in its southern tropical climate and unique (relative) propensity to welcome foreigners. It was eight years since I’d last been there, a period of time in which my cousin had gotten married and had a daughter, who I just met at six years old. Though my stay was blanketed by an overarching typhoon, the days brimmed with novel experiences.

Thanks to my uncle’s role leading the city’s business bureau for the past few years, I was immersed immediately into real life in Guangzhou. I found myself getting called upon at a long table in a boardroom of a large Chinese data center manufacturer, on my first full day there. I was embarrassed to follow the questions of others at the table, who all were all the executive leaders of a diverse range of large companies, in my stilted Chinese. But I was curious, and my questions were answered — a theme of the week. I inquired about the water and energy use, based on my limited knowledge of the Chinese permitting and environmental landscape around the centers but from what I knew was the case in America. Interestingly, both are less of issues in China, allegedly, with cheaper and more diversified energy sources and far more available water to tap near the cities needing the centers. After looking at the company’s massive cooling systems, CAT branded generators, and massive batteries, we headed back to my uncle’s bureau office for the typical evening there — hours around the poker table. I can say I’ve improved, but still hold no candle to the mastery I witnessed.

I also went to an ai jiu (mugwort) medicine clinic, meeting the owner who had borne a shocking 15 kids on her own. Somehow, she still looked incredible at 49, with glowing skin and in good shape. Maybe the ai jiu really does something. The rest of the days were filled with the rest of the family, my cousin, her husband, her daughter, and my aunt and uncle. We had many a feast around a round table, canvassed shopping plazas, and wandered some streets in the older center of Guangzhou together. 

It’s kind of crazy how far removed our families are from each other. My aunt and uncle didn’t know the past few years of career updates on my parents, and likewise, I had no idea what they did in Guangzhou before they just retired. In the hours together in Guangzhou traffic, my uncle and I discussed things I’ve never seriously talked about in Chinese — American and Chinese economic conditions post-Iran and the reputation of Elon Musk ‚— but also what the huge entire-extended family Chinese New Year gatherings that I’ve never attended looked like each year, and updates on my romantic relationships. Along the route to the railway station, I peppered my uncle with questions with some of the questions I’d always wondered about. Did my grandparents like that both of their sons left Hunan for good? How did he feel about the exponential quality of life trajectory he and my father both had, from living in a rural wooden room altogether with no electricity to driving their Lexus SUVs to their large corner offices filled with hardcover books? Did I even have any other relatives my own age? (The answer to the latter was shockingly yes, and there are some in Shanghai and other cities around China). 

And it’s not just this Guangzhou side of the family I grew closer to. I bookended my week with long travel days getting in and out of Yiyang. My grandfather, my mom’s dad whose mental stability has escaped our family’s visits in the past two years, was actually there again to greet me upon my solo return. He had become avoidant and distant in the last two years, a far cry from his former affectionate, generous, and chatty self. But indeed, I was surprised to meet an albeit much grayer and frailer, but more vivid version of himself. 

Over a table of some of my favorite local dishes — a white soup of silken tofu, delicate fish, and perilla leaf; stir-fried water spinach; Hunan “little fried pork” and fragrant green peppers — he asked me about my minerals research in Kazakhstan and recounted stories from his stint in North Carolina. To my point on the challenges of meeting others through the Kazakh/Russian language barriers, he mused that oftentimes a stranger’s good intentions and character can be translated nonverbally, even across cultural lines. At the Chapel Hill senior center he would walk to everyday when he lived with us, he said, he would sometimes play table tennis with a young Indian boy who accompanied his own grandparents. Despite never having spoken to each other, they could get along quite well. 

It is in fact true, that in my third week in Almaty I’d already grown closer to a few people. Of course, these are all young people who are willing to operate our relationships entirely in English. But they came fast and from all over, from horse riding to cafes. My last weekend before jetting off to China, I actually chose not to book any official tour, instead opting to visit a tiny local town outside of Almaty (where allegedly I might have been the first American to ever visit), going to places like a horsemilk stand and a sauna that only local people could find. Bota, my friend from the night beach adventure of my last post, invited me to her family’s weekly forest walk and late night dinner, where I learned more about her mom’s international supply chain work and how in Almaty, to go south is said to go “up” because the mountains rise in elevation there. I also spent a leisurely Sunday afternoon at Almaty’s Central Park, where eating ice creams and riding every kind of ride imaginable isn’t limited just for the seemingly thousands of children gleefully prancing about but for all the ages of people enjoying a sunny Sunday. In all these ways, life has gotten more vivid than even the turquoise lakes and red canyons of the first weeks there. 

These kinds of experiences in the last two weeks are limitlessly precious to me and make up memories I know I’ll incredulously look back upon with nostalgic envy. But they are also transitioned together with the gritty parts of solo travel. Though I started this once again on a bullet train in China and am finishing it as a panda blissfully munches on a bamboo leaf on the small TV screen above me, and the Gobi Desert ripples endlessly below, I have also found myself on taxis that take me through unknown alleys at night walking on the sides of roads not meant for walking, and somehow more often than waving down cars in hope of help when it outweighed the risk of harm. I’ve felt all the. twangs of loneliness, exhaustion, frustration, and fear. Not to even start on the difficulties of remote work in China — I sure have some catching up to do in my next destination. The week has looked like working off of tray tables and bed pillows, constant topping up of unrestricted data when no WiFi VPN combination is strong enough, and of course meetings in the dead of night.

But truly, for each invaluable hour with my family, all the extra hours on planes and trains and subways and taxis are undoubtedly worth it. Particularly in sight of growing ambition and global dreams, there is no more urgent task at hand than understanding the roots that underlie who I am. 

Now the looser tidbits of life, as always. I’m feeling a little more lazy and to balance out the bulky grafs from above, here’s a bulleted list:

• I ate durian for the first time in Guangzhou. It tastes nothing like I would have imagined and I think I quite like it.
• How can I not mention my splendid Changsha adventure with my 老乡 Vivian, meeting her adorable dog and getting not just our nails but lashes done in true Chinese girl fashion. The vinyl bar we went to, too, marked the first bar I’ve been to in China I think,and offered their unique smoked plum-bell pepper-bing lang cocktail and the discovery of the song “Submarine” by L’Imperatrice.
• As I am now an aunt, I took many selfies with my niece (who is quite a fashionable diva) and bought her some stuffed animals.
• I also got on the good side of my uncle’s rather unfriendly British Shorthair, a dark gray cat named Miao Miao. 
• I ate so much good food in Guangzhou.I was treated to my aunt’s home-cooked dishes, and a vast array of great restaurants from Chaoshan style hotpot with a dozen cuts of beef to an award-winning dim sum restaurant over seventy years old to  a seafood buffet at a scale unlike anything I’ve seen in the US. 
• My grandmother, as always, tries to fill two times my available luggage space with gifts. This time, I took some of the snacks (chestnuts, my favorite, and some little candies I’ll bring to the CAPS office), some socks, a couple of her long skirts, a soap, and a hair towel. To accommodate this, I removed some clothes.
• In Almaty, I moved apartments further up north (down, I guess) Panfilov, closer to Arbat! Krisha prices are really a third of US website prices, but rather inaccessible to foreigners.
• I’ve been heavily listening to Lana again.
• My Russian learning has stagnated, but I can report I’ve increased my Kazakh vocabulary by approximately five words. I’ve run into the obstacle of sounds I’ve never pronounced, like guttural k’s and g’s. 

Okay, this is becoming quite a novel in length, and if you’ve made it to here, consider me in debt of a coffee to you. While supplies last!