A Familiar Place, Seen Differently

The summer of 2025 felt like a narrowing window for my family. With my older siblings soon heading toward summer internships and, eventually, jobs, we decided it was time to make a long-discussed family trip happen.

Growing up, my summer visits usually meant staying with my grandparents, seeing relatives, crowded family dinners, breakfasts of 热干面 and 面窝, and non-negotiable Chinese, dance, or drawing classes. I knew the bus routes, the best Qin Qin Sausage stands and the playgrounds to hide from the heat.

Whenever the three of us were together, someone would exclaim “Wow, three kids!?” I still remember the proud smiles on Ye Ye and Nai Nai ‘s faces.

That all felt like a long, long time ago, when the China I knew was mostly the China surrounding my family in Wuhan. The summer of 2025 was our first time back since Covid and we were going to see a much bigger China.

Our first stop was Shenzhen, a financial and technology center and a city shaped by people from all over the country. Its skyline, futuristic architecture and carefully landscaped streets and neighborhoods somehow made places like Shanghai’s Bund and New York feel less singluar. The Western influence is visible in everyday life,  I even shared my Instagram with a local girl. Before we left, the daughter of my dad’s college roommate and I had exchanged Instagram handles.

Walking through the factory at my dad’s manufacturer, I heard accents from all over China. Many workers had come from inland provinces; some brought their children with them. I knew that China’s hukou (户口) system links access to local schools and social benefits to original household registration. I started wondering what migration meant for these families: which schools their children could attend, which public services they could access without local hukou.

Months of research on gender differences in education made me notice who did what around me. At the worktables, nearly as many men as women were making tiny wreaths for Santa decorations or sewing parts of Mrs. Claus hats, work I had unconsciously pictured women doing. Did the paycheck matter more than whose work it was supposed to be?

Then came Guilin. “江作青罗带，山如碧玉簪。”  Of the many poetic descriptions of the Li River (漓江) and the karst peaks, this line by Tang dynasty poet Han Yu stayed with me the most. It compares the river to a green silk ribbon and the mountains to jade hairpins.  I loved how naturally the poet connected nature with something human.  More than a thousand years later, I could stand before the same mountains and enjoy the scene Han Yu had imagined.  For a moment, the centuries between us disappeared, and it felt as if Han Yu and I were looking at the same river together.

If Guilin were made for poetry, Jiuzhaigou (九寨沟) felt almost beyond description. The water was so clear that I could see fallen branches resting on the bottom, wrapped in swaying weeds, as if they had formed a little fairy-tale community of their own. I had to fight my urge to dive in and investigate.

Prayer wheels stood in creeks, turning without pause in the running water.  No one needed to spin them. The stream kept the prayers going on their own among the nine Tibetan villages that give Jiuzhaigou its name. When the villagers talked about their upcoming horse-racing festivals, I felt a twinge of sadness knowing that I had to say goodbye to this wonderland too soon.  

As much as nature amazed us, what people had left behind was just as mesmerizing. At Sanxingdui (三星堆), bronze masks stared back at me with enormous protruding eyes, oversized ears, and forms unlike anything I had expected from ancient China. Although the people who made them left no known written records, their art revealed a past far less uniform than I had imagined.

In Xi’an, the Terracotta Army (兵马俑) brought history to life right in front of our eyes. The soldiers stood in life-size battle formations alongside chariots and weapons, showing how Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), China’s first emperor, organized his army in preparation to fight.

I was grateful for how lucky we were: a ditch, a well, a farmer’s shovel. What if these wonders had never been unearthed? Will another discovery someday reshape how we understand our past, and ourselves?

At Wuhan University, we encountered bamboo texts from the Qin period. The laws, legal cases and administrative records showed a government more structured and procedural than the brutal image of Qin Shi Huang I learned mostly from Shiji (史记). I started asking questions about Sima Qian, a historian I always revered. What sources did he have? Which voices had already disappeared before he began writing? How might the Han perspective have shaped the stories told about the dynasty it replaced?

Historical facts could be fragile. The human feeling carried by poetry can endure.  Wuhan is where my grandparents still live and where my dad grew up. One of his favorite poems is Cui Hao’s “Yellow Crane Tower”:

“黄鹤一去不复返，白云千载空悠悠。”  

…

“日暮乡关何处是？烟波江上使人愁。”

The tower has been destroyed and rebuilt many times and the city has changed around it.

Yet the poem has continued to echo across generations, reminding people of the longing for home and the passing of time. The tower may change, the city my change, but the feeling remains.

On the Zhiyin Hao boat on the Yangtze, a host unexpectedly picked me from the audience for a short interview. He asked where I was from, whether the other two kids with me were my siblings, and whether I was enjoying Wuhan. Once again, the fact that there were three of us became part of the conversation.

It was funny that Wuhan could be my grandparents’ home, my dad’s hometown, the setting of a poem he loved—and still a place where I could be introduced as a visitor from the United States.

From China, we continued on to Japan, where I quickly formed one more broad impression - only to watch it unravel in a single evening. For days, I was struck by how quiet the trains and many public spaces were. A ringing phone could make people glance up and conversations stayed low.

Then one evening, while looking for dinner, my family got off at the wrong metro station. People crowed around outdoor tables, pounding on them, shouting, laughing, and talking over one another. We stood at the edge of the street for a while, looked at one another, and eventually got back on the train.

Dinner could wait.

Growing up, I had heard “读万卷书，行万里路” many times: read ten thousand books, travel ten thousand li. I had always thought of them as two separate things. That summer, they kept running into each other. A Tang poem showed me how to see the Li River. My research followed me onto a factory floor. Bamboo slips I traveled to see sent me back to a book I thought I knew.

I had always thought familiarity meant knowing something well. That summer, I began to think it might instead be an invitation to look again.