One Week Alone in Shanghai

After my Tokyo trip I came to Shanghai alone. It’s the city my dad grew up in (my mom is from Beijing) and I’ve always wanted to build my own relationship with China and figure out how I fit in. Up until now I’ve only visited with my parents, following them around to meals with relatives I’ve never met or going to pre-school in the Beijing summer riding on the back of my grandpa’s scooter eating dried seaweed and the most artificial but perfect strawberry ice cream. As an adult I used the excuse of being too busy or there being too many barriers to entry (no Google, no English, it’s not as westernized as Korea and Japan which is what makes it really special) for me to not visit China but the real fear was coming and realizing I don’t really belong here either even though I’m technically supposed to. What if I can’t find a connection with the country that my parents came from? How can I reconcile the fact that I’m Chinese if I don’t even have a real relationship to China? And what if Chinese people don’t even recognize me as Chinese even though that’s how I’ve identified myself? If I never go to China then I never have to confront these fears. But in the interest of this new era I’m entering in my life, I booked my ticket for 1 week in Shanghai and worried about everything else later.

I speak enough mandarin to get by but it’s bad enough that everyone knows I’m not from here. My first morning I went for a long run on the Bund to get acclimated. It’s one of my favorite things about running: it immediately makes a new city feel less big and daunting while also helping you maintain a routine. Then I walked to Ah Ma Handmade where I waited 1 hour for a taro mochi milk tea (8/10 delicious but made my stomach hurt) because I didn’t have the order ahead app that everyone else was using. Before coming to Shanghai, I cold DM’d a few people I followed on Instagram because I was determined to make new friends on this trip. I was transported back to elementary school nervously approaching new people and feeling self conscious about clearly not having any friends and anxiously wondering if they liked me.

I sensed based off a few messages with Mengyu that we would get along. We met up for dinner with her and her husband Jack and became instant friends. We went to a natural wine festival after dinner and the next day they brought me to Xingguang Photo Mall, a building that repairs cameras, develops film, and has vintage cameras too. Then we went to lunch with their friends and walked around. I felt so comfortable and this set the tone for the rest of my trip here.

I love traveling alone. It gives me the freedom to slow down and do everything at my own pace. I can sit with my thoughts and process every single one for as long as I want. I did things based on how I was feeling in the moment vs. what was most efficient. I spent hours trying to to hunt down pickled olive leaves that I loved eating with my congee at the hotel breakfast. I waited another hour for another bubble tea. I walked around random mega malls and bought Hello Kitty keychains and snacks like seaweed crackers with cream cheese. When I got tired, I would get a pastry and read Famesick by Lena Dunham. It was the introspective book I needed while I was here and I appreciated the way she wrote with so much self awareness. It made me feel connected to New York City when I was homesick. It also inspired me to journal and think more openly about the things that have happened in my life. And it provided me company when I was stuck in a cycle of my thoughts and feeling lonely for someone to talk things through with.

My grandma recently moved into a nursing home in Nanjing so I took a two hour train to visit her for the day. We ate lunch in the cafeteria with her brother and inevitably ordered way too much food (it’s a love language that I can never get used to). Then we took an afternoon nap and afterwards she gave me a tour of the facilities which had a pond, bamboo forest, and many ping pong tables. We talked about what it was like when she moved from Nanjing to Shanghai when she was 15 years old. She showed me how she’s using AI to turn photos into videos and also the finger exercises she learned to improve mental clarity and circulation from her weekly hand qigong classes. Before I left for the train station, she made black rice into patties, fried them until they were crispy, and dipped them in sugar. It revealed that she still thought of me as just a little kid and I really liked that. It made me feel nostalgic for my childhood and the joys of being taken care of with something as simple as crispy rice dipped in sugar.

I came back to Shanghai feeling really good about how the trip was going without any hiccups. From the train station I hopped in a taxi but once we got to my hotel I struggled to pay him because his QR code wasn’t Alipay or Wechat. The man got really frustrated at me and within 30 seconds started shouting at me to hurry up and complaining about how annoying I was! That’s the cost of traveling alone. After something humiliating and upsetting and frustrating happens, you don’t have someone to commiserate with. You just have to quietly pay and get out of the car safely and walk 5 minutes back to your hotel because he actually dropped you off in the wrong spot.

In my last few days in Shanghai, I met up with a new friend Sofija for coffee and I admired how she took the leap and moved from Spain to China in search of a new creative life. Then my NYC friend, Blake, showed me his quiet wellness led life here. We went to his Lagree studio and then a massage where we got moxibustion and I was told that my spine is curved funny which is why my right lower back is always tense. I also had dinner and tea with the parents of our family friends and we discussed life as if we were just friends and not as if they were the adults that picked me up from tennis practice when I was 12 years old. On my last night, I had dinner with my ex-coworker Kit. We gossiped and talked about our lives outside of work and I could feel the immediate shift from co-workers to real friends.

Now I’m home and I’m a different person than when I left New York City two weeks ago. I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment and a new confidence — that’s the benefit of traveling alone, you build trust that you can be happy and have lots of fun by yourself. Now it’s fully summer and I’m focusing in on the things I want to accomplish. I started a screen printing class at SVA which has re-inspired me to make things! I’m reading East of Eden and finally love writing again! I’m training for the New York City marathon and trying to run as much as I can but my hips are so tight! I’m conscious of how happy I am to be me 🪽