I didn’t sleep last night. I was scrolling Threads before bed when I caught the edges of it, scattered posts arguing about Time Fengjun (时代峰峻), the words “Yangtze International(长江国际),” a few chaotic seconds of video that made no sense on their own. I went looking for what it was. By the time I understood, it was very late and I was furious, and sleep was no longer an option.

What I found was footage from outside the building, Yangtze International, which houses the trainee center of Time Fengjun, the agency that manufactures China’s boy idols. It is the company that built TFBOYS and Teens in Times, and it has spent fifteen years perfecting a particular machine: recruit boys as young as ten or eleven, put them through years of singing and dancing and camera training, stream their adolescence to fans who “raise” them by voting and spending, and turn the most bankable of them into national stars. The current crop is a fifth generation of trainees, some of them eleven and twelve years old, not yet debuted.

For years, this address had been a place that people would travel to from far and wide to visit. The girls who came to wait for the trainees called themselves the eighteenth-floor girls (18楼女孩), after the floor where the agency is. They made the spot a place that people would want to visit. People could go there to catch a glimpse of an idol arriving or leaving. They could also leave a gift or stand and think about the place their devotion pointed to. One picture that was spreading online really said it all: “Not every girl dreams of Shanghai Disneyland; for some, it’s Time Fengjun in Chongqing.” To them, the building was like a castle, a place you make a special trip to.

This past week, it became the opposite of a sanctuary.

Here is roughly how it was built, as best I can reconstruct it from the timelines fans themselves have pieced together. It dates back to late May and early June of this year, when a wave of men began posting on Douyin that the idols “had stolen their lives,” that these “tower people (楼人),” as the slang called them, were uglier than the men complaining yet somehow made money and were loved by girls. They began banding together to attack the idols and their fans online. By late July a few of them started going to the building itself, blocking the underage trainees’ cars and hurling abuse while live-streaming it. When fans found the streams and argued in the comments, the men doxxed them, photoshopped them into pornographic images, and spread rumors. Through July it was all online. Then it came down to the street, coordinated in group chats, the men gathered below the Time Fengjun offices for days running, not once but as a proper campaign.

The timeline of the days themselves is short and ugly. On the 15th, a male streamer stood outside and taunted the fifth-generation trainees with jiahao (嘉豪), an internet slang for a certain kind of try-hard teenage boy, all black hoodie and studied cool. Shouting it at the idols was a way to call them posturing children. A fan argued back, and was screenshotted and turned into a crude pornographic sticker.

On the 16th, more men gathered “because a brother was being bullied,” massing below the building to scream at fans; when fans complained to the company, Time Fengjun told them they were exaggerating and spreading falsehoods. The 17th was the turning point, more men, a bigger crowd.

By the 18th it had fully boiled over into a total chaos: the videos everywhere, the men flooded the Chongqing tourism bureau’s account, the company posting a suspension-of-training notice. Fewer fans came that day. More men did, throwing drinks at the women who were there.

Set the sequence out plainly. At first they came to jeer at the child trainees, live-streaming themselves shouting the slang at boys walking to their vans, blocking the cars, pulling at the doors. Then they turned on the female fans, many of them teenagers themselves, who had come to see the idols. The men surrounded them, mocked them, filmed their faces up close. They threw water. They kicked. A mother and daughter were beaten together.

Fans’ photographs, some of them minors’, were run through AI into fabricated pornography and printed onto cards advertising sex work, then scattered on the pavement where the girls stood. That is the part I keep returning to. You do not print those cards in the heat of an argument. You make them at home, the night before, having already decided what the girls are for.

I want to be careful about the spark, because it is actually a real issue and because the argument does not need it. One side says the men started it. The “she threw first” video, which a lot of people have watched, shows a man throwing an object and a woman throwing it back. The cup of water only came after a man had grabbed a girl to take off her mask, and she threw it into the air.

But to take the girls to court over the first cup is wrong. It seems like the mob’s answer was a decision that the girls could have avoided by behaving perfectly. It wasn’t. Nothing a teenage girl does leads to a stack of pre-printed cards with her face on a flyer asking for money.

And note the shape of the men’s own justification. They dressed their assault up as protection: the fans’ love for underage idols was pedophilic, they said, and so the girls had it coming. Yet it was these same men who photoshopped teenage fans onto sex-work flyers and generated pornography of them. Whatever they claimed to be defending, they were the ones sexualizing the children in front of them.

What the authorities did

Then came the official response, which was in its way more chilling than the crowd.

The fans created a hashtag to document what happened to them — a supertopic, in Weibo’s language — naming the thing plainly: men gathering to insult and beat underage trainees and female fans. It is no longer visible.

The censorship was not only a matter of things quietly vanishing; you could watch it happen to you. A fan who posted an account of the violence received the platform’s verdict in writing: her post “may contain unfriendly information” and would, for now, be visible only to herself. The listed grounds read like a charge sheet against her — inciting confrontation, organizing crowds, raising money, hiring “water armies” to manipulate traffic. And then the platform’s advice, which is the tell: post in a spirit of tolerance, it counseled, and practice rational fandom. There it is. A campaign in which grown men doxxed teenage girls, printed their faces on solicitation cards, and set fire to a fan wall had been recategorized, by the machinery above it, as a fandom that needed to calm down. The men do not appear in that sentence. Only the girls, who are asked to be more rational and more kind.

In its AI Search, where Weibo offers an AI-generated summary, the whole episode was laundered into “fans gathered at night and quarreled,” a grammar in which the men simply dissolve and the disturbance becomes something the girls were doing.

The company’s own statement suspended the trainees’ sessions, and said little about the women who were assaulted. And around the edges of the footage: a video of a police officer with his arm around one of the ringleaders, easy and friendly; the report that the Chongqing tourism bureau sent public buses to carry the men away from the scene. The state has not issued a formal account. It did not need to. The account was written in what it chose to erase, and in whose arm was around whose shoulder.

What the men were actually protesting

Underneath all these cruelties there is a single premise, and once you see it the disparate cases stop looking disparate. The premise is that a woman is not a person but a resource — a sexual and reproductive asset that belongs, properly, to a man, or to men, or to the nation as a stock of men. Almost everything else follows from that one idea.

Watch how it surfaces when the “owner” changes. In 2019, Shandong University was found to have paired international students with local “study buddies,” and because some of those students were foreign men and some of the buddies were Chinese women, the internet detonated. The campaign that followed called itself, without irony, “Chinese boys protect Chinese girls.” Its logic was territorial: our women are being taken by foreign men. Men filmed themselves in mock-heroic poses vowing to defend the nation’s girls; the same men trailed actual Shandong women across campus with livestream cameras, shouting slut-shaming abuse at them, until the university had to lock the gates. A Shandong University student, herself one of the women being hounded, named the mechanism exactly: a Chinese woman being possessed does not anger them; a Chinese woman being possessed by a foreign man is what angers them. What was being defended was never the girl. It was the ownership.

If you hold that sentence next to the others and they rhyme. The men outside Yangtze International were enraged that girls loved idols they judged unworthy, that a sexual-romantic resource they felt entitled to was being “spent” on other men, and their answer was to repossess those girls as public property, photoshopping their faces onto solicitation cards, generating pornography of them, marking them as sexually available to anyone as punishment for not being available to them. The men who buy trafficked, disabled women to bear them children are working the same premise at its most literal: a woman is a thing that can be purchased and used to produce a family, and the law, as we will see, half-agrees. Different scenes, one grammar — she is ours, not her own. The nationalist, the incel, and the buyer are not three problems. They are one belief in three costumes.

And this is why the misogyny and the stereotypes are not decoration on top of the violence; they are its operating system. If a woman is a resource, then her own desires are noise — the Shandong women “didn’t really” want language practice, the fans “don’t really” love music, the wife “doesn’t really” want the divorce. If she is a resource, her stated refusal is not a boundary but a malfunction to be corrected. And if she is a resource, then a man who takes or keeps or kills one has committed, at worst, a property matter, which is very close to what the sentencing language actually says.

This is why the misogyny and stereotypes are not just an extra layer on top of the violence; they are a fundamental part of it. If a woman is seen as a resource, then her own desires don’t matter. The Shandong women “really” didn’t want language practice, the fans “really” don’t love music, the wife “really” doesn’t want the divorce. If she is a person who can be useful, her stated refusal is not a boundary but a problem that needs to be fixed. If she is a resource, then a man who takes, keeps or kills one has committed, at worst, a property crime. This is very close to what the sentencing language actually says.

The state of things

Behind all of this is a situation that will not improve on its present course, and may be the reason the machine runs the way it does.

The sex ratio is badly skewed, the inheritance of a one-child policy laid over a preference for sons — tens of millions of men for whom the promised wife and place do not, arithmetically, exist. Youth unemployment has been high enough that the government stopped publishing the number for a while, then changed how it was counted. The property that a young man was supposed to acquire before anyone would consider him is out of reach. So there is a very large population of underemployed, unmarried, frustrated young men, marinating in spaces that hand them a diagnosis: your life was stolen, and the thief is the feminine man girl prefers to you. That is precisely the syllogism the Chongqing crowd began with, months before the violence: those unworthy boys have money and fame and the love of girls, and I, who deserve it, have none. It is the incel arithmetic exactly, and it does not stay online. It got on scooters and turned up outside a building and put its hands on actual children.

Over the top of this the state has thrown its full weight into marriage and childbirth, because the birth rate is in freefall and a shrinking, aging population frightens the planners more than anything else. It wants the daughters to have daughters. What it has never wanted, with anything like the same urgency, is to make the country safe for them once they are here, and this is where I want to be careful, because the strongest case is not a collage of shocking crimes. Any single crime can be answered with a single sentence and a single verdict. The stronger thing to look at is the paperwork: the law, the sentencing language, the terms of service. Those are not incidents. They are the settings the machine runs on, and they all lean the same way.

Start with the criminal code itself, because a country’s sentencing ranges are the most formal statement it makes about what it will not tolerate. Trafficking a woman or selling her carries a starting sentence of five years. Buying a trafficked woman carries a maximum of three. In law, on paper, the man who purchases a human being is the lighter offender. This is not a rural enforcement gap; it is the same code everywhere. This summer, Chinese-language independent outlets read through thirty-one public verdicts in which men had bought or trafficked mentally disabled women and raped them to produce children. In the overwhelming majority, the rape was never charged at all. A “marriage” wrapper — a bride price, a banquet, the word “wife” — was enough to make the courts write “lived together” instead of “raped,” and to let the buyers testify as witnesses rather than stand as defendants. Prosecutors in one Shanxi case declined to charge a man who had confined and impregnated a woman with no capacity to consent, reasoning that he “subjectively intended to build a family.” A stranger who does this is a rapist; a man who means to keep her is not. That distinction was written by the state’s own prosecutors, and it is the woman-as-property premise made law: acquire her with the forms of ownership, a price and a banquet, and the courts will read the rape as marriage.

Then look at what the law does to the woman who wants out. Since 2021 a thirty-day “cooling-off period(离婚冷静期)” stands between a couple and a divorce, a measure the government adopted, and defends, as a way to hold marriages together and lift the birth rate. In its first year, divorce registrations fell by more than forty percent. The Supreme Court’s own figures show that most divorces are filed by women, and that domestic violence is among the leading reasons. Officials answer that the cooling-off period doesn’t apply to abuse cases, which must go through the courts. However, proving abuse to a Chinese court is its own ordeal: in one study of Beijing divorce judgments, family violence was formally recognized in about six percent. So the design holds a great many women, including battered ones, inside the marriage for the sake of a number the planners care about. And note what the law still declines to say at all: it contains no clear crime of rape within marriage. The silence is itself a ranking.

The sentencing language tells the same story in a different register. When a man kills his wife or girlfriend or the woman who left him, the verdict very often files it under “a family conflict” or “emotional dispute” — phrases that pull the sentence toward leniency. One Chinese data-journalism team went looking to test the grim TV maxim that “it’s always the husband.” Pulling intimate-partner murder verdicts from the public judgment database, they found that of the killings between partners, 82 percent were men killing women. The asymmetry ran deeper than the count: among the far fewer cases of women killing men, a striking share were women who had been beaten for years and finally struck back — a pattern almost absent on the other side. And the report named the logic without euphemism: the husbands, it wrote, treated wife and children as their possessions, theirs to decide whether to let live.

When Li Yan finally killed her husband after being beaten for years, burned with cigarettes on her face and genitals, and having a finger cut off, the courts that sentenced her to death twice over would not write the word “abuse” in the verdict; they called it a “family dispute.” It took more than a hundred lawyers and scholars petitioning the Supreme Court to “stay the blade,” and nearly three years, before the death sentence became a suspended one.

A man who kills is often “provoked by a family dispute.” A woman who kills the man abusing her must be rescued from the gallows by a national campaign. Even Lhamo — the Tibetan livestreamer whose ex-husband doused her in gasoline and set her alight on camera, and who was, rightly, executed for it — had, while she was still alive and fighting for custody, watched a court hand both her children to that same man, the one with the better income.

None of this needs a viral video, and that is the point of it. But the videos exist too, because the paperwork has a daily texture. A woman gets into an ordinary ride-hail car — the most banal errand there is — and the system around her is built to treat her as a commodity and her safety as an afterthought. When a flight attendant was murdered by a driver in 2018, it came out that the platform had let drivers tag female passengers “pretty,” “nice figure.” Three months later another young woman, nineteen, was raped and killed by a driver who had been reported by a different woman the day before for asking passengers to move to the front seat and steering toward empty roads, a complaint the company sat on. As she was being killed, her friends and the police called the platform for the car’s details and were put off for hours with “privacy” and “we don’t have the authority.” Two deaths were what it took to pull the service. That is the everyday face of it: not a monster in the dark so much as a system that had filed a woman’s life below its own convenience until the cost came due.

And then there are the knives on the street, which I mention last and carefully, because the official word for them is “random.” A jobless man in Nanchang, turned down for a security job and unmarried, trailed three young women leaving work and stabbed the one in the middle — a trainee lawyer — to death. Six years later, in the same city, another jobless man approached two students in traditional dress, and when they brushed him off, stabbed them a dozen times, killing a nineteen-year-old. In both the official finding was mental illness and a “random” choice of target. Perhaps. But it is worth asking why the random knife, again and again, comes down on a young woman. When a society keeps manufacturing desperate, failed, “diagnosed” young men, “random” is the word for the motive; it is not the word for the pattern of the dead. Random is who they are angry at in general. Female is who is on the ground.

Set the whole record beside itself. When the goal is to move a woman toward marriage, the state’s ingenuity is boundless: it will register a wedding inside a subway station. When the question is her safety once she is inside a marriage, a car, a police station, a street, the same state discovers a hundred reasons for restraint. I am not claiming a room where someone drew this up. I don’t need to. The claim is smaller and harder to refute: that whatever the intent, the errors of this system fall, with a consistency that stops looking like chance, in the same direction — a woman’s safety placed behind stability, behind the birth rate, behind a man. And a government nervous about the anger of its men has no urgent reason to correct an error that points that anger away from itself. The girls outside the tower were, on that logic, expendable.

So I did not sleep, and I do not think what I watched was a fandom curiosity that ends when the schools reopen and the crowd goes home. I think it was a preview. Every pressure underneath it is set to intensify, and each of them resolves, on a single street, into the same picture: a crowd of men, and the girls they have decided is to blame.

On social media, in the hours I was awake, I kept seeing women saying the same thing to one another, that they have to leave China, that leaving is the only choice left for them. I left six years ago. I am one of the women who, back then, said something about women’s lives online and was attacked by men until the abuse simply stopped registering, until I was immune to it. I understand what these women are saying, and I agree with them. I think it is the best thing for them.

I recently bought a pin. It says, “Leave the soil that won’t make you grow.” That was how I felt when I left six years ago. I hope that for every woman who is still there.

Note on sourcing: the Chongqing events are drawn from fan-compiled timelines.

A special thanks to all the women who kept sending me the screenshots and the videos, so there would be a record.

As of writing, mainland police had issued no formal report; some specific later incidents remain reported rather than independently confirmed, and the precise trigger of the confrontation is disputed by the parties involved. My description of the disputed video reflects my own viewing.

I flew back to Europe from Beijing straight into the heat wave that was sweeping the continent; even Denmark was not spared. The day I landed, Copenhagen hit thirty-three degrees, likely one of the hottest days of the Danish summer. Danish apartments are built to hold warmth through the winter, and in summer they hold it just as faithfully. There is no air conditioning — in ordinary times a virtue, at thirty-three degrees a test of character. At ten in the evening the sun was still hanging outside the curtain, declining to leave. Too hot to sleep, I lasted one day and then flew to Italy.

On the plane I reasoned that Italy could only be hotter. It was, and I found I didn’t mind. Danish heat feels like an accident; Italian heat is in the contract — you agreed to it when you bought the ticket. Same temperature: one leaves you feeling wronged, the other merely sweating.

Italy is probably my favorite country in Europe. Set aside Germany and Belgium, where work kept sending me back, and it is the country I have visited most: six times in the eight years since 2018, four of them in summer.

What is it about Italian summers?

Since moving to Europe I like to tell people that in summer I go nowhere: the North has the most comfortable temperatures in the world, and this is true. But a comfortable summer always feels short of something. It took me years to work out what. The summer in my memory is a checklist — cicadas; hard sun; drowsy afternoons with no air conditioning, only an oscillating fan turning its head and humming; the cool sweet mist that rises off a watermelon at the moment of cutting — and a summer only counts when every item is ticked. The watermelon must come cold from the refrigerator, and the cold watermelon must be eaten when you are about to melt; that is the whole pleasure of it. At twenty-five degrees, nothing needs rescuing. Danish supermarkets do sell melons, but not the kind sweetened by Mediterranean sun; for a respectable one you try your luck at the Middle Eastern grocer’s.

The summer I first met Italy, it happened to tick every box — and then some. The season in which you first meet a place decides much of what you will always think of it; it is almost as if my childhood summers had emigrated there, and so the place felt familiar to me before I could say why.

The wish itself I caught from a movie. Call Me by Your Name: peaches, more sunlight than anyone could reasonably need, and sweat that never quite dries. For a long time that was my entire imagination of a northern Italian summer. The film took a climate and made it romantic, ambiguous — as if heat were not a condition but the opening of a plot.

My first destination in Italy was Florence, 2018, a summer school on migration run by the European University Institute. I arrived two days early and stayed in an Airbnb not far from the Duomo. In the mornings I carried my coffee up to the roof. Florence lay spread below, and the dome stood there, unreasonably large. Every angle was a painting — not figuratively; whatever rectangle you cut out, someone had painted it already, and had been painting it for five hundred years. I remember thinking that Europeans come by their taste honestly: look at this daily and it would be hard to turn out otherwise. I also remember something close to despair. Beauty like that runs on a time lag of centuries, and I was clearly not going to catch up.

There is a phrase going around the Chinese internet lately: boom-era beauty (经济上行时期的美). It names a nostalgia — for the vitality of the years when everything was rising. Standing before what the Medici left behind, it occurred to me that the paintings and the sculpture are the same thing at humanity’s scale: an age at its richest and boldest, spending the whole surplus on beauty. To look at it across five hundred years, from inside our own garbage time, is a little like watching an afterglow. The light is not of this moment, and it is warm on the skin anyway.

Two days later I moved up to Fiesole, on the hill above Florence, into the accommodation the school had arranged. By the door was a little shop where the fruit was fresh, sweet, and cheap enough to be unsettling: grapes, peaches, apricots, figs. The owner wished me good morning in Italian every day and taught me to say “Buona giornata”, explaining that the whole trick is in the ending, which has to spiral upward.

My classmates were mostly European professionals. One of them worked in Brussels, had Italian colleagues, and landed with a list of places to eat and drink already in his pocket. The rest of us collected the dividend: places no tourist finds. In a family-run trattoria I ate handmade pasta dressed with nothing but chili, garlic, and olive oil, and revised my opinion of myself on the spot: it turned out I did like pasta; I had simply never had good pasta. At a bar where every drink came with small free plates, everyone was holding the same orange glass. That was my introduction to the Aperol Spritz. For years afterward, that sweet fizz was my default summer.

In the class was a Dutch girl of Turkish descent, and we got along best, probably because we both came from migrations of our own. I said I wanted to see Prato, where Italy’s Chinese are most concentrated. On a free afternoon she rode the train out with me. Twenty-odd minutes later Italy was gone: Chinese signs the length of the street, as if we had stepped into a county town in China. The excursion was on no syllabus, but of all that summer’s discussion of migration, that half afternoon was the most concrete.

Three of my six visits were summer schools, two weeks or so apiece. A summer school is a gathering with an expiration date printed on it: people arrive from everywhere, study by day, drink by evening, talk past midnight, and disband before anybody has had time to tire of anybody. Italy, to me, was for years a summer fling, light version — all of the fun, the heartbreak deleted. We met once a year and went back to our lives. The relationship was kept strictly under two weeks, which may be why it has lasted ten years.

Somewhere along the way, Italy stopped being an occasion and became part of the ordinary calendar. I went back in seasons that no postcard advertises: Venice in March, with friends; Perugia in spring, for the journalism festival, because a different set of friends would be there. Turin, three times — the first in 2022 for another summer school, the next two because it was summer and friends were there. Names on the map became, one by one, somebody's city.

It helps that Italians are easy to love. The Chinese internet keeps a full file of jokes about them: unreliable, slow, and religious about food — you do not snap spaghetti in half; you do not put pineapple on a pizza. In my observation the jokes are all true, and all endearing. A nation willing to quarrel with you over the correctness of noodles is a nation that takes living seriously.

And the Italians I meet around Europe are, reliably, the most alive people in the room. In my master’s program there was an Italian girl — long curls, beautiful, sharp, and loved by everyone. Early in the program a group of us went out, and another girl said what the rest of us were thinking: “I come out of the shower looking like a rat. You come out of the shower and even your wet hair is sexy.”

Bologna was new this year. I stepped out of the station and fell in love inside a second or so, I couldn’t say with what — a color, a proportion, possibly a door handle. Italian design, from the Renaissance dome down to a chair on a street corner, gets every detail exactly right; there are no ugly things here. This is an arbitrary claim. I have yet to find a counterexample.

I love the colors of Italy — not the bright kind, the sun-aged kind: walls peeling exactly the right amount, the glare sifting tree shadows across them. Elsewhere, old looks shabby; in Italy, old looks pedigreed. The brighter the sun, the deeper the nostalgia. I believe this is a physical phenomenon found only in southern Europe.

The insistence has a price tag, of course. Italian handwork is expensive — a hand-stitched wallet, a blown-glass lamp, figures that make you inhale. But the question it asks is not what the thing is worth. It is the reverse: how much are you willing to pay for design? In an age when everything can be had cheaper, this country stands stubbornly on the side of craft, the old and the new facing each other down in the street, neither giving way.

Before I came to Bologna, a local friend pressed a list of places to eat and drink on me. I had seen this plot before. In 2018 there was a list just like it, only in someone else’s pocket, and I tagged along behind. This one was mine. For days I had no real plan: I biked around, worked through the list, ducked into the small rooms where locals eat — Bologna’s pasta; a flatbread packed with meat that I privately call the Italian roujiamo (肉夹馍), after the street sandwich of my childhood; a gelato a day for maintenance.

To fall for a city at first sight on the sixth visit means that beyond the childhood checklist, the place still keeps a reserve of surprise.

Everything else was as memory had it. The cicadas still unreasonable. The apricots still sweet, the juice still running down the fingers, sticky, wiped twice on the paper bag. In the evening squares, the orange glasses were still being raised. A spritz anywhere else always feels like a quotation; in Italy it is the original text. I stood at the bar a moment and ordered a Hugo. Elderflower, soda, a mint leaf. Almost no color; doesn’t photograph; nobody crosses half the world for one.

That is how change happens, I think — not in any single moment, but at the moment of ordering. The old checklist gets ticked as always; new symbols are quietly appended. Stay with a place long enough and the arrangement turns out to be mutual: it hands you back your childhood summers, and you grow new habits in its keeping.

I catch myself doing things I never used to do. I no longer climb up for the sunset — not that it got less beautiful; I simply have the quiet feeling there will be more of them, no hurry. Awe is for the first time. The sixth time has sixth-time business: calculating whether, if one came every year, a small flat with a balcony would beat a hotel; wondering what autumn here looks like.

Eight years ago, on the hill, we discussed migration in the big words: push, pull, borders, identity. Nobody mentioned that a person’s feeling for a place migrates too — from being stunned, to missing it, to wanting, finally, to spend some days together not worth writing about. The beauty is what it was; the five-hundred-year lag is still there. But look long enough and the lag becomes part of the scenery. It no longer needs catching up to.

On my last day in Bologna, the heat presented its bill. I showed the first signs of heatstroke; my appetite packed up and left; and I caught myself — of all things — looking forward to Denmark. My body, it turns out, has been tamed by the Nordic weather. The checklist now belongs to Italy and the body to the North, and between the two of them, the two-week limit enforces itself. I already know the sequel, too: a few weeks back inside Denmark’s order — everything clean, everything quiet, everything working — and I will begin to miss precisely this mess, the noise and the peeling and the happy disorder. Too much order, it turns out, is also something a person occasionally needs a holiday from.

Italians like to say the goodbye twice: ciao, ciao. It suits an arrangement like ours. Ciao is the same word coming and going, so for a place one returns to every year, each goodbye is already half of the next hello.

Ciao, ciao, then — and Buona giornata. A shopkeeper taught me that last one eight years ago. The whole trick, she said, is in the ending, which has to spiral upward.

The Cemetery

Two weeks ago, I went back to China to move two graves.

China mandates cremation for most of its citizens, but makes an exception for certain ethnic minorities on religious grounds. My family are Hui (回) — Chinese Muslims — and for us, burial in the earth is permitted — a dispensation that is also, depending on how you look at it, a form of being marked.

They had been buried in a Hui cemetery at the edge of the city — one of the designated burial grounds the government approves for recognized ethnic minorities, which sounds more protective than it is. The land the government designates and the land surrounding it are different jurisdictions, and the village controls the latter. The city did not stay at the edge. Hotels and resorts went up along the perimeter. The village allocated the surrounding land for other uses, as villages do when land becomes valuable. Someone planted bamboo along the cemetery’s edge — to screen the graves from the resort’s guests, presumably, so that visitors arriving for a spa weekend would not have to contemplate mortality from their windows.

In Denmark and the Czech Republic, I have walked through cemeteries that double as parks, where people spread blankets on the grass near Kafka’s grave, or picnic a few rows from Andersen’s, as though the dead were simply neighbors who happened to be resting. In China, the feeling is different. The dead make people uncomfortable. They are to be managed, not lived alongside. The bamboo made a kind of sense.

The more serious problem was the wall. The resort had built one across the access road — the road that belonged to the mosque — and fitted it with an iron gate, and locked the gate. The mosque and the resort disputed the road for long enough that the police were eventually called. The dead lay behind their bamboo screen, behind their locked gate, uninvolved and inaccessible.

So we moved them. Moving them meant permits, an imam, a crew, and a morning with decent weather. The plan was to reinter my great-grandmother and my grandfather near my father, who is buried in a newer Hui cemetery across town, beside a plot already reserved for my grandmother, so that the family might be, in death, more orderly than we had managed to be in life. The newer cemetery, like the old one, exists because the government designated it — which is to say, we moved them from one piece of bureaucratic grace to another.

The Compound

We are Hui in the way that many minority families living among a Han majority learn to be: present at the ceremonies, absent from the daily observance. We lived in a factory compound in a small northern city where my grandfather was a minority cadre — an official designation, a box checked in the government’s system of ethnic accounting, which I have always thought of as a kind of tokenism dressed in the language of representation. We were the only minority family in the compound. I was the only minority student in every classroom from primary school through high school.

I did not feel particularly different, which was itself a kind of achievement — or a kind of loss, depending on how you look at it. We spoke Mandarin. We attended the same schools, lived inside the same walls as everyone else. The children around me were not cruel about it. They were something harder to argue with: casually curious. Some of them called me “little Hui” (小回回, xiǎo huíhui), the way you might point out that someone has red hair. They watched with genuine surprise when I ate certain things. You can eat that? Not hostile. Just certain that I was, in some categorical way, supposed to be different from what I was.

The main visible marker of our faith was that we did not eat pork — or rather, my grandfather did not, and we honored that in his presence. He drank, which is its own theological negotiation. There was no halal butcher in our neighborhood. The most we could do was avoid the obvious. My mother is Han Chinese, and at her parents’ house I ate whatever was on the table, and on the drive home my parents would remind me: don’t mention the pork. So when my grandfather asked what we’d had for dinner, I would say: beef, chicken, vegetables. Various vegetables.

I was perhaps six when I learned this, and I understood it not as lying but as selection — that facts, like guests at a table, could be invited or turned away. You choose which to present. You leave others outside the door.

My great-grandmother was the truly observant one. I knew her as very small, very old, and very certain. Every morning her washing took unusually long — I would hear her in the bathroom, and sometimes watch from the doorway: the careful sequence of it, the rinsing of hands, the cleaning of the nose, the face washed in a particular order I did not understand and did not think to ask about. I know now that she was performing wudu, the ritual ablution Islam prescribes before prayer. At the time I knew only that she was very thorough, and very unhurried, and that the bathroom would smell faintly of water when she was done.

She had lived with us all my life. She spent her days in her chair by the window, shelling sunflower seeds and handing them to me one by one when I came home from school, watching me swallow them all at once. She often wore the same grey crossed-front shirt every day — the kind elderly Chinese women have worn for a century — her white hair combed flat with a fine-toothed comb and pinned into a tight bun. She walked with a cane. Her feet had been bound in childhood, and they had never unbound themselves from what that had made them: two small compressed things that had carried her across nearly a century.

The Mosque

Years ago I wrote an article about the decline of Buddhism in Japan. Many of the Japanese friends I interviewed told me the same thing: the first time they had ever set foot in a temple was for a family funeral — that a tradition they nominally belonged to had remained abstract until death made it concrete. For me it was the same. The first time I set foot in a mosque was for my great-grandmother’s funeral. I was eleven.

We traveled to a mosque in a neighboring city, and I was given a white cap and had white cloth tied around me, and it was winter. She was laid out on a stainless steel washing table in a room inside the mosque, behind a curtain of white cotton. Islamic tradition requires that the body be washed before burial — a thorough bathing administered by the living on behalf of the dead, in water that cleans away something harder to name than dirt. After the washing she was wrapped in layers of white cotton, the kafan, which is all a Muslim is permitted to take into the ground. No coffin. No flowers. No objects of any kind. You arrive in the world with nothing; the faith asks that you leave the same way.

The adults told me to go look at her one last time. I did, and I touched her arm, and she was cold in a way I had no word for — not cold like a window or a floor, but cold in the way that makes your hand understand, before your mind has caught up, that the person is entirely gone. I pulled my hand back quickly. It was the first time death had been something I could touch.

There was to be no weeping. Weeping, I was told, would hold the spirit here, would keep her from leaving. So the mourners stood quietly while the imam chanted. The funeral prayer in Islam is called the salat al-Janazah: the congregation stands — no kneeling, no prostration — and the imam prays on behalf of both the living and the dead, asking forgiveness for all of them. For a ceremony marking the end of a life, it is startlingly brief. I have come to think there is theology in that brevity: the dead are not waiting for us to finish grieving. They have somewhere to be.

There is a word Hui Muslims use in Chinese for dying: wúcháng (无常) — impermanence, the condition of being without permanence. It is not a Quranic term; the Arabic word for death is mawt, and the more devout say guīzhēn (归真), returning to God. Wúcháng is something the Hui made for themselves, somewhere between Chinese philosophy and Islamic faith, which is perhaps the only place we have ever really lived. Standing in the cold that winter, I did not know any of this. I was eleven, and I had just learned that you could touch a dead person and feel the absence of them as a physical fact.

Afterward, the family made you’xiang (油香) — plain rounds of fried bread, golden, smelling of hot oil — and distributed them to the neighbors and friends who had come. It is what Hui families do after a death. Other communities send flowers; we sent bread you could eat. Grief, after all, is hungry.

Only male relatives were permitted to ride in the truck that carried her body to the cemetery. I was eleven, and a girl, and I watched the metal tailgate begin to rise. The idea in my mind was very simple: I wanted to go with her. I had handed her sunflower seeds every afternoon of my life. I had watched her comb her hair. This was the last road she would travel, and I wanted to be there for it. I judged my moment, and in the last second before the tailgate closed, I stepped up onto the flatbed.

Nobody stopped me in time.

My grandmother — her daughter-in-law — remembered this for years, and brought it up more than once. My defiance, she said, had shown itself early. I think, though she never said so directly, that she did not entirely disapprove.

At the grave, the imam chanted the burial prayers, and my great-grandmother was lowered into the earth in her white wrapping, the pit sealed with stone slabs. The women who had washed her body said she must have been a woman of deep faith: even in death, her hands had settled into the gesture of iman, of belief, as though her body knew what to do without being asked. I did not know what iman meant. I was eleven, standing in the cold, still feeling the cold of her arm in my hand.

The Hospital

My grandfather passed away two years later. This one was harder to absorb.

He had raised me, more or less. He walked me home from kindergarten every day, made my breakfast, grew fruit trees in the courtyard — loquat, fig, cherry, grape — so that in summer there was always something to pick. He made borscht from a recipe I never thought to ask about, rich and dark red, the most improbable thing for a Hui man in a northern Chinese city to have learned to cook. When he had a stroke and was hospitalized, barely able to move, he would still raise one finger toward the bedside cabinet when I came to visit — to indicate there was something good inside, as there always had been. I cut his nails one afternoon and nicked the skin. My aunt scolded me. He waved her off with great effort and said, in the slurred and halting way he spoke by then, that it was nothing. Then he told her to leave me alone.

Everyone knew he favored me. In a family where a grandson had come along — a boy, which in Chinese culture is supposed to settle these things — he had never pretended otherwise. There was an evening near the end when his right hand still had some strength. He raised it toward me suddenly, and I took it, and he held on harder than I expected, and I held on too. I turned my face into his hand and stayed there, and if I cried I tried not to let him see it, because the adults had said it would upset him. We stayed that way for a while. I wanted time to stop, in the way that people want things that cannot happen. He died a few nights later. The phone rang late, which is never good news.

By the time we reached the hospital, his body had already been wrapped and placed on the floor, oriented to face west — toward Mecca, which lies west of China, and toward which a Muslim’s body is turned at death as it is turned in prayer throughout life. The adults had already cleaned the wooden boards needed to carry him, already arranged a truck, already contacted the mosque. I had seen them preparing the boards days before, when he was still alive, and I was furious. I said it was morbid, inauspicious, wrong. I was a teenager, which is to say I understood grief and nothing else. What I did not yet understand was that preparation is its own form of love — that the adults around me were doing, in the middle of their own sorrow, what had to be done regardless of whether anyone felt ready. The dead cannot wait for the living to finish being shocked.

That was my first lesson about death: it arrives whether or not your feelings about it are in order.

The Reinterment

It had rained the day before the reinterment. The crew arrived at six in the morning and began to dig. By ten they had reached the stone slabs.

When they lifted the slabs, there were bones. Brown, whole, twenty-some years in the ground. The senior imam — who had presided at both original burials and had come again now, older, to oversee this one — stood at the edge of the pit. It was a younger imam who climbed down, lifting the bones out by hand, one by one, and laying them carefully onto white cloth spread beside the pit. For the smaller fragments that had worked their way into the soil, he used a flat plastic trowel to lift them out, then separated the bone from the earth with his fingers.

My grandfather’s burial cap was still there. The original white wrapping had survived intact. The imams said it was the most intact reinterment they had done in years; the rain the day before had worried them, they had brought a water pump, but the graves were dry and undisturbed. The senior imam looked down at what remained of my grandfather and said that a man whose grave had kept this well must have lived a good life, must have done good in the world. I am not a believer in any way I could defend. But standing there, I found I wanted it to be true — that a good grave means a good life, that the earth keeps score of something. I did not know if this was theology or comfort. It was probably both.

On the day of the reinterment, I learned from a conversation between my cousin and the imam that we are Sunni — which is a branch of Islam, which is a religion I nominally belong to. Standing beside an open grave in the summer heat, learning this for the first time at thirty-something years old, I found I was not surprised. I could not tell you what being Sunni means in practice, because nothing in my upbringing made it mean anything in practice. It is a label I carry the way you carry a middle name you never use: it is yours, technically, but it has never been introduced.

In our tradition, funerals are organized by the mosque — the washing, the prayers, the burial, everything. The carrying case belongs to the mosque too, not to any family. My cousin and I carried the bundled remains to it — the communal steel box, draped in cloth embroidered with Quranic verses, used for every Hui burial in the community and returned after each one, because the dead borrow their passage out of the world and give it back. The bundles were light in my arms. They were also not light at all. I have tried to find a way to say this that doesn’t sound like a paradox, and I cannot.

At the new cemetery, the imam climbed into the grave and tacked fresh white cloth along the walls, and we lowered the bundles in, and someone scattered spices, and thin smoke rose in the summer air. I thought of the Japanese film Departures, about a man who prepares the dead for burial — the care he takes, the precision, the way he handles each body as though it still matters how it is touched. It does, I think. It always did.

The imams took turns chanting at each new grave — the same prayers as the first burial, beginning again as though no time had passed. At the end they raised both hands, palms up, and drew them slowly down across their faces. I have seen this gesture at every Hui funeral I have been to — which is not many; only these two, and the anniversary ceremonies in the years between — and I still could not tell you its name or exactly what it means. But standing there in the summer heat, I found the chanting beautiful for the first time — not because I had come to understand it, but because I had stopped waiting for understanding to arrive before I was allowed to feel it.

I handled all of this without weeping, which surprised me somewhat. I am not a composed person by nature. But I have been to enough funerals to understand that the body knows what is needed of it, and what was needed here was steadiness, and so I was steady. It was only later, driving back, that I began to think about the distance between the eleven-year-old who had stood at a Hui burial and understood nothing — not the prayers, not the rituals, not what iman meant. How much ground I had covered. How little of it showed on any map.

After

This is how my education in my own tradition has always gone: in fragments, at funerals, from the side of a grave.

Perhaps it was the funeral that prompted it. A few weeks after we buried my great grandmother, my family decided I should be more connected to the tradition I had been circling my whole life without entering. The mosque’s senior imam wrote me a name in brushstroke on a sheet of white paper: an Arabic name, a Muslim name, one that carried a meaning he explained and that I have since forgotten. I don’t know where that paper is now. I never used the name. I cannot tell you what it said. It was an attempt — by him, by my family, by something — to give me a thread back. The thread did not hold. Or I did not hold it. I am not sure there is a difference.

I am still not a practicing Muslim — which is almost not the right way to put it, because it implies an absence I notice. Mostly I don’t. It is an identity I forget I carry, the way I forgot the name written on that sheet of white paper — until something reminds me: a funeral, a grave, a conversation beside an open pit in which I learn, at thirty-something years old, that we are apparently Sunni. I still eat pork when I feel like it. I am still the only Hui person in most of the rooms I enter. I have made a certain peace with not knowing what I am, exactly, or what any of it means in practice.

What I have, instead of practice, is this: I was present at their deaths, and present again when we moved their bones. After the reinterment I found myself reading about Hui funeral rites — matching what I had seen against the names and meanings I had never known to ask about, filling in the gaps twenty years late. There is a Pixar film called Coco, about the Day of the Dead, built around the idea that the dead disappear only when the living stop remembering them.

I am not sure I believe that. But I think about the name on the white paper — the one I was given and lost, the one I cannot tell you — and I think: some things disappear whether or not anyone stops remembering. The bones were still there, brown and whole, twenty-some years in the earth. The name was gone in a decade.

I don’t know what that means. I am not sure it means anything. But I carried the bones, and I know where they lie now, and that is the closest I have come to knowing where I belong.

It was only after this summer that I stopped to think about the word itself — wúcháng, the word the imams use, the word the adults around me have always used. I had heard it at every funeral I attended without once pausing to consider what it meant to say it that way: not dead, not gone, but impermanent. As though impermanence were not something that happens to us at the end, but the condition we have been in all along. As though living and wúcháng were not opposites, but the same thing seen from different distances.

I find that more honest than most words I know for death. I also find it, unexpectedly, a kind of comfort.

The movie is called Dear You (给阿嬷的情书), and if you happened to be in any Chinese city this past week you could not have missed it. The posters were everywhere. By last Tuesday the film had crossed 600 million yuan at the box office, and the social media platforms were full of people weeping into their phones. The story is a simple one, as the stories that make people weep usually are: a grandson travels to Thailand to find the man who wrote love letters to his grandmother for half a century, and discovers that the man died years ago, and that a stranger — a woman with no obligation to anyone — had carried on the correspondence in his name, writing the letters, sending the money, keeping a beautiful lie alive across two families and eighteen years.

The film is shot almost entirely in the Teochew dialect, and the leads are not actors. This is the kind of detail that critics describe as “raw” or “authentic,” and in this case they are not wrong. It is a good movie. It made me cry, and I am not a person who says that lightly.

But there is another story here, and it lives in the silence between the lines of those old letters.

The letters at the center of the film are qiaopi (侨批) — a word that means, in the Teochew and Hokkien dialects, simply "correspondence." But qiaopi were never simple. They were letters and remittances bundled together, stitched into a single transaction by the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia who had gone abroad to work the docks and the rubber plantations and the tin mines of Malaya and Siam, and who needed some way to send money home to the villages of Guangdong and Fujian.

In 2013, UNESCO inscribed the qiaopi archive into the Memory of the World Register. Hong Kong sinologist Jao Tsung-I called them the "Dunhuang of the overseas Chinese" — a comparison to the cave manuscripts that preserved Chinese civilization through centuries of chaos. The Shantou archive alone holds more than 92,000 letters.

Before there were agencies to carry them, the letters moved by human beings called shuike (水客) — “water guests.” These were men who made the crossing between China and Southeast Asia on the monsoon winds, part courier, part itinerant entrepreneur, part village hero, ferrying money and notes and, on occasion, clothes, food, and people. By 1849, there were some two hundred of them working out of Singapore alone. As migration grew and steam ships made the crossing more predictable, the shuike gave way to formal remittance houses, the qiaopiju, which eventually, in 1979, were absorbed into the Bank of China, and the tradition ended.

What the film does not tell you — because films that aspire to move you rarely stop to complicate you — is what it meant in practice to have “overseas connections” in China during the decades those letters were being written.

It was not merely a sentimental condition. It was a political one.

The Letters Themselves

There is also something the film elides about the letters themselves, before we even get to politics.

Many of the men who sent qiaopi could not write. Most early migrants were illiterate or semi-literate, and when they made their remittances, some could manage only the date and the amount. For anything more, they sat down at small stalls that professional letter-writers operated from the five-foot ways of Singapore shophouses, on stools set under the shade of a tree or at the base of a wall, equipped with a table, paper, brush, and ink. They spoke their feelings aloud. The letter-writer turned them into classical Chinese. This means that the man who dictated the letter and the man who wrote it were not the same man. The elegant phrases that appear in the film — the sea that thinking of you makes small (江海万里，心中念你，便不觉遥远) — might the scribe’s language, not Musheng’s.

The film knows this, in its way. In one letter, the husband writes to his wife: I have been practicing my brushwork lately, and have learned to write your name. It is clumsy still, but a few more days and I think I will have it. It is one of the most quietly devastating lines in the movie — a man in middle age, laboring over the four strokes of his wife's name on a scrap of paper in a rented room in Bangkok.

At home, the problem ran the other way. The women waiting in the villages were often illiterate too, and so a third figure enters the story: the phoekha (批脚), the “feet of the letters,” the local delivery men who hand-carried the envelopes from the district agencies to the village doors and, in many households, read them aloud. The intimacy of the qiaopi — that sense of a private voice crossing the water — passed, in practice, through at least two strangers before it reached anyone’s ears. The film’s premise of a woman writing letters in a dead man’s name is, in this light, less an extraordinary act than a variation on something ordinary: the qiaopi was always, to some degree, a collaborative fiction.

There is one more thing worth noting about the letters as physical objects. They were paid for by weight. Paper cost money. The men writing them had very little. So they crammed their characters to the margins, filling every scrap of tissue-thin paper, leaving no room for extraneous sentiment. The formal, courtly prose of the qiaopi was partly a function of compression: classical Chinese says more in fewer characters than the vernacular. Beauty, in this case, was also thrift.

And then there is the question of who, precisely, the letters were addressed to.

By custom, a qiaopi followed a strict hierarchy of recipients. If the paternal grandmother was living, one did not address it to the mother. If the mother was living, one did not address it to the wife. A young son ranked above the mother in the right to receive the envelope. More than sixty percent of qiaopi were addressed to paternal grandparents or parents, and predominantly to men. A love letter addressed directly to a wife — the film’s central premise — was, by the conventions of the form, already an act of deviation.

The Letter-Writing Campaign

All of which is to say that the qiaopi, before the state got involved, was already a more complicated document than the film suggests. And the state did get involved.

In the early 1950s, Beijing had a problem. It needed foreign currency — desperately, systematically — and the remittances flowing through the qiaopi networks were one of the few reliable sources. Records from the Gazetteer of Chaozhou suggest that in some years nearly half the region’s population subsisted partly on money sent from abroad. So the government launched what the historian Glen Peterson, in his study of the PRC’s overseas Chinese policies, calls a letter-writing campaign.

The stated purpose was humanitarian. The war years had scattered families across two continents; countless households in Guangdong and Fujian had lost contact with relatives in Southeast Asia for more than a decade, and many did not know whether their men had survived the Japanese occupation at all. In her 1950 New Year’s address, He Xiangning, Chair of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, expressed hope that the campaign would allay migrants’ suspicions about the new communist government and encourage the resumption of remittances. Local post offices organized elderly residents with long memories to assist in locating the missing. By 1957, authorities reported that some 500,000 letters had been sent to overseas relatives from Guangdong alone, reuniting several thousand families each year.

But the campaign was never only what it said it was. Opening the letters also gave the state its first systematic intelligence on the scale and geography of Chinese transnationalism — who was where, how much money was flowing, what the communities in Bangkok and Singapore and San Francisco looked like from the inside. And as local governments launched their own parallel campaigns focused explicitly on soliciting remittances, the letters from home began to change in character. In Taishan, county delegates resolved in September 1950 that each representative must write at least one letter to an overseas relative explaining the importance of sending money home; they even placed advertisements in New York’s Meizhou Huaqiao Ribao urging Taishan expatriates to remit.

What arrived in the mailboxes of Chinese laundrymen and dockworkers and gardeners in San Francisco and Vancouver and New York was often something closer to a ransom note. The letters described illness, poverty, imprisonment — and ended with an urgent, specific demand for cash. In some cases the demands were genuine expressions of desperation; in others, as Peterson documents, they were the product of local cadres who had discovered that threatening to harm relatives was an efficient way to extract foreign currency from people too far away to verify the claims. Chen Yong, a thirty-five-year-old laundry worker in New York’s Chinatown, received one such letter and handed over his entire life savings of $700. When a second letter arrived demanding $1,100 more, he became so distraught that neighbors called the police. When officers arrived, Chen came at them with a knife. They shot him dead.

The stories was big enough to win a Pulitzer. George De Carvalho of the San Francisco Chronicle received the 1952 Prize for Local Reporting for his investigation of what the prize committee called "a 'ransom racket' extorting money from Chinese in the United States for relatives held in Red China."

By December 1951, more than 1,100 Chinese in the United States had signed a letter to Mao Zedong and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. “The peasant associations in the villages have begun to charge Overseas Chinese families with absolutely groundless crimes,” they wrote, “putting them on trial, torturing them, and compelling them to pay large sums of money by a specified date … atrocious murders have often followed.” Reuters reported that at least one million dollars had been “extorted” from Chinese in New York City in the preceding two months alone. The US Treasury dispatched agents to Chinese communities in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco to collect testimony. The letters — the same letters that the campaign had been designed to produce, the same letters that were supposed to carry family news and filial devotion across the Pacific — were put on public exhibition in Los Angeles in early 1952 as evidence of communist extortion.

The FBI went further, bringing federal charges against the editors of New York's pro-PRC Chinese-language newspaper Meizhou Huaqiao Ribao — the same paper that had earlier run the Taishan delegates' paid advertisement urging expatriates to remit — for allegedly assisting Chinese Americans in sending money to the mainland. The New York Times covered the indictment on its front page.

He Xiangning had spoken of encouraging overseas Chinese to feel connected to the new China. The connection had been made. It simply did not feel the way she had described it.

Families Back Home

Having a relative abroad was not a mark of family connection. It was a liability. The state needed the remittances these men sent home; it did not trust the families who received them. This tension ran all the way into the bedroom.

In the new China after 1949, the 1950 Marriage Law gave women the right to sue for divorce if a husband had “abandoned” them for more than three years. Local authorities in Taishan, Meixian and other emigrant counties promptly announced that wives whose overseas husbands had not returned to China in three years were now free to petition — and that such petitions would be readily granted. According to a 1954 classified report circulated to Overseas Chinese affairs cadres in Guangdong, the frequency of marital disputes in transnational households had by then grown “extremely serious,” with divorce petitions rising in virtually every qiaoxiang across the province.

The government’s response revealed where its priorities lay. Its Overseas Chinese affairs officials condemned — in the same breath — both the “patriarchal clan system” that kept wives in permanent waiting and the women who had simply stopped waiting without filing the correct paperwork. The 1954 State Council directive on overseas Chinese matrimonial disputes was explicit: maintaining a family in China was “one of the material foundations of the overseas Chinese’s connection to the motherland,” and disputes should be handled with “appropriate consideration for the overseas Chinese.” The remittances mattered more than the marriages. Women who had waited years — sometimes decades, sometimes for husbands who had long since built second families in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur — found that the state’s interest in their liberation extended only as far as it did not inconvenience the men sending money home.

During the land reform campaigns of the early 1950s, overseas Chinese households were supposed to be protected. The Agrarian Reform Law of June 1950 had specified that there be "due consideration for the interests of overseas Chinese (华侨所有的土地和房屋，应本照顾侨胞利益的原则)," and Fang Fang, then chair of the Guangdong Land Reform Committee, had explicitly cautioned a careful approach to overseas Chinese property — aware that on the eve of land reform, emigrants owned about one-fifth of all land in Guangdong.

In 1952, Mao sent Tao Zhu to take over from Fang Fang. In Frank Dikötter's account of this period in The Tragedy of Liberation, Tao Zhu had made his name ruthlessly suppressing all opposition in Guangxi — some compared him to a tank, crushing all enemies in his path. In May 1952 alone, over 6,000 cadres in Guangdong were demoted or persecuted for having followed what Beijing deemed an incorrect party line. In practice, as Peterson documents, many qiaojuan households were wrongly classified as landlords and subjected to the expropriation of land and houses; a special provincial commission was eventually established in 1957 to handle the outstanding property disputes. When families could not produce their grain quota, they wrote to their husbands and fathers and brothers overseas and begged for more money. Some men had stopped writing back at all — not from indifference, but because their host countries' governments, edgy with Cold War suspicion, were watching every Chinese man who maintained contact with the People's Republic.

In 1958, local cadres organized drives to collect overseas Chinese funds for the backyard steel furnaces of the Great Leap Forward. Overseas Chinese homes were cleared to make room for communal canteens. In 1963, the Four Cleanups campaign (四清运动) specifically targeted overseas Chinese households as objects of investigation; some production brigades subjected these families to public denunciations, searches, fines, and confiscation.

Then came the Cultural Revolution. By 1966, the provincial government had suspended the entire overseas remittance supply system. Families with foreign connections were, in the official language of the time, “reactionary social foundations (反动的社会基础).” In 1969, Guangdong province formalized this logic into a set of six regulations governing cadres with overseas ties — known informally as the "Six Black Rules" (黑六条) — stipulating that anyone who maintained political or economic contact with relatives abroad was to be "dealt with severely," and that no one with overseas or Hong Kong connections would henceforth be recruited as a cadre. Their letters were read. Their money was seized. Their homes were ransacked for the "four olds" (四旧). Some, unable to endure the investigations and the struggle sessions, took their own lives. It was not until 1978, when Liao Chengzhi — who as a senior overseas Chinese affairs official had spent decades trying to protect these same families — formally repudiated the Cultural Revolution's treatment of the overseas Chinese, that "overseas connections" ceased to be a crime.

**

There is a letter in the historical record — not from the film, but from the actual archive — dated 1927, sent from a man in Indonesia to his family in Chaoshan. In the center of the page he had written a single traditional character: nán (难). Difficult. The left side bore a poem:

He was writing in 1927, before any of the campaigns, before the land reform or the steel drives or the Cultural Revolution. He was writing about the ordinary difficulty of being far from home — a difficulty that belonged to him alone, that no institution could name or preserve.

In 2013, UNESCO inscribed the qiaopi archive into the Memory of the World Register. The letters became heritage. They became, in the words of Shuhua Chen, a scholar who has written on qiaopi culture, a “collective memory” — curated, celebrated, institutionalized. What the process of institutionalization cannot easily accommodate is what the letters actually were: the residue of private suffering, of people separated by distance and history and policy, whose feelings did not become less painful for being preserved.

Chen describes a scene in her 2024 paper. She is visiting an elderly woman in Chaoshan — a woman in her eighties, one of the last generation with living memory of waiting for the letters. The television is on. A news anchor is reporting, in excited tones, that the qiaopi archive has been nominated for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register — a great success, the anchor says, a cultural triumph. She turns to look at the old woman. She is crying.

Chen notes the incongruity: the anchor’s language of collective heritage and shared memory, and the old woman’s private, silent tears. Whose memory, she asks, is the "Memory of the World" preserving? The question does not get answered, because it cannot be.

The film will soon open overseas, the director says. He wants the diaspora to see it. No doubt they will, and no doubt many of them will cry. Some of them will be the grandchildren of the people who sent those letters. They will know, or suspect, or half-remember from something a grandparent once said in a tired moment, that the story has another side.

The grandmother in the film is called Ye Shurou. She is a woman who receives her letters with joy, who presses them to her chest, who seems to live in a world in which a letter from abroad is only ever a love letter. One Chinese critic, writing on Douban after the film opened, noted that she is either an exception or a very lucky woman. I do not think the film is lying about her. I think it is telling a true story about a real kind of love. But it is telling that story while carefully removing everything that surrounded it — the cadres, the campaigns, the confiscations, the hierarchy of addresses that put a young son above a wife, the scribes who supplied the eloquence, the delivery men who supplied the voice.

A movie cannot hold that side and still be a movie. That is not an accusation. It is simply the nature of the form.

The UNESCO archive has, depending on how you count the copies, somewhere between 92,000 and 170,000 letters. The ones that survived are the ones that could be kept. We do not know how many were destroyed — burned by families who thought the foreign handwriting on the envelope would bring the cadres to the door, or seized during house searches and never returned, or simply never written in the first place because a man in a rubber plantation in Malaya had heard enough about what happened to the families of people like him.

The letters, at least, are in the archive. The archive is there for anyone who wants to read it. Ninety-two thousand envelopes, each one thin as a held breath.

I found it the way one finds most things now: by accident, on a phone, at an hour I would rather not admit to. A clip appeared in my Instagram Reels. It was a curtain call. A man walked out in a red silk robe — the embroidered kind, the kind that belongs in a dynasty painting — worn open, his chest bare underneath, as if the robe were an afterthought. He turned his back to the audience and reached for his skirt: a floor-length Mamian skirt, the traditional pleated style embroidered with gold dragons, currently experiencing a nationalist fashion revival across China. He began, slowly and deliberately, to undo the outer layer. He paused. He waited for the screaming to get louder. It did. He let the outer skirt drop, leaving only the inner one, and turned around grinning.

My first reaction was not aesthetic. It was: this is happening in China? Openly? With tickets?

I watched it again.

Then I went to Xiaohongshu and searched for the show. It is called Tan Chunfeng (叹春风), “Sighing at the Spring Breeze,” and it is performed by an all-male company that operates under the name Gong Gou Theatre (公狗剧场), which translates, with magnificent brazenness, as “Male Dog Theatre.” The tour dates came up immediately. Next month, a city near my hometown. I texted a few friends to ask if they heard about it. One wrote back immediately: it’s so hard to get a ticket. They sold out as soon as they went on sale. Another did not answer my question. She just told me which city the tour was currently in.

What I found when I kept searching was not just a hit show but a small social phenomenon, one that says something true about desire and its management in contemporary China.

The official description of Tan Chunfeng calls it “a reconstruction of Eastern masculine spirit” and “a tribute to male spiritual power.” The women who fill every seat and scream until the rafters rattle have a simpler description. Audience surveys put the female share of ticket buyers at ninety-nine percent. One of them, on Xiaohongshu, collected eight thousand likes for this: “A wild and carefree youth — that’s how it ought to be. A free and unrestrained young man, easy and unbound.” She was not describing herself. She was describing the dancers. She was describing something she wanted to see exist in the world — something she recognized but had never quite been allowed to be.

There is a strand of thought in Chinese cultural officialdom, persistent and seemingly impervious to evidence, that art exists primarily to instruct. Literature should elevate. Theater should edify. The purpose of beauty, in this view, is essentially pedagogical: it trains the citizenry toward virtue, loyalty, and correct feeling. Content that strays from these purposes — that titillates, disturbs, or merely delights without improving — is described, in the vocabulary that Chinese censors have used for a century and a half, as shang feng bai su (伤风败俗): injurious to public morality, a corruption of decent custom.

Tan Chunfeng has been called this, more or less. State-affiliated media have fretted about “male body marketing” and cautioned that innovation must have limits, that aesthetics must have propriety. One editorial suggested the production company was deliberately manufacturing controversy to drive ticket sales. This is almost certainly true, and also almost entirely beside the point.

The point is the women in the audience.

My friend who already knew the tour schedule is not, by any outward measure, the demographic one might expect. She is married, employed in a government office, possessed of the general bearing that Chinese society still calls liangjia funu (良家妇女) — a woman from a good family who knows her place. She is also tracking venue capacity and secondary ticket markets for a show in which men take their shirts off and dance. When I mentioned I was curious about the phenomenon, the floodgates opened. More friends weighed in. The knowledge was not confined to the young or the single or the conspicuously liberated. It was everywhere.

This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it complicates the narrative that gets told about Chinese women by people outside China, which goes roughly: Chinese women are constrained by censorship and Confucian expectation; their desires are managed, supervised, and where necessary suppressed. This narrative is not wrong, exactly. The expectations placed on women in China — to marry at the correct age, to bear children, to perform the majority of domestic labor while also holding down a job, to be simultaneously modern and traditional, ambitious and accommodating — are real, and they are heavy. A civil servant with a mortgage and a toddler is not living an unconstrained life.

And yet here she is, knowing the tour dates for a show featuring half-dressed men doing water-sleeve choreography, and planning to see it.

Another comment names what that planning costs: “In this one moment, I forgive everything that has gone wrong in my life.”

What are these women looking for?

The most-liked comments suggest something more interesting than simple appetite. “A wild and carefree youth — that’s how it ought to be,” wrote one viewer, describing the male dancers with a longing that felt less like lust than like grief for something never had. Another wrote — and twenty thousand people agreed — “It isn’t that I’m lascivious — it’s that the flowers are blooming at their peak, and if I don’t look, I’d be a philistine.” There is a whole classical tradition being invoked here, a literati aesthetics of appreciating beautiful things as a moral and intellectual act. These women are not apologizing for looking. They are claiming the right to look as an act of cultural participation.

Others were less literary about it. "This flourishing age is as women wished it," one commenter wrote — a line that carries more history than it appears to. The phrase originates from a 2015 Weibo post published on the day of China's Victory Day military parade, accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of Premier Zhou Enlai. The original meaning was patriotic: this flourishing age is as you wished it — addressed to a revolutionary generation that had sacrificed everything for a China that now, at last, existed. The post was shared 1.01 million times by noon. A decade later, the same words reappear in the comments of a dance show featuring bare-chested men in court robes, and the addressee has changed entirely. The flourishing age now belongs to the women in the audience. The revolutionary inheritance has been quietly repossessed.

“I used to not understand why the emperor stopped attending morning court,” wrote another, referencing the Tang dynasty story of Yang Guifei, whose beauty so captivated the Emperor Xuanzong that governance suffered. “Now I understand.” The implication is not subtle: these women are now the ones so captivated that nothing else matters. They have taken the seat of power in the old story.

“Once I doubted Empress Wu Zetian,” another wrote. “Then I understood her. Now I am her.”

Wu Zetian, for those unfamiliar, was the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own name. She is a complicated figure in Chinese memory — brilliant, ruthless, excessive, visionary — and the way her name keeps appearing in the comments about a dance show tells you something. These women are not merely consuming entertainment. They are, in the language available to them, conducting a small negotiation with history. They are trying on a kind of power, even if only for two hours in a darkened theater, that ordinary life does not offer them.

This is, I think, what all the official hand-wringing misses. The state worries about obscenity, about moral corruption, about the “male body economy” sliding toward something unrespectable. But the demand these women are expressing is not primarily for bodies. It is for a moment — just one moment — of being the one who looks, the one who desires, the one whose appetite the world has arranged itself to satisfy. For a great many Chinese women, working the double shift of career and household while negotiating the expectations of parents, in-laws, employers, and an anxious state that keeps changing its mind about whether they should have one child or two or three, such a moment is not trivial.

It is, as one comment put it, a forgiveness of all the ways life has disappointed.

The comparison that keeps suggesting itself is the Chippendales — the American male striptease act that became a Las Vegas fixture in the 1980s, also born from female desire, also met with considerable moral alarm. The comparison is instructive precisely because of how far it breaks down. The Chippendales sold what one might call a fantasy of desire: the dancer is an object of want, the audience member is a consumer of appetite, the transaction is frank and cheerful and requires no further justification.

Tan Chunfeng is doing something more complicated, and the complication is Chinese. The show wraps itself in classical poetry, historical allegory, and the aesthetics of the Tang court. The dancers are not just attractive men; they are vessels for Yue Fei’s warrior spirit, the melancholy of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the yearning of Zhuangzi’s Wandering Far. The audience is not there merely to look — they are there to appreciate, in the full literati sense of that word. The difference is not only cosmetic. It is structurally necessary. In a cultural environment where female desire requires a costume to walk in public, the costume here is aesthetic legitimacy. You are not attending a strip show. You are attending a dance. A very sold-out dance.

The chart a Chinese commentator drew comparing the two productions noted the key distinction in audience psychology: the Chippendales audience experiences a “fantasy of desire,” while the Tan Chunfeng audience experiences a “fantasy of relationship” — the dancers interact like friends or lovers, the women feel accompanied, seen, responded to. This seems right to me, and it points to something beyond the erotic. What many of these women are hungry for is not just to look at beautiful men. It is to be in a room where their presence, their enjoyment, their feeling is the entire point of the evening. In ordinary life, this is rarer than it should be.

Worth noting, too, is where the show goes. Tan Chunfeng is not a Shanghai or Beijing prestige production playing to coastal sophisticates. The tour rolls through Taiyuan Lanzhou, and Changsha — the grand theaters of second- and third-tier cities, the Workers’ Cultural Palaces and the Silk Road International Arts Centers. This is not underground art. It is not fringe. It is a commercial production performing, night after night, in exactly the venues that official culture considers its own proper territory. The women filling those seats are not seeking out something illicit. They are simply buying a ticket to the theater, the way people have always bought tickets to the theater, for the oldest of reasons: to see something that moves them.

This gap between what the state thinks people should enjoy and what people actually enjoy is not a new problem, and it is not unique to China — or even to women who live inside Chinese cultural expectations. Last year, Patti Smith — the godmother of punk, the poet who wrote Horses, the woman who stood at the Nobel podium in Stockholm and sang Bob Dylan’s songs because he had other things to do — was discovered to have spent several weeks binge-watching a Chinese historical romance drama on Netflix. The show was called Perfect Match, a period comedy about a Song dynasty matchmaker’s five daughters. In it, a twenty-three-year-old actor named Wang Xingyue wore court robes and a great deal of eyeliner and was, by general consensus, extremely beautiful. Patti Smith left comments on his Instagram: “You are really a good actor.” Fans who noticed were, understandably, beside themselves. One replied: “I can’t believe you watched this show.” Another: “Oh my God, it’s really you.”

No one is immune to a well-dressed young man in a flowing robe. This is perhaps the oldest fact about human beings, and no apparatus of cultural management has yet found a way to repeal it. What is interesting about Tan Chunfeng is that it exposes a specific gap: not between official culture and popular culture in general, but between official culture and women’s desire in particular.

Chinese censorship has historically been quite vigilant about female sexuality — about what women can say they want, how they can say it, where, and to whom. The irony is that this vigilance has made the desire more visible, not less. When the normal channels are narrow, people find the interesting routes around them. A dance show in a national style, performed by men in traditional costume, with a title from classical poetry — this is not, on the surface, the kind of thing anyone told these women they could not have. And so they had it, all of it, and they screamed.

Eventually, I found tickets on a secondhand market — sold at a considerable premium, which I paid without much deliberation, which itself felt like a kind of answer. Monday evening, the last ones available, the rest of the run sold out. A friend is coming from Beijing specifically to see it with me.

I am glad the show exists — glad that somewhere in the country, in cities I will pass through on trains, there are theaters full of women who decided, for one evening, that this flourishing age would be as they wished it. Even the state, with all its considerable apparatus for shaping desire, could not quite talk them out of it. Neither, in the end, could I.

The flowers are blooming at their peak. It would be a shame not to look.

Scene from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind

Late last year a friend asked if I wanted to go to Paris to see Accusefive (告五人) on their European tour. I said yes almost immediately, mostly because I wanted an excuse to go to Paris. We eventually went last week.

The band was everywhere on Chinese social media — the kind of omnipresence that makes avoidance impossible even if you aren’t paying attention — but I hadn’t followed popular music closely in some time and told myself I wouldn’t know much of their work. I had mentally prepared myself to spend the trip mostly sightseeing and eating, and to sit politely through the music like a well-behaved guest at someone else’s party.

On the bus to Copenhagen airport I looked them up. I was wrong about not knowing them. I had heard their songs many times; I simply hadn’t known whose songs they were. They had been playing behind short videos on my phone, threading through a comedy show I watched, attaching themselves to moments I had already half-forgotten. The music had arrived before the name did. By the time I found out what I was listening to, I had already been listening for a long time.

The venue was the Salle Pleyel, a concert hall in the 8th arrondissement that opened in 1927 and has the high ceilings and formal proportions of a place that considers itself serious. Walking in, I thought of the assembly hall of the factory compound where I grew up — the same blunt grandeur, the same sense that the architecture was asking something of you. The resemblance ended there. A few weeks earlier I had seen Omnipotent Youth Society perform in Berlin, in a venue that felt provisional, a little rough at the edges, entirely right for music that has always understood itself as a kind of testimony. The Salle Pleyel, by the time Accusefive took the stage, had been transformed into something else: lights that swept the hall in coordinated patterns, elaborate visuals, carefully prepared storytelling between songs, interactions with the crowd that had clearly been rehearsed many times and still felt warm. It was an excellent show. It was also, in some way I kept trying to locate, sealed.

The songs arrived exactly when they should. The hooks landed. I found myself mouthing words I had only learned on the bus, which was its own small embarrassment.

This fact — that I knew the music without knowing I knew it — kept pulling at me through the evening. There is something about the cadence of the Taiwanese accent, that particular softness, the way certain syllables are rounded rather than clipped, that carries its own kind of memory. The melodies too had a familiarity that went beyond having heard them before — a warmth in the rhythm, a willingness to linger on a feeling rather than move past it. For my generation, this texture was not foreign. We grew up inside it.

The first Taiwanese cultural product I consumed was probably My Beloved (妈妈再爱我一次), a 1988 film about a boy separated from his mentally ill mother. I saw it in the assembly hall of our factory compound, on a ticket distributed free to workers and their families. I was too young to remember much — only the crying, of which there was a great deal, and the theme song There’s No One Like Mom (世上只有妈妈好), which became so ubiquitous that decades later I can still recall every word. The film became an unexpected sensation in mainland China. By the end of 1990 it had been seen by over two hundred million people — a figure that, adjusted for today’s ticket prices, would represent something like ten billion yuan. Audiences who had almost no frame of reference for the island walked out having absorbed, without quite knowing it, a vision of suffering rendered with a particular tenderness.

Then came the Chiung Yao (琼瑶) dramas, their plots constructed almost entirely out of misunderstanding and tears. The child actress Jin Ming, with her big eyes and her preternatural talent for crying on cue, was as familiar to us as any neighbourhood playmate; her likeness appeared on cassette tapes in every household. Journey to the West (西游记), a homegrown classic from the 1980s, was already a fixture of summer television by the time I was old enough to watch it — every regional station replaying it annually as if by solemn obligation. Then, in 1998, came My Fair Princess (还珠格格), Chiung Yao’s imperial romance, and it joined the rotation immediately, as if it had always been there. Between the two of them, they soundtracked the long humid afternoons of an entire generation’s childhood.

By high school the delivery mechanism had changed. My Taiwan came mostly through earphones.

Jay Chou (周杰伦) released his first album when I was in high school and it was immediately clear that something unprecedented had happened — a complete musical intelligence arriving fully formed, dismantling everything that Mandarin pop had assumed about itself and rebuilding it as something stranger and better. We were still listening on cassette tapes. I wore mine out.

Jay Chou was for everyone. The literary-minded listened to Deserts Xuan (张悬), who now performs under her given name, Anpu (安溥) — fierce and philosophical, the kind of singer who made caring about ideas feel like a reasonable way to spend a life. I used a line from her song Like as my QQ status for a long time:

I may not have had a specific person in mind. It didn’t matter. The feeling was enough; the feeling was the point.

Sodagreen (苏打绿) wrote about friendship in a way that Chinese music rarely attempted — the specific loyalty of young people who have decided to protect each other against everything:

And Mayday (五月天). In the sun-filled afternoons of high school, a boy who sat at the desk next to mine and had no particular interest in studying would put his head down and sing quietly to himself —

He sang it the way people sing things they have no idea they are singing, the way a song becomes the inside of a mood rather than the description of one. Mayday understood something about that age that I couldn’t have articulated then: that the intensity of feeling was the point, that being young and caring too much was not embarrassing but necessary, and that the knowledge that it would not last was not a reason to feel it less.

There is a lyric of theirs I have not been able to shake for twenty years:

What I loved about those lines, and still love, is their refusal to resolve. They do not say it will be all right. They say: I understand everything completely and still find it unbearable. That is a different, more accurate thing.

These were the songs we sang at KTV on weekend afternoons, passed around on cassette tapes and later mp3 files, learned by heart without quite intending to. The intimacy of them — the willingness to sit with a feeling and examine it honestly, without deflection or false comfort — felt almost foreign to what we had grown up with. That careful attention to private experience was what we were hungry for, and Taiwan kept providing it.

There is a quality that runs through the best of Taiwanese cultural production, and I have spent some time trying to name it. The closest I can get is this: it puts large things inside small containers.

Hou Hsiao-hsien made films about Japanese occupation and the mainlanders who arrived in 1949 and the decades of martial law that followed, but his camera rested on a face eating a meal, a train passing through a tunnel into sudden subtropical green, the damp Pacific wind you could almost feel through the screen. Edward Yang made films about the spiritual cost of Taiwan’s economic miracle, but he set them in a middle-class living room, around a dining table, in the particular silence of people who have stopped being able to speak to each other. Their films were political in the way that all honest art about ordinary life under extraordinary historical pressure is political — not through argument but through attention, the radical act of looking carefully at a person and refusing to let history make them small.

This ran directly against the grain of what I had grown up consuming on the mainland, where the prevailing mode was the opposite: small things placed inside very large containers, individual experience given meaning only by its relation to the national story, the collective, the march of history. There was nothing wrong with this exactly. But it left certain things unnamed. The feeling of being seventeen and not knowing what to do with yourself. The specific texture of a friendship. The gap between what you were supposed to feel and what you actually felt, sitting in a classroom on a Tuesday afternoon while someone at the next desk sang quietly to himself.

Taiwan gave those things a name. Or rather, it gave you permission to believe they already had one.

Partly this may be the result of being an island — small enough that the camera is forced to come in close, that the story cannot sprawl into epic. Partly it is the particular history: artists who had lived under authoritarianism and emerged on the other side into something that permitted, however imperfectly, a reckoning with what had been done and what had been lost. The tenderness in that 1988 film about a boy and his mother — a tenderness that moved two hundred million mainland viewers who couldn’t have explained why — came from somewhere. It came from a culture that had learned, at some cost, to pay attention to suffering without flinching and without inflating it into something larger than it was.

For a generation of mainland Chinese young people, this was quietly revolutionary. Not politically — we were not thinking in those terms yet. But personally. The message, absorbed without quite knowing you were absorbing it, was that your interior life was real and worth examining. That the things you felt, the friendships that seemed to mean everything, the heartbreaks that seemed unsurvivable, the sense that caring about ideas was a legitimate way to be alive in the world — these were not self-indulgence. They were not, as the Chinese phrase has it, 不务正业 — neglecting your proper work for frivolous pursuits. They were your proper work. They were what being a person consisted of.

This was, for many of us, the first time anyone had said so.

In university I found Lung Ying-tai.

Wild Fire (野火集) was a collection of essays she had published in a Taiwanese newspaper in the 1980s, addressed to a general readership, asking uncomfortable questions about Taiwanese society with a directness that the times had only just begun to permit. They were not academic essays. They were the work of someone who believed that a writer’s job was to speak plainly to her neighbours about the things nobody wanted to say out loud, and that this was not a political act so much as a civic one — the kind of thing a society needed in order to remain honest with itself.

Later came Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949 (大江大海一九四九) — the stories of ordinary people swept across the strait by civil war, soldiers and families and children who ended up somewhere they had not chosen, living lives shaped by a history that had never asked their permission. She interviewed survivors. She followed the threads. She let the people speak.

Reading her was a different experience from reading Chinese public intellectuals, of whom there were not many and who tended to operate in a register of either approved optimism or careful obliqueness. Lung Ying-tai wrote as if clarity were possible, as if a writer could look directly at a difficult thing and describe what she saw without the description being finished for her by someone else. The tradition she was working in — the writer as citizen, addressing the public not to instruct them but to think alongside them — was one I had encountered almost nowhere else.

It did not occur to me then to ask why this tradition flourished in Taiwan and not where I came from. I was busy reading.

But others were reading too. Lung Ying-tai’s essays circulated on the mainland in ways that were not always officially encouraged, passed from hand to hand, shared in forums, and discussed in university dormitories. The same was true of the films, the music, the aesthetic of the Simple Life Festival — the idea that doing what you love could itself be a form of seriousness. Gradually, and then quite suddenly, Taiwan had become something larger than a source of entertainment. It had become a projection. An image of what a Chinese society might look like if history had gone differently, if a different set of possibilities had been permitted to develop — more civil, more honest with itself, more willing to let ordinary people take up space.

In 2011, mainland tourists were permitted to visit Taiwan freely for the first time. People returned speaking carefully about what they had seen: the courtesy of strangers, the return of a lost wallet, a taxi driver who refused a tip. New Weekly (新周刊) sent seventy journalists to the island for a week and came back with a two-hundred-page special issue — Taiwan: the most beautiful scenery is people (台湾最美的风景是人).

The title was an observation, but it was also a longing. We thought the distance was closeable. We thought cultural affinity was a kind of infrastructure that it would hold.

The political tension was always there, of course. It had never not been there. But for a time it seemed possible to hold the tension and the connection simultaneously — to acknowledge the complication without letting it foreclose everything else. Deserts, who had by then become something close to a generational icon for mainland listeners, seemed to embody this possibility: a Taiwanese artist who spoke openly about where she came from and what she believed, and whose mainland audience loved her not despite this but in some complicated way because of it.

In 2013, she was performing in Manchester when an audience member unfurled a Taiwanese flag. She picked it up. She held it. She said: this is the flag of my home. From somewhere in the crowd came objections — mainland Chinese students who felt the flag’s presence as a provocation. The room was divided. She stayed with it. “No politics today,” she said, which was either a plea for calm or a quiet acknowledgment that politics had already arrived and there was nothing to be done about it. The act of not dropping the flag was itself political in the truest sense — the politics of refusal: I will not pretend this object does not exist.

The incident set off arguments online between young people on both sides of the strait. Beijing’s official response was measured: cultural exchange should not be disrupted by other factors; both sides should seek greater mutual understanding. As far back as 2008, Hu Jintao had drawn a distinction that the party found useful: “Taiwanese compatriots’ love for their home and their Taiwan consciousness does not equal a ‘Taiwan independence’ consciousness.” The framework was still, just barely, one of engagement — an attempt to separate cultural identity from political threat, to keep the door open while being very clear about where the walls were. After Manchester, officials called for calm. The language was the language of managed distance. But the underlying message was still, just barely, the language of engagement: we would prefer you talk to each other.

Deserts’ mainland concerts were subsequently cancelled.

Not long after, she began performing under her given name, Anpu. It is a smaller, quieter name — her birth name, which she had set aside when she became Deserts Xuan, and now reclaimed. Whether the cancellations and the renaming were directly connected she has never said, and it is not my place to speculate. But the timing lodged itself in memory the way certain dates do. Deserts Xuan had been, for many of us, the clearest embodiment of what Taiwanese culture at its best had offered: the belief that a person could be honest in public, could carry their identity without apology, could refuse to put things down when asked. When she stepped back from that name, it felt less like a rebrand than like a door closing — not slammed, but eased shut, carefully, in a way that made the click of the latch very loud in the silence that followed.

I did not know then that the silence would keep spreading. I think most of us assumed it was temporary — a chill that would pass, a door that might reopen. It did not reopen.

What replaced the conversation is harder to describe than an argument. It is more like the end of argument — the point at which suspicion has been rehearsed so many times it has hardened into something that feels like knowledge. On the Chinese internet, jokes about military unification circulate as casually as memes. Students abroad learn to file complaints against lecturers who refer to Taiwan as a country as a distortion of fact or an insult to China. On the Taiwanese side, the language purges itself of mainland idioms; people learn to identify the other by their syntax, to hear the enemy in a turn of phrase. The people across the water are no longer complicated strangers you are fighting to understand. They are simply the enemy, or the traitors, or the aggressors, depending on which side of the strait you are reading from. What was once an argument has become shelling. What was once a conversation has become targeting.

In this kind of air, culture stops being a bridge and becomes a liability. To come from the wrong place, to say the wrong thing, to be associated with the wrong set of symbols — these are no longer merely awkward. They have consequences.

Sometime in the years between Manchester and tonight, the Taiwan musicians I knew came to the mainland less, or came and said less, or came and were careful in ways they had not always been careful before. The mainland changed around them. They adapted, or they did not come at all. Either way the conversation thinned, and eventually stopped.

There is a phrase: 去政治化 — de-politicization. It describes the careful removal of consequence from cultural expression, the process by which a song about being alive in a complicated world becomes a song about being sad on a Tuesday evening. It is not dishonesty exactly. It is more like sanding every surface until nothing can catch. In the current climate, a Taiwanese artist who wants to reach a mainland audience — or simply not to be made an example of — makes this calculation automatically, the way you learn to breathe shallowly in a room where the air is thin.

Accusefive do not hold flags. They hold the audience with hooks.

This is not a criticism. The loneliness they describe is real, and they describe it honestly. But there is a finish to their work that belongs unmistakably to the present era. Their breakthrough came through short videos — fifteen-second clips of a melody arriving at exactly the right emotional moment. The music was made, one senses, to be clipped. What the algorithm rewards is the feeling of being understood without the discomfort of actually being seen. The loneliness in their songs is genuine, but it is a loneliness that has been made safe — sanded of anything that might catch on the world outside the song, filed down to a smoothness that can travel anywhere without causing trouble.

I think about the boy at the desk next to mine, singing without knowing he was singing. I think about the QQ status I kept for months, addressed to no one in particular. I think about sitting in a factory assembly hall, too young to understand the film but old enough to feel it. I think about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s train emerging from the tunnel into green, and about Lung Ying-tai writing as if clarity were possible, and about Deserts Xuan standing on a stage in Manchester holding something she refused to put down.

What Taiwan gave my generation was not a single thing but a sequence. First it gave us permission to take our interior lives seriously — to believe that what we felt, in all its embarrassing intensity, was worth examining rather than suppressing. Then, gradually, it showed us that the interior life was not a sealed room. That the same honesty you brought to a lyric about heartbreak was available to you when you looked at the society you were living in. That a person and a citizen were not different creatures. This was, I understand now, a form of enlightenment. It arrived through earphones and cinema screens and newspaper essays and the cadence of a singer’s voice, and it shaped the way I understood what it was possible to be.

I am not sure that enlightenment is still being transmitted across the strait. I am not sure the channel is still open. And standing in the Salle Pleyel, watching a show so perfectly calibrated that nothing is left to chance or accident or the particular electricity of a specific evening, I find myself wondering what it means that the Taiwan reaching young people now arrives in fifteen-second increments, already clipped, already safe, already sanded smooth.

The question I cannot resolve is whether what I feel is loss or simply age. Every generation finds in the music of its youth evidence that the world was once more alive. My parents probably feel this about singers I have never heard of. The feeling is not proof of anything except continuity. I know this.

And yet. The strait has widened — not by geography but by accumulated events, by suspicion rehearsed so many times it has begun to feel like knowledge, by an information environment so thoroughly managed on both sides that the complicated stranger across the water has been replaced by a simplified enemy. The musicians who once seemed to be reaching toward us now appear, when they appear in Chinese media at all, to be performing a careful neutrality. They smile carefully. They answer carefully. The carelessness — the good kind, the kind that comes from not needing to calculate — is gone.

Accusefive are very good at what they do. The songs are well-made, the loneliness portable, which is what the present moment requires. I don’t blame them. I am not sure there is anyone to blame. I am only noticing what has been replaced, and by what.

E.B. White once wrote about returning to a lake in Maine where he had summered as a child, finding everything there and everything different, and arriving at the unsettling sense that it was he who was the ghost. I think about this when a song ends and the crowd cheers with a completeness I cannot quite match. They are not missing anything. The show is exactly what it promised to be, which is a real achievement and not a small one.

I am the one standing here waiting for something the evening has not offered to provide — a moment in which the music might briefly fail to be perfect and reveal something truer underneath.

It does not fail. It is very good. The lights come up.

Outside, the Paris streets are indifferent in the way that old cities are to the ghosts of others. I walk among people who have no idea that somewhere, two societies that once reached toward each other across a strip of water are now rehearsing, daily and with great thoroughness, the reasons they cannot. The music those societies grew up sharing is still playing, somewhere, in rooms that are no longer shared. A boy is putting his head down on a desk and singing quietly to himself. A girl is typing a line of someone else’s lyric into a status field, meaning it for no one in particular and meaning it completely.

I don’t know if they can still hear each other. From this distance, the music sounds rather beautiful.

Which may be the problem.

The columnist David Brooks coined the term “Odyssey Years” in 2007 to describe the extended period of wandering between adolescence and adulthood—those years between 20 and 35 when you drift between jobs, cities, identities, not yet settled, not yet sure who you are. That long stretch between knowing who you’re supposed to be and figuring out who you actually are. The years of searching, trying on identities, not yet arriving.

Mine lasted over a decade. From a small college town in Ohio to Beijing to New York to Aarhus. A decade of moving between countries, losing my voice and finding it again, refusing scripts and searching for my own.

My Odyssey Years began in America, where I first tasted freedom. It wasn’t political, not at first. It was simpler than that, almost mundane.

I was a college student in a small college town in Ohio, studying journalism. Because of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), public records were genuinely public. One of our classroom assignments was simply to look up the mayor’s name and whether he had any speeding tickets. You typed a name, the information appeared. Another time, the mayor walked into our classroom to take questions about city affairs. Students asked whatever they wanted. He answered.

In China, none of this would have been possible. But what struck me wasn’t just the access—it was the question that came with it: now that you can ask anything, what do you want to ask? Now that you can do anything, what do you want to do?

Freedom, I began to realize, meant having to think for yourself.

In another class, we were assigned to review court documents from a case involving a former state attorney general who had misused campaign funds. As I read through the files, I noticed one of the people mentioned in the case was teaching at our school. I asked my professor if I could interview him for the assignment. He said yes—but added that he didn’t want to see any softball questions. He wanted real questions. Tough questions. What was the working environment like? What did you know?

I was nervous. I worried it would come across as mean, or harsh. But the man agreed to the interview, and he answered everything I asked—openly, without defensiveness.

This was unimaginable to me. In China, this kind of access, this kind of directness, simply didn’t exist. Everything about these experiences made me feel that freedom had no ceiling. You could ask. You could know. You could do anything.

For someone who grew up never quite fitting the scripts offered to me at home—like most Asian parents, mine wanted me to study law or finance, or become an engineer, but I was always drawn to the media—this was a revelation. America, for all its performative excesses, held space for misfits. It let me exist without first having to explain myself.

But even here, there were scripts. Once, a lecturer was explaining freedom of information laws. “In America, we have transparency,” he said. “Not like China or North Korea.” I felt a flicker of discomfort. I couldn’t entirely disagree—but something about the framing felt imprecise, too neat. China was simply “suppression.” End of story.

I filed the feeling away and moved on.

After graduation, I returned to China. I wanted to practice journalism where I came from, where the stories were.

This was around 2012. I returned to China in the summer that year, and the media landscape still felt alive. Looking back, it was the tail end of something—though we didn’t know it yet.

Bloomberg Businessweek (彭博商业周刊) had just launched its Chinese edition the year before. Modern Media (现代传播), based in Red Street, was putting out lifestyle magazines alongside serious journalism. There were still investigative reports that mattered: that same year, Bloomberg published an exposé on the family wealth of China’s incoming leader, and was promptly blocked. A year later, Caixin would publish “The Huangs of Laguna Beach,” tracing the overseas assets of a powerful family’s inner circle—the story was deleted within days, then mysteriously restored.

Meanwhile, China’s tech giants were pouring money into content and experimenting with new forms. Tencent launched “Living” (活着), a photo essay column documenting ordinary lives across China. They created “Dajia” (大家), an opinion blog modeled after The Huffington Post, signing up prominent scholars and columnists to write for a mass audience. And there were offline events too—salons where intellectuals discussed ideas that pushed against the edges of the permissible. I attended some of them, sat in packed rooms listening to historians debate the Republican era, philosophers argue about justice, writers reflect on memory and censorship. I even wrote press releases for Tencent Culture covering these events. Back then, every weekend in Beijing offered gatherings like this—book launches, lectures, discussions that felt like they mattered.

I worked at Caixin, one of the most prestigious outlets in the country. The editorial standards were rigorous, even if the writing was dry. Freedom was limited, yes, but there was a game you could play: racing against administrative orders, publishing stories before the ban came down. You learned to dance in shackles.

Later I moved to Lens magazine. They had just resumed publication after being shut down for “Walking Out of Masanjia“—an exposé that revealed systematic torture in a labor camp, through the account of a survivor who had smuggled out a letter hidden in Halloween decorations sold to the US. The story became especially sensitive because many of those detained were Falun Gong practitioners. After the crackdown, the magazine pivoted from documentary photography to lifestyle aesthetics. A quieter existence. But still, in its own way, an attempt to voice.

I always had a sense of what kind of stories I wanted to tell, what style of writing I had in mind. Caixin was professional but lacked soul. The literary nonfiction that was fashionable at the time was too focused on craft—beautiful sentences, but weak on fact-checking, on the professional rigor that separates reporting from storytelling.

Back then, the two writers about China I admired most were Zha Jianying and Peter Hessler. Zha’s “Enemy of the State,” published in The New Yorker in 2007, was a portrait of her own brother, a democracy activist serving nine years for “subverting the state”—intimate, precise, unflinching. Hessler’s River Town showed me something else: that you could write about China without turning it into a spectacle, without the exoticizing gaze that so much Western journalism defaulted to. He wrote about ordinary people as ordinary people.

I wanted both: rigor and soul, intimacy and professionalism. Stories that weren’t being told, told in a way that respected both the subject and the reader.

In 2013, a partner and I transformed an existing translation project, Cenci Journalism Project, into something more ambitious: translation plus original reporting, focused on marginalized communities—LGBT people, workers, patients. I mostly did editorial work. We had a column called “Dissenters” (异见分子), profiling people who crossed lines—artists like Ai Weiwei, student activists abroad. From my experience, I knew these were sensitive topics. But I thought: the worst that could happen was that we couldn’t post on social media. Our website wasn’t registered with the authorities, which gave us a higher degree of freedom. I tried my best to let the younger writers write whatever they wanted—the way my own editors had once given me space. That was the freedom I wanted to pass on.

That was my voice. For about six months.

Then, one afternoon, I was editing a draft in a café when someone messaged our group chat. Then more people started asking what happened. I checked—the website was blocked. Our social media accounts were wiped out. All of them, at once. I was stunned for a moment, but not entirely surprised. Later, my partner was summoned for “tea.”

That was my most visceral experience of China’s unfreedom—not as an abstract concept, but as a door slamming shut on something I had built with my own hands. I was traumatized by it for a long time. But still—it was a price we could afford. We had known, almost from the start, that this would probably happen. We just didn’t expect it so soon. And this is how it works: you do something, you learn from it, you figure out where the line is, and you try to be smarter next time.

After that, I lost my voice for a long time. What I wanted to say, I couldn’t. What I was allowed to say didn’t interest me. I drifted between China and America, searching.

In 2015, I moved to New York. I had written it into a bucket list years ago—”live in New York for a few years”—without quite knowing why. Maybe it was E.B. White’s Here Is New York, which I had loved: “each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

Years of suppressed creative desire finally exploded. I followed my curiosity, reached out to people and communities I wanted to understand. I lived in Brooklyn, among Orthodox Jews and Puerto Rican families and young artists who had fled Manhattan’s rising rents. I covered protests and marches. I wrote about coffee shops, canvas bags sold by vendors. I took photographs I was proud of. I knocked on doors and interviewed owners of ethnic businesses—an Orthodox Jewish liquor store, a Thai restaurant owner, a Peruvian-Chinese selling rotisserie chicken.

It was the most creatively productive period of my life. New York is a perfect place for creators—so many scenes from art-house films, so many stories layered into the city, the streets themselves like cinema. Material everywhere, details at every corner. My school was on 14th Street in Manhattan; in the café downstairs, people were debating decolonization.

Along the way, that flicker of discomfort I had felt in journalism school—it returned, sharper now.

Back then, everything was new. I was absorbing knowledge, expanding my horizons, and my admiration for America was largely uncritical. But after what I had experienced in China—after watching so many people work within the cracks, dance in shackles, carve out space for real journalism against the odds—the simple narrative of “China equals suppression” felt incomplete. It erased all that effort, all that agency. It reduced everything to a story about the CCP, not about the people who refused to be silenced.

In the American context, China was almost always framed through geopolitics—either as threat or as a distant symbol of unfreedom. And if you were Chinese and willing to read from this script, you could easily be given a stage. The role was already written: victim, witness, dissident.

In some ways, I was a victim. But I didn’t want to live as one. I didn’t want to be given a stage without a voice. I didn’t want to fit a script, to be seen without complexity, to become a trophy proving someone else’s point. I didn’t want the CCP to become the axis around which my entire existence is measured.

At the same time, I had no interest in joining those who dogmatically defended China.

My school was famous for being leftist—one of the few institutions in America that still taught in the continental philosophy tradition, the place where Hannah Arendt once taught. But I gradually found it hard to take seriously. It was a strange hybrid: a fashion and design school stitched together with a continental philosophy school. And in a country where even unions are demonized, talking about “the left” often felt more like gesture than substance.

The American “leftists” I encountered used theory dogmatically to explain reality in ways that were twisted—justifying China’s human rights abuses in the name of anti-imperialism. In 2019, I saw people opposing the Hong Kong protests on the grounds that it was imperialist intervention. Their logic was simple: capitalism is bad, therefore communism must be a good alternative. They had never lived under it—it was just theory to them. Listening to them talk always reminded me of that bloody Jesus meme. One person comfortable, the other embodying a suffering that is, for the first, merely a subject of conversation.

I didn’t fit either script. The victim narrative, the tankie narrative—neither was mine.

I left New York at the beginning of 2017, still uncertain about everything. New York had freedom, it had audiences—but the stories I wanted to tell were elsewhere, and so, it seemed, were the people I wanted to reach. New York is probably one of the best cities in the world—I still think so today—but I just couldn't see myself living there long-term. Everything there felt like it was floating in the air.

Years later, this would be one of the reasons I felt more at home in Europe. But that’s another story.

Back in Beijing, I lived in a hutong. Summer evenings buying beer from the little imported-goods shop on Baochao Hutong, sitting on the curb with friends talking late into the night, going to someone’s yard for barbecue—it was the happiest years of my life. We had our own small support group. The hutong held all of it: the laughter, the dreams, and the heavy discussions too. My stomach was full, and so was my spirit.

Around 2019, after five or six years of avoiding Weibo—ever since my first account was banned in 2014—I returned, under the name Hutong Arendt.

Hutong, from those nights. Arendt, from New York—she is my favorite political philosopher. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”

That quote was one of my first posts that people noticed. In China, where nationalism dominates social media, I didn’t expect a quote about refusing to love any collective to resonate. But it did.

I started posting commentary on women’s issues. News from outside the firewall that contradicted official narratives. Especially about Hong Kong, during the anti-extradition protests. I was attacked constantly, but I also felt the reconnection with an audience. There were mothers and teachers who wrote to me. High school girls in the private messages, telling me how my posts inspired them, how they saw things they couldn’t see elsewhere.

One message has stayed with me. A high school girl in Xinjiang—those two words alone say enough. She told me she was depressed, that everything around her felt suffocating. To deal with the random phone checks on the street, she would clear her chat history every time, sometimes even delete her account entirely. When she could, she would come back and message me again. She said what I wrote opened her eyes. She hoped one day she would have the ability to leave, to get out.

Maybe this came from ego—every person who wants to speak in public also wants to be heard, wants to know their voice has value. But I understood: what I was expressing was needed.

That wave didn’t last either. After I was banned for my posts about Hong Kong, I basically couldn’t use Weibo anymore.

This is what it feels like: you push the boulder up, and it rolls back down. You try again. It rolls back down. Sisyphus. It’s not heroic. It’s labor.

And this was the second time I lost my voice.

The exhaustion—and the constant awareness that you can be erased at any moment—made me start to think about leaving. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was a calculation. Risk assessment.

Covid made the decision easier. In 2020, I left for Europe. From the decision to the departure, it took only six months. I didn’t hesitate for a moment.

The day I left was the last day of August. I had cut my hair the shortest it had ever been. My previous flight had been canceled due to pandemic restrictions, and I had finally managed to buy a new ticket at an exorbitant price. My closest friends in Beijing came to see me off at the airport—my flatmate, who would stay in our apartment near Lama Temple and inherit all our furniture; my neighbor from the hutong, a journalist and longtime friend; my partner from the Cenci. We took a photo together at the entrance to international departures. There was no sadness—we had grown used to goodbyes. Only the anticipation of a new life.

After years of traveling back and forth between China and America, this time felt different. I knew, somewhere inside me, that the next time I came back I would only be a visitor. I wasn’t coming back.

In Europe, part of my work is still journalism. I started writing more in English—partly as a form of protection. Language itself becomes a shield: writing in English makes you less likely to be targeted. But it also means you become irrelevant to the readers you care about most, the ones you want to write for, the ones who could truly understand you.

And when you write about China in English, for non-Chinese audiences, you have to consider the average reader’s knowledge, the limits of space. Everything gets flattened. On one hand, you are a journalist; on the other, you are explaining yourself—your country, your background, your existence. The two roles blur. You don’t always know which one you’re performing.

I am envious of my European colleagues who can write in their mother tongue. They can talk proudly about their reporting, share their bylines, and build careers in the open. There may be controversies, but it’s more about professional practice—not a dangerous profession. And they don’t face loyalty tests.

For Chinese journalists practicing overseas, the ecosystem is precarious. Opportunities are limited, institutional support scarce—somewhat better in America, but nowhere abundant. There is no union, no professional network to fall back on. Every professional choice carries political weight. You learn what you can say and what you can’t—or you’re always weighing.

Even when you’re safer abroad, you still face the choice: visibility or practice. Attention or profession. The more you’re known, the greater the risk of becoming a target. If you believe getting the story out matters more than being recognized for it—if you want safety—you may have to give up your byline, give up certain visibility. But that means limited career growth, limited recognition, limited sense of professional accomplishment. You can’t have everything.

Your social life is also constrained. You have to socialize only with people you trust. When you have vulnerabilities, an unfamiliar person could become the weak point. You stay low-key. You become a lone wolf by necessity.

You learn to live with a particular kind of solitude. Professional solitude, social solitude, and the solitude of not knowing who you’re writing for, or whether your words reach anyone who truly needs them.

This is not just my confusion. It’s shared by many who do this work.

Recently, I announced on LinkedIn that I was starting a Chinese-language media project aimed at the Chinese diaspora in Europe. The first comment that appeared: “Will you cover CCP transnational suppression?” Another: “If you don’t work in the direction of the CCP then the editorial team will get in trouble. If you work in accordance with CCP principles, it will be very dull.”

I was frustrated. As if everything I am is defined by my relationship to Beijing.

In China, the cage is obvious: censorship, surveillance, the risk of disappearing. And home—home is its own cage too. Family ties, the possibility of return, the weight of what you can’t say to the people who knew you first.

But leaving one cage doesn’t mean freedom. It means entering another.

Another part of my work is in policy spaces, analyzing media narratives related to China, consulting for European institutions, occasionally sitting in rooms where decisions are shaped. The rooms themselves are unremarkable: fluorescent lights, bottled water, thirty or forty people around the room, the same cautious language.

Much of the conversation is still caught between Panda Huggers and Dragon Slayers—those who naively embrace engagement and those who see only threat. Little room for anything in between.

In these rooms, I am often the only Chinese person, or one of very few non-Europeans. I am both the expert and the subject. The insider and the outsider.

During one such meeting, I began my remarks with “We should—”

The words left my mouth, and I stopped. A distinct discomfort. It struck me: I don’t think I am truly one of “we.” At least, the relationship is more complicated than a simple “we” and “them.”

So I’ve become the person who objects. Who insists on nuance when the framing gets too neat. Who complicates things when others want them simple.

During a coffee break once, a colleague joked: “You want to be a pain in the ass, right?”

I think that is exactly who I want to be.

My favorite poem contains these lines:

This may be my state for many years to come.

I am not looking for a place where I finally belong. I don’t think that place exists. What I’m looking for is simpler and harder: to know what my voice is, to be honest with myself, and to be willing to pay the price for it. To practice what I think is right, even when the boulder rolls back down.

The discomfort I felt saying “we”—the unease watching those figures displayed rather than heard—these are not signs of confusion. They are signs of clarity. I can see the scripts being offered to me. I am trying, still, to refuse to read from them.

Maybe that’s all freedom is, in the end. Not the absence of a cage, but the refusal to let any single cage define you. To be useful without being used up.

In China, many practitioners idealize journalism—but idealization is complicated. Sometimes it means giving the work too much meaning, which can also mean covering over the harm it does to you or other people. For me, it’s just a profession. Something I could walk away if I ever want to stop.

But I haven’t stopped. Not because I’m couragous , or because I believe in some grand cause. But because of the journey itself—the people I’ve met along the way, the stories that belong to no one’s script, the moments of connection that no one can claim.

As Cavafy wrote to Odysseus:

Mine has been. The curb on Baochao Hutong, summer nights, beer in hand, talking until the sky turned light. The packed rooms in Beijing where ideas still seemed to matter. The Brussels meeting room where I stumbled over “we.”

And now, writing this—in a language that is not my mother tongue, for readers I may never meet, in a place that is not quite home. But it’s my voice. And that’s enough.

These were my Odyssey Years. And I'm still walking.

A friend of a friend flew in from Lisbon. Someone else from Munich. Half an hour before doors opened, the line already stretched hundreds of meters. Cobblestone streets, old brick buildings on both sides, searchlights cutting through the March sky. About a thousand of us, mostly Chinese from all over Europe, queuing in the Berlin night to hear a band from Shijiazhuang sing about collapse.

The venue was Kesselhaus at Kulturbrauerei—a complex of old brick buildings that looked like Bauhaus architecture, the same style as Beijing’s 798 Art District, also built by Germans. There was something familiar about it. Inside, the livehouse itself had exposed pipes and peeling walls, like those underground spaces tucked into Beijing’s hutongs around Gulou. Those hutong venues exist in the cracks of power—ramshackle, semi-legal spaces where underground culture finds room to breathe, like fish slipping through a net. They survive because they’re hidden, and because they’re cheap.

Berlin has that same stubbornness. "Poor but sexy," the mayor once called it—cheap rent, underground culture, room for misfits to breathe. That was twenty years ago. The rent is no longer cheap. But something remains: a city where a band like Omnipotent Youth Society, or Wanqing (万青) for short, still belongs.

Unpolished, not quite tamed, Wanqing is not a band that invites spectacle. Ten or so musicians stood on stage. The trumpet player performed with his back to the audience. The lead singer, Dong Yaqian, wore a striped shirt, jeans, and pointed leather shoes—clothes that seemed stuck in the 1980s, retro or maybe just out of step with the times.

When they played “Kill That Shijiazhuang Person (杀死那个石家庄人),” what the New York Times once called “the most influential indie rock song in China”, Dong stumbled at the start of the chorus, a sudden, jagged hitch in his throat. It was a physical slip, a human error, but the crowd didn’t care. They filled the gap with a roar, carrying him until he could find his voice again. A thousand people, in Berlin, singing in Chinese: “Living like this for thirty years, until the building collapses (如此生活三十年，直到大厦崩塌).” Everyone sang loudly, together.

I first heard Wanqing in America, around 2010, right after the album came out. I was a student then, still believing in the “End of History.” Back then, I vaguely sensed the "collapsing buildings" of Shijiazhuang might be some kind of political metaphor, but I dismissed it as a local tragedy, a ghost story from a China I was leaving behind. What I noticed first was the music—it was good. It was only much later that I learned the song was about the layoff crisis of the 1990s, when state-owned enterprises collapsed across China and a generation of workers lost everything.

A few years later, I attended a friend’s wedding in Zhuhai and happened to catch them at a beach music festival. When “Qinhuangdao” (秦皇岛) came on, the trumpet broke through like sunrise piercing clouds—and underneath it, the sound of the northern sea at night, silent and ink-dark. When the trumpet came in, I felt the urge to cry, like finally seeing sunlight after an endless night. The song was written when Dong was in Qinhuangdao recovering from depression; the melody and lyrics describe exactly that state.

Now it’s Berlin. Another decade. The man on stage is the same man, a little grayer, still wearing that kind of shirt. The album he made back then is still an all-time classic—the music, the lyrics, the cover art. Sixteen years later, it still looks avant-garde.

The cover features a figure diving from a high platform—or rather, soaring. In an interview with Hypebeast for the album’s tenth anniversary, the designer Ruan Qianrui said the figure was originally falling, but a Spanish collaborator suggested flipping the posture, so descent became flight. This is perhaps the visual metaphor for the band’s entire ethos: clearly falling, but posed as if flying.

The album title is written in Mao-style calligraphy—the font of the Chairman himself—with the English name tucked away in an inconspicuous corner. The cover stock is gold sulfate paper, absurdly expensive for 2010. Someone online said the color was the color of Shijiazhuang. The designer disagreed: “Shijiazhuang’s color is far more dreary, boring, and oppressive than this.”

Wanqing is one of the few Chinese rock bands that never sold out. Indie, anti-authority, uncompromising—songs about life as it actually is, not love songs for the charts. “Kill That Shijiazhuang Person” is about the 1990s layoffs. “Record of Pawning Dark Clouds (乌云典当记)” was used as the theme song for the Taiwanese release of “No,” a Chilean documentary about the campaign that voted out Pinochet. The song contains a line “calculating three-seven or six-four (计算三七或六四),” which is often interpreted as a reference to two sensitive numbers: three-seven, the official verdict on Mao (30% wrong, 70% right), and six-four, which needs no explanation. That song is now completely banned.

“In All the Pubs on This Planet (在这颗行星所有的酒馆)” is believed to reference June Fourth. One line goes:

The lyricist, Ji Geng, once said in an interview that if you replace “pubs” in the title with “squares,” the lyrics would make complete sense. He chose “pubs” to make the meaning less obvious—to replace cruelty with something “more romantic.”

“Pubs” was effectively banned in China starting in 2019 and disappeared entirely by 2023. In its place, fans noticed that live performances would transition into a new instrumental piece where “Pubs” used to be—born from the outro of the original song, with a different drumbeat, and no words. In 2023, the band officially named it “Yongjia Comet (永嘉彗星).” It has never appeared on any streaming platform. For fans, the continuity is everything: to play “Yongjia Comet” is to play “Pubs.” The words are gone, but the song lives on.

The name is an omen. Yongjia was the era when the Jin dynasty fell and the Five Barbarians (五胡) swept south. In classical Chinese texts, comets signal catastrophe—war, regime change, the death of kings.

On New Year’s Eve 2024, they performed “Yongjia Comet” at Bilibili’s nationally broadcast countdown show—six minutes of instrumental music on a formulaic variety program, sandwiched between pop stars and comedy sketches. It was completely out of place. But everyone who needed to understand, understood. The loudest moment of a rock concert is usually the chorus everyone sings along to. Here, the loudest moment was pure instrumental—because the words were illegal. That silence was deafening.

When they performed “Yongjia Comet” in Berlin, the stage was bathed in blood-red light. The music was psychedelic, piercing, full of unease and ill omen. Behind the band, the backdrop was a collage of images in the style of Han dynasty tomb bricks: a comet with flames streaming outward, figures fleeing beneath it, and scattered across the blood-red field—running beasts, fish skeletons, hunters, strange and ominous symbols.

This is how Wanqing resists: through indirection, through code. They are the password and countersign of a scattered tribe.

In June 2023, at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, "Kill That Shijiazhuang Person" was performed entirely as instrumental. The piano played, the melody was familiar, but no one sang. The audience listened in silence, mouthing the words in their hearts. According to fan accounts, the song hadn't passed censorship—both the title and lyrics touched too many nerves. Others said it was a tribute to the White Paper Movement: the absent lyrics mirroring the blank sheets people had held up in protest. No one knows what the band truly meant. But the silence itself was the answer.

And yet, the state finds ways to claim what it cannot silence. In 2021, Ji Geng—the man who wrote "living like this for thirty years, until the building collapses"—was granted the status of a "special government-subsidized expert" by the Shijiazhuang municipal government. The official reason: he had contributed to promoting Shijiazhuang's "name card." Five hundred yuan a month.

The absurdity didn't stop there. That same year, the Hebei Communist Youth League posted a "positive energy" remake on Bilibili titled "The Unkillable Shijiazhuang Person (杀不死的石家庄人)." The lyrics were altered beyond recognition, sparking controversy. The singer who performed the cover later requested to terminate the collaboration, and the video was eventually deleted. Two years later, Shijiazhuang officially announced plans to rebrand itself as a "City of Rock." As if rock and roll could be co-opted by decree. As if rebellion could be rebranded.

But for the fans, it doesn’t matter. The state can hand out stipends, print slogans, launch campaigns. Wanqing remains what it has always been: the opposite of all that.

I looked around the room. The people here were not here by accident. You had to know the relationship between “pubs” and “squares.” You had to understand why “Yongjia Comet” has no lyrics. You had to have learned, somewhere along the way, to read code words in the gaps of censorship. These were people filtered by shared memory—people who, like characters out of Kerouac, refuse the way things are supposed to be. Not necessarily political dissidents, but something adjacent: the ones who never quite fit, who hear silenced lyrics in six minutes of instrumental music.

Normally scattered across Europe, liking each other’s posts on Twitter, posting carefully coded content on WeChat that only the like-minded can decipher—tonight, standing together, we discovered there were this many of us. An echo chamber huddling for warmth (同温层), if you want to call it that. But maybe it could be called something else. A fire that hasn’t gone out.

Diaspora doesn’t translate well into Chinese. “Lisan”(离散) is too literary. “Liuwang” (流亡) is too heavy. “Overseas Chinese”(海外华人) sounds like something from the United Front Work Department. But standing in a Berlin livehouse, singing “until the building collapses” with a thousand people who flew in from everywhere, you begin to feel what the word means: gone, but still connected; safe, but still hurting; free, but still remembering the unfree days.

But the unfreedom isn't only back there anymore. Seeing the band in Berlin now, under the shadow of a global right-wing surge and Trump's second term, I realize those buildings weren't just falling in Hebei. The decay is everywhere. The “Shijiazhuang person” isn’t a specific worker from a defunct pharmaceutical factory anymore; he is anyone watching the institutional walls of the twentieth century crumble in real-time, myself included.

I was born in China in the late 1980s, at the dawn of globalization. We were promised we would be citizens of the world—free to move, free to belong anywhere. I looked outward, toward the world beyond China. My first real education in democracy came in America. I was in Ohio when they elected the first Black president. The college town erupted—people celebrating in the streets, drinking all night. Hope felt real.

And then the world turned. The refugee crisis, the walls going up at borders, Trump elected once and then again. America is lurching toward authoritarianism. Day by day, it looks a bit more like something I thought I had left behind.

We didn’t just bring our memories to Berlin; we brought the realization that the ruins are now global. Wanqing wrote about Shijiazhuang in the 1990s—a specific city, a specific decade, a specific collapse. But somehow, everyone hears their own. That’s the thing about them: they were never only talking about the past. They were talking about now.

When the show ended, someone threw a pack of cigarettes onto the stage. Not flowers, not underwear. Cigarettes. The band members are all chain smokers, so this was a true fan, someone who knew exactly what to offer. It was also a very Chinese gesture: you offer a cigarette to a friend.

I walked out into the Berlin night. March, still cold. People stood on the street smoking, the scent of tobacco lingering in the air—that same gesture, offered and accepted.

The literal translation of the band’s name means “Omnipotent Youth Hostel.” Maybe the hostel really IS omnipotent. It holds everything—the refusal to accept the way things are, the songs that aren’t just about love but about life and reality, bitter and indignant and quietly alive. And the door is always open. There’s always a bed.

I walked into one in my twenties. Sixteen years later, I can still stay. Thirty years, the song says—fourteen to go. Maybe more.

It was an ordinary afternoon, I went to the Asian supermarket near the train station — the one that carries the particular kind of tofu that no Danish supermarket stocks — and I was on my way back, bags in both hands, thinking about nothing in particular, when I saw them.

Two stone figures in a square: a man and a woman, frozen mid-struggle or mid-dance, it was hard to tell. The woman had been given a patchwork skirt in purples and pinks, and an orange crocheted bikini top. The man had been fitted with a small pair of knitted shorts. Against the flat grey of a January sky, they looked almost festive — a little absurd, a little tender, the way handmade things often do when they appear somewhere you don't expect them.

I set down my bags and took a photo. I posted it. Interesting, I wrote, or something like that. Then I picked up my bags and caught my train, and didn't think about it again for several days.

***

A few days later I was at my friend Emma’s for dinner, and I mentioned I wanted to learn to crochet. She asked what I’d like to make. I showed her the photo.

She put down her drink and told me the story behind it.

The statues across Denmark — hundreds of them — had been catalogued. Four hundred and eighty-four monuments depicting historically significant men. Forty-three depicting women. And over a hundred female nudes, anonymous and allegorical, representing myths and ideas and nothing in particular. Women knitters and crocheters around the country had begun dressing them: sweaters, skirts, bikinis, scarves. The government had taken notice. A million and a half dollars had been set aside for new monuments commemorating historically significant women.

I looked at my photo again. The woman in the patchwork skirt. The man in his modest knitted shorts. I had thought it was art. It was also an argument.

I admired it. I still do. There is something genuinely moving about this form of protest — its patience, its humor, its refusal of rage. You don’t tear the statue down. You dress her. You make the point with yarn. The government writes a check. The museum takes the dress for its collection. Democracy, functioning more or less as advertised.

But sitting at Emma’s table, I also felt something else, some small resistance I couldn’t quite name. What a particular kind of problem to have, I thought. What a particular kind of country, where this is what feminism looks like.

I have been living in Denmark for some time now, and it is — I want to be accurate about this — genuinely good for women. I attended a conference here not long ago, co-hosted by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and looked around the room at the officials who had come to speak, and realized that the overwhelming majority of them were women. Not as an exception. Not as a deliberate statement. Just as a fact, unremarkable, the way things are. I have walked through the cities at night without thinking twice. I have been taken seriously in rooms where I expected not to be. There are role models here in the literal, structural sense: women in positions of authority, visible enough that a girl growing up here can see what is possible and believe it.

I know what this is worth. I have not always lived somewhere it was true.

And yet.

I went to a gynecologist here about four years ago to have an IUD fitted. The doctor was a woman, efficient and kind, and at some point during the examination she looked up and said, almost conversationally: You have a beautiful uterus. You could still have children, you know.

I lay there on the table and felt something I struggled afterward to describe. Not quite offense. Not quite surprise. Something more like recognition — the sensation of being seen, not as a person who had come in with a specific medical request, but as a vessel being assessed for its fitness. In Denmark. By a woman doctor. In the most gender-equal country in the world, by most measurements.

I thought about the numbers Emma had told me. Four hundred and eighty-four men. Forty-three women. A hundred and twenty anonymous female nudes.

The welfare state will give you childcare, I thought. It will not give you stone. And it will, if you give it the chance, remark upon your uterus.

About six or seven years ago, when I could still use Weibo, I used to post frequently about gender. I was never, by Chinese social media standards, particularly radical. I thought feminism meant protecting women’s right to choose — to work, to stay home, to marry, to not marry, to want whatever they wanted without a movement telling them their choices were wrong.

This turned out to be a controversial position.

I was attacked from two directions simultaneously. The first was the predictable one: the trolls who showed up on any post about gender to deploy the coarsest possible language, who treated any woman who named a social problem as a problem herself, to be dealt with accordingly. I had expected them. They were unpleasant and, in a certain grim way, legible.

The second group surprised me more. They came from within what called itself feminism — women who had concluded that marriage was slavery, that any woman who chose it was either a victim or a collaborator, that defending women’s right to choose included everything except the choice to marry, which was not a real choice and therefore didn’t count. They had a word for married women, a word I won’t repeat here. They attacked me for saying I thought women should be free to make that choice too.

I was angry at the time. I am not angry now.

I had grown up with the protections I’d been given — the education, the options, the structural buffers that kept the worst from reaching me directly. My relationship to feminism had always been, at some level, theoretical. I could afford to think in principles. They could not.

For them, the reality of being a woman in China was not a principle. It was the knowledge that a family might decide a daughter was worth less than a son before she was old enough to have an opinion about it. It was the understanding that if a boyfriend or husband hurt you, the system would not necessarily be on your side. It was the calculation, made every day, of which streets and which hours and which situations were navigable. It was the news that came in a steady stream — women followed, women harassed, women killed, the men who did these things receiving sentences that made the math of it clear.

It was the woman in Xuzhou, in 2022, chained by the neck in a shed, who had borne eight children. She had been trafficked decades earlier, possibly as a teenager, and sold as a wife. The local government initially claimed she was a mentally ill vagrant. The hashtags kept being deleted. The outrage kept returning.

That same year, on Reddit, there was a social experiment called r/place: a vast shared canvas, millions of pixels wide, on which anyone in the world could place a single colored square every few minutes. It became, inevitably, a kind of war — communities fighting for territory, alliances forming and collapsing, images built and destroyed and rebuilt in the span of hours.

In one corner of that canvas, a group of Chinese dissidents spent days constructing a pixel portrait: a woman’s face, rendered in blue and white, a chain and padlock at her throat. Around her, in blocky capital letters: SAVE TRAFFICKED WOMEN IN CHINA. At the bottom, a phrase borrowed from a student at Tiananmen Square in 1989: THIS IS MY DUTY.

Other users tried to erase it. They changed pixels, overwrote the face, turned words into nonsense. The dissidents rebuilt it, square by square, coordinating across time zones, defending each point of color against deletion. The mural survived to the final canvas.

I think about this alongside the knitters in Denmark — the careful stitches, the patchwork skirts, the government check for a million and a half dollars. Both are forms of handcraft. Both are ways of making something visible that power would prefer to leave unmarked. But one happened in a public square in the most gender-equal country in the world, and the government responded with funding. The other happened on a digital canvas that exists nowhere physically, made by people who could not protest in any square that mattered, fighting pixel by pixel to keep one woman’s face from being erased.

The knitting is beautiful. The pixel mural is also beautiful, in its way — the way that pure stubbornness can be beautiful, the way that making something with your hands in defiance of someone trying to unmake it is always, at some level, an act of love.

When I read about the woman in Xuzhou, I thought: there are women who experience feminism as a philosophical position and women who experience it as the difference between life and death. I had been, in almost every way that matters, the first kind. To ask the second kind to be moderate and reasonable and strategic is to ask them to treat their own survival as a matter for considered debate.

I didn’t agree with everything those women said on Weibo. But I understood, finally, that my disagreement was a luxury I had purchased with a life they hadn’t been given.

**

Virginia Woolf wrote, in 1938, that as a woman she had no country. She meant it precisely: the nation had never offered women belonging, only use. Protection in exchange for compliance. Inclusion in exchange for productivity. The country that honored your labor would assess your uterus. The country that built four hundred and eighty-four monuments to men would set aside a million and a half dollars for women’s monuments once the knitters made the point impossible to ignore — and would call the timing a coincidence.

In Chinese, among women of a certain age and internet history, a version of this sentence circulates too. Women have no country. It means something sharper there, because the country in question has made its terms so much more explicit. But I think Woolf would recognize the underlying logic across all of it: from the shed in Xuzhou to the gynecologist’s table in Denmark, the premise is the same. The woman is the resource. The question is only how the resource is managed.

Denmark manages it gently. Generously, even. The lesser evil is still evil, but it is evil you can live inside, which is not nothing. I want to be honest about that. I walk through the country and I feel something I can only call relief — not triumph, not justice, but relief — and I know enough to know that relief is not available everywhere, and that knowing this is itself a kind of privilege.

**

Today is International Women’s Day. I am looking again at the photo I took in the square — the patchwork skirt, the orange bikini top, the blue sky. The woman in stone, dressed now in someone’s careful handiwork, standing in the cold.

She will be undressed eventually. The museum will want the yarn. The argument will continue.

I think about the women in Afghanistan who cannot go to school, and the women in Iran who have taken off their headscarves in the street and accepted what comes next, and the women on Chinese social media writing names on their hands so the names stay visible for a few hours before they are erased. I think about the women who attacked me on Weibo, whose anger I misread for a long time as excess and now understand as information. I think about Emma, who knew what the statue meant. I think about myself on the examination table, being assessed.

What I want, for all of us, is not the lesser evil. It is not the gentle management of our potential. It is not monuments, though monuments are better than their absence.

What I want is harder to name and further away. The freedom to be something other than useful. The freedom to be difficult, ordinary, furious, unproductive, unchosen — and to have that be, simply, enough.

I don’t know what that world looks like. I have not seen it anywhere yet.

But someone is still picking up her needles. And somewhere else, someone has written a name on her hand and is holding it up to the camera before it disappears.

It is the same gesture, I think, made at different distances from the fire.

（A note: this essay began, as most things do, with a conversation. Emma, who taught me to crochet and first told me what the statues meant — thank you. I have not yet decided what to make.）

Spring is officially here. It is seven degrees outside.

I should explain that I am a person who used to belong entirely to warmth. Hot summers, heated rooms, the sun at its most direct and unambiguous — these were my conditions. Cold was something to be endured, briefly, before returning to somewhere sensible. Then I moved to Denmark, and five years passed, and something changed that I cannot fully account for. I have heard it said that the body, given enough time in a place, reorganizes itself: the fat redistributes, the metabolism recalibrates, a person becomes, in some cellular way, native to the climate. I am inclined to believe this. Seven degrees now feels like an opening, like a door swinging outward. I walked for an hour the other day in a single cotton jacket and came home sweating.

Spring here is less a matter of temperature than of light. It begins in February, quietly, almost furtively — the afternoons lengthen by minutes, and then suddenly by something you can actually feel. The flowers are starting now, scattered and tentative along the paths. And in the forest, the wild garlic is nearly ready.

This matters to me more than it would to most people. I grew up eating garlic chives, which are easy to find in China and nearly impossible to find in Denmark, and the wild garlic that grows freely in the Danish woods each spring has become my seasonal consolation — a gift from the forest, free and abundant, arriving exactly when I am most ready for it. It is one of several reasons I have come to love this season.

And Happy Lantern Festival! 🏮

I had almost forgotten it. It was nearly noon when someone posted a photo of tangyuan and I remembered. I put on my coat and took the bus to three different Asian grocery stores. All of them had sold out. So I decided this is my “tangyuan” :

A longevity peach — the white, round, bean-paste-filled bun made for elderly birthdays, the kind you bring to a grandmother turning seventy. It is white. It is round. It is filled with something sweet. I am choosing to count it. You have to make do with what you have.

On the bus there, I noticed the lamp posts. This required no effort at all: it was the third day of March, and the sun was doing something it had not bothered to do in some time, which was to actually show up. The light came in flat and generous across the rooftops, and the city looked briefly like a place that had decided to be pleased with itself. It was the kind of afternoon that makes you feel obscurely that things are going to be fine. And there they were, in all that brightness: faces, smiling down from the railings and the fences all the way into the city center, catching the light.

Danish elections are normally scheduled with the same consideration that goes into everything else here — June or November, when Danes are neither deep in their summer holidays nor bracing for Christmas, and when the light is cooperative enough that standing in line feels like a reasonable thing to do. The vote was not supposed to come until October at the earliest. But five days earlier, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had walked into the Folketing and called a snap election for March 24th.

The reason, she said, was Greenland. Donald Trump had spent the winter making increasingly explicit threats to annex the island, and Frederiksen had spent that same winter becoming, in the eyes of Danish voters, the person standing between Denmark and whatever came next. Her poll numbers had nearly doubled.

The announcement landed in party offices like a starting pistol — except that in this race, the first thing you sprint for is not votes but lamp posts. Printing schedules were pulled forward. Zip ties were ordered in bulk. Teams of young volunteers were dispatched with ladders and measuring sticks, because the law requires every poster to hang at least one-and-a-half meters below the power lines, and the starting gun fires always at the same moment: precisely 28 days before the vote, always at noon. There is a competitive frenzy to it. The bridges and the fences fill up. The law forbids removing a rival’s poster once it is hung, which means that position, claimed early, is permanent. Train stations are the crown jewels: every commuter, every traveler, every person squinting at a departure board must pass beneath a gauntlet of faces, and to have your poster at the central station is to have won something before a single vote is cast.

Standing in the mild sunshine, it was difficult to imagine that somewhere far to the north, on an enormous island most Danes have never visited, a question of sovereignty was being contested by forces well beyond this small country’s control — and that this vast geopolitical drama had now been zip-tied, quite literally, to the lamp posts outside my door.

And there they were already, on the third of March, in all that unseasonal sunshine: the faces. Smiling down from every lamp post and bridge railing and stretch of fence, one after another, all the way into the city center. Every time an election approaches in Denmark, this is the first sign — not a news alert, not a television advertisement, but a face, zip-tied to metal at the legally mandated height, looking down at you with carefully calibrated warmth. The posters themselves are curiously uniform for a country so devoted to design. A face. A name. A letter and a color indicating the party. That is all — no promises, no slogans, no hint of what the candidate intends to do if given the chance to do anything. Apparently that is your business to discover on your own. The face simply presents itself, hopeful and enormous, like a neighbor who has climbed onto the roof to wave at you.

The last time I had seen them was 28 days before the 18th of November, which was the day I cast my first ballot in a local election, which was also the first vote I had ever cast in my life.

It was a local and regional election, and in Denmark, foreigners are permitted to participate in these: any EU citizen, any UK citizen, any non-EU citizen who has lived in the municipality for four consecutive years. I have lived here for five. When the voting slip arrived in my mailbox, I stood in the hallway and looked at it for a moment. I had grown up in a country where this was not a thing that happened to you. The slip was unremarkable, a piece of paper, a list of bureaucratic instructions, the kind of thing you might mistake for a utilities notice. But I held it with a certain attention, and then I held it a little longer, and if anyone had been watching they might have wondered why a person was standing alone in a hallway, staring at a piece of paper, trying very hard not to make any noise.

To be a responsible voter I researched the parties, which in Denmark requires some effort. There are thirteen at the national level, and more locally, though the main ones arrange themselves across a familiar grid. To find your political position in Denmark, you first have to learn to breathe inside a complicated grid.

The parties arrange themselves across two axes: one running from big government on the left to free market on the right, another from socially open at the top to socially conservative at the bottom. Enhedslisten (the Red-Green Alliance) sits in the upper left with actual communist roots. Liberal Alliance — the name, for once, meaning almost exactly what it says — occupies the lower right, essentially the Danish libertarian party. Dansk Folkeparti (the Danish People's Party) anchors the lower middle, the populist party that has built its identity around the proposition that Denmark belongs, in some essential way, to the Danes.

Near the center sit Socialdemokratiet (the Social Democrats) and Venstre, whose name means simply "Left," a historical artifact that no longer describes its politics, which are firmly center-right. They are closer to each other than either would perhaps prefer to admit, two large parties that have dominated Danish politics for most of a century, both fairly conservative on immigration, both reluctant to stray too far from the economic middle. Their proximity on the chart reflects something true about the Danish electorate: cautious, practical, attached to its welfare state, and deeply ambivalent about the world beyond its borders.

Except that last November, the ground shifted. Socialdemokratiet lost more than five percentage points across the country, and in Copenhagen they lost something they had held continuously since 1938: the lord mayoralty. The party’s municipal seats shrank from 44 to roughly 25. The new lord mayor of Copenhagen came from Socialistisk Folkeparti (the Socialist People’s Party). The city’s single biggest party remained Enhedslisten, with 22 percent. Copenhagen went left — just not the left that the prime minister had in mind. It was, by any measure, a historic defeat. And then Trump started talking about Greenland again, Frederiksen’s numbers climbed back up, and she called the election before the moment could pass.

Denmark is a multi-party democracy, which means governments are almost always coalitions, and coalitions require negotiation, and negotiation requires that people with genuinely different views find ways to share a table. This produces a different quality of politics than a two-party system does — less polarized, more fractured, more given to the kind of unglamorous compromise that does not make for good television but does, over time, make for a functioning country.

Before each election, many newspapers offer questionnaires: you enter your opinions, and the questionnaire tells you who you are, politically speaking. I took one — the kind that asks you to slide a little bar between agree and disagree on thirty questions about tax rates and immigration and the proper role of the state, and then pronounces judgment on your soul.

Mine came back: Radical Left.

The name sounds alarming in the American ear, conjuring barricades and pamphlets. In Danish it is Radikale Venstre, which translates, with some mischief, as exactly that, though the party is in fact a social liberal one, occupying the progressive center rather than any revolutionary fringe. They are the party of the educated professional class: academics, architects, journalists, people who hold strong opinions about urban planning and feel personally implicated in the state of the world. They believe in open borders, a generous welfare state, and the kind of cosmopolitanism that makes them instinctively sympathetic to foreigners. They believe that Denmark’s soul should not be reduced to a single ethnic shade, that every person who arrives on this small, flat, wind-battered peninsula brings something the country did not have before. They cite statistics and love the arts. They are internationalists in a country that is, at its center of gravity, not entirely sure about internationalism.

The Danish internet promptly confirmed this diagnosis. Someone had made a meme cataloguing the Radikale Venstre type: Birkenstocks, thin-framed glasses, a bicycle helmet, a pink blazer, a Tuborg, black coffee, political science studied at Aarhus University, DR and TV2 for news, a guitar producing Wonderwall at the slightest provocation, a pride flag somewhere in the frame. They are, in the taxonomy of the meme, the people who cannot go four minutes without talking about politics — and who would, if pressed, argue that four minutes is not nearly enough. It was, in several uncomfortable respects, me.

The polling station was eight minutes from my front door, in the gymnasium of a local school. I went after work. People arrived on foot and by bicycle; an old man came in a wheelchair; someone maneuvered a stroller through the door with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done harder things. There was a queue, orderly and unhurried, the way queues in Denmark tend to be. You gave your phone number. You received your ballot. You went to a booth.

I stood in the booth for a moment before I marked anything.

Denmark turns out about 70 percent of its voters for local elections, 85 percent for nationals. I had grown up in a country where elections exist but mean something different — where the parliament is, in the dry phrase of political scientists, a rubber stamp, where the results arrive at 100 percent, where the process is more ceremony than choice. I had spent my adult life watching other countries’ elections from that distance: the counting, the concession speeches, the genuine uncertainty of a night when nobody yet knows. And now I was inside one. I marked a name, and the name I marked might actually matter, and I felt something I did not entirely expect to feel, which was that I wanted to cry.

I wanted someone to take my photograph. I was too shy to ask. There is something quietly humiliating about turning 39 and casting your first vote — not because of any failing of your own, but because of the simple accident of where you were born and how the world is arranged. It is not the kind of thing you explain easily to strangers in a gymnasium. So I folded my ballot, and fed it into the box, and walked back out into the evening, and kept it to myself.

That vote, as it turned out, had witnessed something. Across the country, and most dramatically in Copenhagen, Socialdemokratiet was losing ground it had held for nearly a century. I did not know that yet, standing in the gymnasium in Aarhus. I only knew that I had done it, finally, at 39, on a November evening in a country that was not the one I was born in.

Four months later, I carried my longevity peach home through the March sunshine, past the lamp posts with their new faces. It was not what I had gone out looking for. But I have come to think that this is beside the point. The peach was mine, and it was enough — the way a first vote is not grand or ceremonial but is simply a small, irrevocable thing that fills a space you did not know was hollow until the moment it was filled.

Next time, I have decided, I will be there on the day the starting pistol fires. Noon, precisely 28 days before the vote. I want to watch them do it — the ladders, the zip ties, the young volunteers sprinting for the best positions. I want to see who gets the lamp post outside my door.

It has been exactly four years since I woke in Prague to news of a war that had started while I slept. I remember fumbling for my phone in the half-dark, catching fragments of words—Russia, Ukraine, special military operation—before drifting off again, as one does when the unthinkable has not yet assembled itself into a sentence. When I woke again, the war had been going for hours.

That morning, I went to the café near my apartment, as usual. The tram ran on time, as usual. I ordered a flat white and worked on my laptop while the coffee machine hummed and light music played. Everyone around me was doing the same. At some point I thought of Kafka’s diary entry from August 2, 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Afternoon, swimming.”

Prague is Kafka’s city. The writer Ivan Klíma once said that people in Prague use the word “Kafkaesque” to describe the absurdity of life. A century later, I felt that absurdity too—though from a different angle. The war itself was absurd. But continuing to live normally while a war raged not far away seemed equally absurd.

Prague and Kyiv are about 1,400 kilometers apart. Not close enough to hear the shelling, but not far enough to look away.

The Czechs know something about waking up to foreign soldiers in their streets. On August 21, 1968, the residents of Prague opened their doors to find Soviet tanks rolling through the city. That morning ended the Prague Spring and created fourteen thousand refugees in a single year. Many people still remember it clearly. That memory made them quick to help.

Within days, convoys loaded with humanitarian aid left Prague for the Slovak-Ukrainian border. Near my apartment, there was a coordination point for Ukrainian aid. Walking to the corner store, I would see convoys loaded with supplies—sometimes weapons—heading east.

Even before the war, Prague had a large Ukrainian population—the biggest foreign community in the country. They worked in construction, in shops, in restaurants. Many Ukrainians worked across Europe, so when the war began, the refugees fleeing through Vyšné Nemecké often had somewhere to go: a sister in Prague, a cousin in Berlin, a brother in Paris. Buses ran daily from the border town, ferrying people west to reunite with family or to catch trains to other parts of Europe.

After February 24, Ukrainian flags appeared everywhere: in windows, on bridges, pinned to coat lapels. Three days after the invasion, tens of thousands gathered at Wenceslas Square for a solidarity rally—the speed and scale of it made possible by the Ukrainian community already here and by the Czechs who remembered 1968.

I lived nearby and had never seen the square so full—bodies packed from the statue of Saint Wenceslas all the way down the long slope of the plaza, spilling onto the side streets. It wasn't just young activists. There were mothers with strollers, old people who had lived through the Soviet tanks, children holding hand-drawn signs they probably didn't fully understand.

A few weeks later, I joined a convoy delivering aid to the Slovakia-Ukraine border. Most refugees were crossing through Poland; the Slovak route was quieter, more organized. The camp at Vyšné Nemecké was small—tents, folding tables, volunteers in orange vests handing out food and warm drinks. There were also nuns, helping where they could.

Many of the refugees carried pets—they had grabbed what they could carry, and what they could carry included the creatures who depended on them. An elderly woman in a turquoise puffer jacket sat on a folding chair, cradling a small dog dressed in pink. A man had a corgi strapped to his back, the dog’s head resting on his shoulder, calm and watchful. Under the tables, little dogs in sweaters waited beside backpacks and water bowls.

Inside the tents, volunteers had hung colored paper garlands along the walls—a small gesture to make the space feel less like a transit point and more like somewhere children might feel welcome. There were many children.

We met an elderly couple from Kharkiv. It had taken them seven days to reach the border. We talked haltingly through Google Translate, passing a phone back and forth, waiting for the app to render our words into something the other could understand. Their daughter was driving from France to pick them up. Seven days on the road, and now they were sitting on folding chairs in a tent in Slovakia, waiting for their child to take them somewhere safe.

I spent a night there with the volunteers, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor. The weather was clear and cold. People sat in the tents waiting—for family members still on the road, for volunteer drivers who would take them west. Nobody talked much.

I think about them sometimes, those people with their dogs. The old woman in turquoise. The corgi on the man's back. The couple from Kharkiv. Four years is long enough for anything to have happened.

In those four years, I left Prague and moved back to Denmark. I changed apartments, changed jobs. Life continued. And when life continues, you forget. The war moved off the front pages. Other emergencies, other outrages. This is not cruelty. It's just how attention works. You continue your life, and the war fades. Until it doesn't.

March 2024. The Berlin bus station, late at night. I was waiting for my connection back to Denmark. The platform next to mine was for the bus to Lviv. It was packed—women, mostly, with heavy bags and tired faces, waiting to return to a country still at war.

The station was quiet. Then a sound cut through the silence: a woman crying. Not weeping, but the kind of crying that comes from somewhere beneath the ribs, involuntary, animal. I turned and saw her—grey coat, crouched on the ground, hands over her face. Another woman in a black puffer jacket knelt beside her, patting her back gently, saying nothing.

Her story wasn’t hard to imagine. The bus was going to Lviv. The things that make a person cry like that in public are limited, and none of them are good.

The war had receded from my daily life. But it had not ended. It was still there, waiting on a platform in Berlin, about to board a bus going east.

I live in Denmark now. Ukrainians live here too. Before I moved to my current apartment, I lived in a university-affiliated studio. The laundry room had instructions in Ukrainian. I see them at the grocery store, at the bus stop, in the parks with their children. The war followed them here, even to this tidy kingdom.

And now there is Greenland. In January, Trump threatened to take it by force. He posted AI images of himself planting an American flag on Greenlandic soil. Thousands gathered in Copenhagen under the slogan “Hands off Greenland.” For a few weeks, it felt like another war was about to start—this time closer, this time here.

It didn’t happen. Trump backed down, for now. But the threat remains. The Danish Defence Intelligence Service now lists the United States as a potential threat to national security—for the first time in its history.

Four years ago I woke to a war that had started while I slept. Now I live in a country preparing for the possibility of another. I thought Denmark was too safe, too clean, too far from the mess of the world. Even the safe places are not spared.

The war in Ukraine continues. Four years, and it continues. I can’t hold all of it. No one can. But I can hold the woman in the grey coat, crouched on the ground at the Berlin bus station. I can hold the woman in the black jacket, kneeling beside her, saying nothing.

That gesture. That silence. It’s not enough. But it’s not nothing.

It’s six-thirty on a Saturday evening and the orders are stacked two rows deep on the rack. Summer heat pours through the food court skylights, mixing with steam from two large boiling pots and the particular sharp smell of oil hitting a hot pan. I’m taking orders, serving food, preparing sauces for dumplings and noodles. Reham is cooking. On the side, gyoza sizzle in a pan, their bottoms turning golden. We don’t speak much during rush hour. There’s no time.

I started this job last summer, not entirely for the money. The hours were flexible, which mattered, but mainly I wanted to see how this world worked. Like those literary types who dream of opening a café, I was curious about the mechanics of it: how a restaurant actually runs, what it takes to feed people for a living. I work mostly with two women: Allanes, from the Philippines, and Reham, from Syria.

The rhythm is simple once you learn it. Winter is slow. Midweek is slow. Weekends from six to seven are different. In summer and fall, during Danish holidays, that single hour can wreck you. Orders fill both racks. Your feet don’t touch the ground. By the end of a shift, you smell like oil and garlic and something else, something fried and vaguely sweet that clings to your hair. The long shifts run nine hours with a half-hour break and a free meal. Short shifts are four hours straight through. You take what you can get.

The money varies wildly. On a busy Saturday in summer, we might take in over twenty thousand kroner. On a quiet Wednesday in winter, a few thousand. You learn not to count on it.

What you can count on is the people around you. A friend once told me that in Denmark, the most important relationship you can cultivate is with your building’s caretaker. Bring them pastries, he said. Small bribes. They’re the ones who can actually solve your problems. The food court operates on the same principle, except here the currency is food itself.

We swap meals. That’s the term—swap. Instead of eating what we make all day, we trade with the other stalls. I’ll exchange our dumplings for Vietnamese pho, for falafel, for whatever the Mexican place is serving. It’s a small system of mutual relief from our own menus.

Then there are the extras, the unexpected gifts. The pizza place next door sends over their mistakes—a pie with a hole in the crust, a slightly burnt edge. Looks perfectly fine to me, but it can’t be sold. The girl who works there likes our dumplings, so these imperfect pizzas come our way as a kind of goodwill.

The Vietnamese place had a beef bao they were discontinuing, sales too slow. The last week it was on the menu, the cook just brought them over. “Try this,” he said. “Tastes like beef jerky. I don’t understand why people didn’t like it.” I didn’t understand either. It was good.

Sometimes it’s free salad, ice cream, or cake. Sometimes it’s the takeout orders nobody picked up, paid for but abandoned. Those I take home. Perfectly good food that would otherwise go in the trash.

This is how it works in the food court: a formal economy of swapped meals and an informal one of shared surplus, of things that don’t quite meet the standard but feed us anyway.

I’m part-time, mostly weekends. Reham and Allanes are full-time. So are most of the people here—Indians, Nepalese, Uruguayan. A small United Nations assembled in a food court in Denmark. The young Danes, when they work in food, tend toward the trendy coffee shops and salad bars. Back in the kitchens, it’s mostly immigrants. We’re the ones feeding people cheaply—the way the Turks feed Berlin with döner, the way every city gets fed by people from somewhere else.

And the people we feed don’t always know what they’re eating. The Danes who come to our counter can’t always tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean food. To them it’s all “Asian,” which is fine, more or less. We sell proper northern Chinese dumplings and wontons, scallion pancakes the way they’re made in Shanghai. But we also sell gyoza. And wakame. And edamame. And chicken karaage. Nobody seems to notice or mind the mixing.

I’m amused watching Danish customers try to pronounce “dandan” or “yangchun” or “zhajiang”—these semantically opaque words met with awkward, polite smiles on both sides. Our yangchun noodles come topped with five Japanese-style gyoza, a combination I’ve never seen in any restaurant in China. But this might be some Danish person’s lifelong understanding of yangchun, of Chinese food in general. Still, it’s exposure to another culture. Better than only eating potatoes, anyway.

Most Danes have mild palates. They can’t handle spice. “Is this strong?” That’s the question they ask most often, pointing at menu items with a cautious finger. And yet the dandan noodles are popular. Who doesn’t like that burn, that rush of heat? They just ask for less chili oil. We oblige.

When it’s slow—winter afternoons, Wednesday evenings—we talk. Reham wants to move to the Netherlands. Allanes just got her driver’s license. Someone mentions prenuptial agreements, how shocking the idea seemed at first, how it changes your thinking about marriage, especially for us non-European women. Believe it or not, this is where you hear the most straightforward talk about feminism. Not theory, just practical thoughts about liberation and independence. We complain about customers, about the weather, about our feet, about management, about everything. It feels like hanging out with friends, the temporary intimacy of people thrown together by circumstance and payroll.

There’s a statistic: in the United States, immigrants make up nearly a third of all restaurant workers, though they’re only seventeen percent of the workforce overall. In some cities, the number in kitchens runs above seventy percent. We’re not just labor but the ones who bring the food itself—the techniques, the recipes, the particular way of folding a dumpling or rolling dough. Here in this food court, you can see it. We’re the ones who know how to make things people want to eat, even if they can’t pronounce what they’re ordering.

Last Saturday evening in winter, I walked out after a long shift. Snow was falling. The pavement had turned to ice. My clothes smelled like fryer oil and soy sauce. We were rushing to catch the bus—miss it and you wait another fifteen minutes in the cold. Reham pulled her coat tight. Allanes was already half-running toward the stop.

We’d see each other again next Saturday. The food court would be there, the orders stacking up, the steam rising from the pots. For now, I was just tired and hungry and trying not to slip on the ice, watching my breath cloud in the winter air, heading home.

(My favorite fastelavnsboller from Lagkagehuset)

As an Asian, I find most Danish sweets impossible—too much sugar, too much of everything. But fastelavnsboller, somehow, I like. The cream is light. The bread has give. It is sweet without being an assault. This small exception makes February a month I look forward to, which is saying something about a month that is otherwise cold, dark, and relentlessly gray.

The fastelavnsboller appeared in bakery windows last week, and I felt that small, specific happiness that comes only from things you cannot have year-round. It is a festival dessert for Fastelavn. Fastelavn is Denmark’s answer to carnival—the last celebration before Lent, when children dress in costumes and beat a wooden barrel with bats, hoping to be the one who knocks it down. Think of it as Halloween meeting Mardi Gras in the cold Scandinavian February. But for me, the holiday lives in its pastry: fastelavnsboller, round sweet buns filled with cream and sometimes jam, topped with icing or chocolate. Every bakery makes them. For a few weeks, they are everywhere. Then they are gone.

These buns belong to February the way cherry blossoms belong to April—briefly, entirely. By March they will vanish, and no amount of wanting will bring them back until next year. This is their power. The Danes understand something about time that I had forgotten: scarcity makes a celebration.

I think of æbleskiver in December, those little round pancakes that taste of nothing particularly extraordinary, yet taste of Christmas completely. Or glögg, mulled wine that warms your hands through the cup. These foods do not merely accompany holidays—they are the holidays, in some essential way.

This year, the Lunar New Year’s Eve and Fastelavn fell just one day apart. Two celebrations, two cultures, nearly overlapping. I spent one day thinking about red envelopes and the other buying a cream-filled bun. It felt, somehow, like the year was asking me to pay attention.

When I was a child, the New Year tasted different because the whole year had been leading up to it. It was a red tide—red envelopes pressed into your palms by aunts and uncles, money you were not allowed to spend but counted over and over anyway. Red sweaters too bright to wear any other time of year. New clothes you got only then, not whenever you wanted. The house overflowed: candies that appeared only during the holiday, towers of fruit, relatives arriving with more food than we could possibly eat. Firecrackers. Special dishes that existed only during those few days: the fish, the nian gao, the spring rolls.

One year my family drove to Guangxi for the New Year. On New Year’s Eve we stopped in Hunan—fireworks country. The explosions began at midnight and did not stop until morning. I could not sleep. I did not mind. That was the last time the New Year felt that loud, that impossible to ignore. Now, I hear, you have to go to a remote village to find someone still slaughtering a pig, still setting off firecrackers the old way.

What I remember most is the stillness underneath the noise. The streets went quiet because everyone was home. Shops closed. You had to stock up beforehand—there was an urgency to it, a sense that ordinary life was pausing. The air smelled of gunpowder for days, sweet and metallic. Everything was red, everywhere, so much red it almost hurt to look.

I am not sure when this changed. Gradually, then all at once. Prosperity came, and with it, a strange erasure. You can buy anything now, anytime—new clothes delivered to your door in two days, strawberries in December, tomatoes in January. The greenhouse and the algorithm have conspired to make every season the same season. When nothing is scarce, nothing is special.

The New Year did not disappear. It flattened. What once was a homecoming became a discount code, a shopping holiday, a long weekend no different from the others. Now, back in China, there are still red lanterns in the shops. Spring couplets on doors. Decorations. But the shops stay open. The streets stay busy. The urgency is gone. It looks like the New Year, but it does not feel like a pause. Not the way Christmas here empties the Danish streets, closes every door, sends everyone home. I had stopped feeling “the taste of New Year” long before I left China.

Then I moved to Europe, and the distance grew wider still.

Celebration, I have come to realize, is partly atmosphere—something that happens when everyone around you is celebrating too. But after years of moving through Europe, I have spent many New Years on days that meant nothing to the people around me. No fireworks, no red, no music. Just another Wednesday. It is hard to make a big occasion out of something only you are observing.

And yet I keep trying. Why? Maybe it is simply the need to make a day different from other days—to draw a line and say: here, this matters. Or maybe celebrating is a way of remembering where I come from—and remembering where I come from is part of knowing where I am going.

When I cook nian gao, when I fold dumplings, I am reaching for a feeling I once knew without trying. The warmth of a kitchen full of people. The sound of firecrackers in the distance. My grandmother’s hands. These rituals are a thread back to something I cannot otherwise touch.

And there is this, too: somewhere far away, my family is sitting down to the same meal. My mother is frying spring rolls. My cousins are fighting over cards. When I eat what they eat, on the same night they eat it, the distance closes a little. I am not just remembering. I am participating. Still part of something, even from here.

So I make it different in small ways. Dumplings. Tangyuan. A meal that says: this day is not ordinary, even if the world outside does not know it.

Last year, my boyfriend heard a Chinese colleague at work mention the coming New Year. He came home and asked how I wanted to celebrate. It was the first time anyone had asked, and the first time I had truly considered the question: what makes it feel like New Year? I decided on nian gao, fried spring rolls, and a whole fish. He listened. Then, quietly, without telling me, he prepared a red envelope—a hongbao—with money inside, the way elders give to children for good luck. And the fish—you cannot find a whole fish in Denmark the way you can in China, so he bought a piece of salmon and pan-fried it. It was not the same. It did not need to be.

When he led me to where he’d hidden the red envelope, I thought: yes. This feels like New Year. Not because of the money, not because the fish was whole, but because someone had paid attention. Someone had made the ordinary day something else.

I think this is what I had been missing—not the dishes themselves, not the customs, but the intention behind them. A reason to pause. A way of saying: this moment matters.

Perhaps this is what moving abroad gives back to us: the chance to miss things properly. To stand in a foreign bakery, holding a fastelavnsbolle, and suddenly remember what seasonal means. Not a marketing term. Not a limited-time offer. But a door that opens once, briefly, then closes—asking nothing of us except that we pay attention.

The cream is light. February is short. This, too, is a kind of homecoming.

I turned forty today. I know this because when I came to the breakfast table this morning, a Danish flag was waiting for me. Not a paper one, not the disposable kind that tilts sideways in frosting — a real flag, or real enough, mounted on a stainless steel stand with the quiet authority of a thing that belongs exactly where it is. There were dozens more on the wrapping paper of a gift placed beside it — a repeating grid of tiny flags, white crosses on red, precise and joyful and relentless, as though the paper itself were trying to tell me something important about where I live. I unwrapped the gift carefully, the way you might handle any document covered in national symbols, which is to say, with respect and a faint, involuntary unease.

In China, waking up to a flag would mean you had overslept on a national holiday, or that something had gone very wrong in the night. Here, it means nothing more than happy birthday.

That the Danish flag belongs on a birthday table the way candles belong on a cake was, in fact, among the first few things I ever learned about Denmark. It arrived before the language, before hygge, before the bike lanes and the tax rate and the peculiar habit of leaving babies in strollers outside cafés in winter. Years ago, when I first bought a birthday cake at a bakery in Aarhus, I asked, out of instinct, whether they had candles. The girl behind the counter looked apologetic. “Sorry, we don’t have candles,” she said. “But we do have flags.” I thought this was a curious substitution. But I was new to the country, and the newly arrived learn early that confusion is not an emergency. I bought the cake without the flags and carried it to my friend’s apartment, feeling vaguely that I had failed. When I mentioned the missing candles, my friend looked confused — candles? — then reached into a drawer and produced a small handful of tiny paper flags, each no bigger than a postage stamp, mounted on little wooden sticks, and planted them across the frosting with the confidence of a general marking positions on a map. The cake, which moments before had been merely a cake, was now festive. It was now Danish.

The Dannebrog — “the cloth of the Danes” — may be the oldest national flag still in use. Legend has it that in 1219, during a crusade against the Estonians, King Valdemar II was losing badly when a red banner with a white cross fell out of the sky and reversed his fortunes. Whether this actually happened is beside the point. The Danes have been telling the story for eight hundred years, and they still like it — a flag sent from heaven, landing in the arms of a king, on a battlefield that would become Tallinn. It is a beautiful story. It is also, if you think about it for more than a moment, a story about a God who takes sides in a war. But nobody thinks about it for more than a moment. The flag fell from the sky, the Danes won, and now it goes on birthday cakes.

How a crusader’s war flag became the world’s friendliest decoration is a question the Danes do not seem to find interesting. The flag is simply described as a festive symbol first and a national symbol second. Its connection with birthdays and celebrations dates back to the early nineteenth century, and by now it has seeped so thoroughly into the texture of daily life that Danes seem scarcely to notice it. Using a fødselsdagsflag — a birthday flag — doesn’t signify any political stance or strong nationalist sentiment; it is a widespread tradition embraced by almost everyone. Some foreigners who are newly arrived interpret this as patriotism or nationalism, but the Danes themselves insist it is simply what happiness looks like when it needs a shape to take.

I should say here that I come from a country where the national flag does not appear on desserts. In China, the flag belongs to parades and government buildings and the particular strain of fervor that makes the back of your neck prickle. It belongs to compulsory flag-raising ceremonies at school, to patriotic education campaigns, to the vast and humming machinery of the state reminding you, at every turn, whom you belong to. You learn to read the flag the way animals learn to read the weather: not as decoration but as information, a signal about the atmospheric pressure of the state. When the flags go up, something is being demanded of you. Loyalty, usually. Silence, often.

There is a word for what this leaves you with, though it is not a very elegant one. It is a kind of post-traumatic sensitivity to national symbols — an allergy acquired through prolonged exposure. The China I grew up in taught me that national symbols are never neutral. They are instruments, as surely as a thermometer is an instrument, and what they measure is the temperature of power. A flag on a birthday cake in Beijing would not signal celebration. It would signal that something had gone terribly wrong — that the party had been requisitioned, that fun itself had been nationalized. If someone at a birthday dinner I attended in China had suddenly produced a flag and stuck it in the frosting, I believe I would have excused myself, gathered my coat, and left the building at a pace just short of running.

But here, in Denmark, nobody flinched. The children sang. The cake was cut. The little flags tilted sideways in the cream. It was, by every measure, an ordinary birthday.

I know what the Danes would say if I told them about my unease. They would say that their flag is different. That the Dannebrog is not the Chinese flag, that Danish nationalism is not Chinese nationalism, that a paper flag on a cake is not a loyalty test, and that I am projecting my own trauma onto their perfectly innocent traditions. And they would be largely right. The Dannebrog carries no threat. No one will be punished for failing to display it. It does not arrive with a knock on the door.

And yet there is, I think, a question buried inside the frosting, and it is a question the Danes, understandably, prefer not to dig out. When does a symbol stop being national and start being merely decorative? Can a flag truly shed its politics the way a snake sheds its skin — completely, cleanly, with nothing left behind? The trouble is that the flag doesn’t change. Only the eye looking at it does. So when I see the little Dannebrog standing upright in a birthday cake, I feel two things at once. I feel the charm of it — the smallness, the sweetness, the way a whole nation has agreed that a flag can mean nothing more ominous than someone in this room is turning seven. And I feel the old unease, the involuntary flinch, the voice in the back of my head that says: a flag is never just a flag.

And somewhere in the corner of every celebration, a person from a country where flags are not decorations but declarations is doing the math in her head, trying to subtract the menace from the symbol and finding, always, a small remainder she cannot account for.

Sometimes I think the remainder is not in the flag. It is in me. That somewhere between the schoolyard ceremonies and the compulsory applause, between the loyalty oaths recited before you were old enough to understand what loyalty meant, something was damaged — a small mechanism that, in most people, allows a flag to simply be a flag. A piece of cloth. A decoration. A way of saying happy birthday.

The Danes have that mechanism. They were born with it, or they grew up in a country gentle enough to leave it intact. When they see the Dannebrog on a breakfast table, they see love. When I see it, I see that too — but I see it through something, the way you see a landscape through a window that has a crack in it. The landscape is still beautiful. You just never stop noticing the crack.

I do not know if it can be fixed. I only know that some mornings — like this one, with coffee growing cold and a stainless steel flag catching the light and a gift wrapped in a hundred tiny crosses — it hurts a little less than it used to.

(Illustration from the Finnish Meteorological Institute)

There is a saying that circulates on Chinese-language social media, attributed vaguely to the Finns: their greatest worry is that when the snow melts, the roads get muddy. I think of this whenever I am putting on my boots to go outside in weather I do not want to go outside in. It is a useful thought. It contains, like most useful thoughts, a small accusation.

Friday brought a snowstorm, the kind Denmark sees perhaps once in ten years. I walked to the grocery store through drifts that came up past my ankles, sliding with each step, and the Finnish proverb came to me again. It sounds, of course, like a boast—a sly little complaint designed to advertise the absence of real problems. The nanny state, as they call it here, has arranged everything from cradle to grave.

When there is enough to go around, people seem to stop clawing at each other. I do not mean this as a grand political observation; I mean it in the small, daily sense. Neighbors hold doors. Colleagues say what they mean. Family dinners do not end in someone leaving the table. Before Denmark, I had rarely seen adults disagree without raising their voices, or apologize without first establishing that the other person was more wrong. I did not know that was an option.

In China, where I grew up, it sometimes felt as though everyone was braced for a fight that might or might not come. You could not simply say a thing; you had to say it sideways, with a little vinegar. Sincerity was suspicious. Directness was naive. To be happy without irony was to be either too young or too stupid. We were not unkind people. We were just people who had learned, over generations, that resources were scarce and someone was always watching. It leaves a mark—on your voice, on your posture, on the way you hold a door. And it leaves a mark at home, too. Love wore the costume of criticism. Parents scolded because they cared; control was a form of devotion. A friend of mine, also Asian, put it this way: in many of our families, people love each other deeply but end up owing each other, and guilt becomes the thread that holds them together. We understood each other immediately when she said this. We had both been loved in ways that left marks.

Thus, when I first arrived in Denmark, I did not trust it. I had the suspicious mind of someone raised on subtext. Surely, I thought, this is the setup for a dystopian novel. Surely something is wrong, or people would not look so content. I watched them in supermarkets, in buses, in the soft gray light of afternoon, and I waited for the crack in the facade. It did not come. They were, as far as I could tell, simply fine.

This seemed to me a kind of moral failure—theirs, but also, if I allowed myself to join them, mine. I had been a journalist in China. I knew what the state could do when it wanted silence. I had felt the particular chill of being watched, of knowing that certain words, typed or spoken, could bring trouble not just to you but to people you loved. I had heard the stories—reporters detained, protesters disappeared, the long arm reaching even for those who thought they had gotten out. How could these people just stand in line at the bakery, thinking about bread?

There is a passage in Kundera I used to return to, back when I needed my suspicion to feel like philosophy:

I believed this. I wanted to believe it. The Danes, with their bicycles and parental leave and sensible sweaters, were floating. I was the one with my feet on the ground. My suffering meant something; their ease was a kind of illusion, pleasant but thin.

It is a seductive idea, and I am not sure it is wrong. But I have started to wonder whether it is something we tell ourselves—those of us who have suffered—so that the suffering was not for nothing. If lightness is meaningless, then at least our heaviness has purchased us something: depth, truth, a life that matters. It is a good trade, if you can convince yourself of it.

And yet. There were moments—watching a father pedal past, two kids in the box up front, all three of them laughing at something I couldn't hear; watching colleagues leave work at three to pick up their kids, guilty about nothing—when something darker stirred. A kind of envy, the kind that sits low in your chest and does not announce itself. Not envy of what they had, exactly, but of what they had never lost. Their innocence was intact. They had not been taught to flinch.

Why should the accident of birthplace make such a difference in what a person gets to feel? But envy, if you follow it honestly, becomes a question: if they can live this way, why not me?

The answer, I used to think, was that I had not earned it. To be happy here felt like betrayal—of the people still there, still watching what they say, still afraid. If I set down the weight, who would carry it?

I convinced myself for years. Until I couldn't.

Last year I was at a conference in Brussels, and the conversation turned, as it often does among people like us, to the question of staying in the field. China policy. Human rights. The work that follows you home and sits with you at dinner. One person said his partner, who is Chinese, refused to touch anything China-related. “I left to get away from that shit,” she had said. Fair enough. Another friend, who works in human rights, shrugged. “Someone has to do it. If not me, it goes to people who don’t understand. I’d rather do it myself than watch someone else do a crappy job.”

After dinner we walked back through the old city, and somehow the conversation circled around again. I tried to explain why I still stay in the field—partly practical, yes, but mostly because I feel that being Chinese in Europe obligates me to do something, however small, to make the public conversation about China a little more accurate, a little less stupid.

A German friend stopped walking. Her parents are from Russia. She understood exactly what I meant, which is perhaps why she could say it so directly: “It’s not responsibility. It’s guilt. But you are free here. Why should you feel guilty? You don’t owe anyone anything. Go do what you like.”

I wanted to print the first part on a T-shirt. It’s not responsibility. It’s guilt. I have been repeating it to myself ever since, not as a conclusion but as a question. What if the weight I carry is not moral seriousness? What if it is just a habit, left over from a life that required it?

The trouble with letting go is that you cannot do it by deciding to. You cannot think your way out of a habit that lives in your body. You have to practice, the way you practice a language or an instrument—badly, at first, and then less badly, and then one day you realize you have stopped translating in your head.

This is what the Danes do with their winters. The sun disappears for months; the sky turns the color of wet cement; you are trapped indoors with nothing but yourself and the dark. They do not fight it. They knit. Everywhere you look, someone is pulling out needles and yarn—on buses, in waiting rooms, at the back of lecture halls. It used to strike me as absurd, all these grown adults making scarves. Now I think it is a technology, a way of metabolizing time that would otherwise sit heavy.

After five years, once my life had settled into something like a shape, I began to do the things people do when they are not in survival mode. I bought houseplants and kept them alive. I learned the Danish word for cozy—hygge—and stopped rolling my eyes at it. I took up baking. I made my first loaf of bread. It was the sort of thing that had always seemed difficult when described but turned out, once attempted, to be not so hard. Most things are like that. We build them into obstacles, and then we do them, and they are just things we have done.

The bread turned out fine. This surprised me, though I am not sure why. I had followed the instructions. Perhaps I had expected some secret difficulty, some hidden test that would expose me as someone who does not really belong here, in this life of small satisfactions. But there was no test. There was only flour and water and time.

I am told the snow will melt in two weeks. The roads will turn to mud. I will put on my boots and feel, perhaps, a flicker of genuine annoyance—just annoyance, nothing more, nothing underneath.

I am practicing. I am not there yet. But I am looking forward to it.

I have lived in Denmark for five years now, if one subtracts a detour through Prague, and in that time I have eaten a great deal of rye bread. The Danes are fond of rye bread. They are also fond of pickled herring, boiled potatoes, and a kind of pork that arrives at the table in various states of salting and smoking. This is Danish food, and I do not mean to be unkind when I say that it is not exciting. It is not meant to be exciting. It is meant to be Tuesday.

The trouble with Danish cuisine, if I may call it that, is the same trouble one finds in the population itself—a certain sameness, a uniformity of complexion and expectation. Copenhagen, I am told, has restaurants now where one can eat Sichuan peppercorns and bánh mì. But Copenhagen is to Denmark what New York is to America, which is to say: an alibi. The Jutlanders know this. They eat their frikadeller and do not pretend otherwise.

I come from a place where food is excessive and everywhere. Where a single meal might sprawl across twelve small dishes, where the night markets hum with smoke and want, where one eats not because it is time but because it is possible. For five years I have carried that country in my stomach like a low, persistent hunger. I did not seek out Danish food. Why would I? I had tasted loss, and loss has a particular flavor—it tastes like everything you cannot get.

Last month I went back.

What followed was not eating but something closer to revenge. I ordered too much at every meal. I bought things from convenience stores simply because they existed. I ate as though I could store it all somewhere, as though my body were a suitcase I might zip shut and carry back through customs. The logic was airtight: I had come a long way; the ticket had cost money; I would eat until the math made sense.

It did not make sense. It never does. I returned to Copenhagen bloated with memory and MSG, and on my first morning back I sat in a hotel near the airport and looked at a breakfast buffet that contained exactly what it always contains: cheese, bread, sliced cucumber, a small dish of herring in curry sauce. The coffee was filtered. The rolls were warm. Outside, the sky was the color of wet wool.

And here is the strange thing: I was glad.

Not relieved, exactly, and not resigned. Glad. The herring tasted correct. The coffee tasted like morning. I ate slowly and did not reach for my phone. Somewhere over the Atlantic, or perhaps over the Baltics, I had crossed back into my ordinary life, and my ordinary life, I realized, had become ordinary because it was mine.

This is the thing about living in a place long enough—it enters you without permission. You go to sleep one night as a visitor, and you wake up someone who knows which bakery opens early and which bus is always late. You do not choose this. It simply happens, the way rust happens, or love. Denmark had gotten into me: into my sense of what a breakfast should look like, into my expectations of silence, into my willingness to eat fish at nine in the morning.

But the other place is still there too. I carry both now—the abundance and the restraint, the chaos and the cucumber. I crave what I cannot have, which is everything, which is both at once, which is the particular impossibility of being a person who has lived in more than one place and can no longer fully return to either.

Some days this makes me sad. A small, dull sadness, like a stone in a coat pocket. Other days I think perhaps this is simply what a life looks like when it has been lived: not a single stream but a delta, branching and muddy and impossible to map.

The herring, in any case, was good. I had not expected that. But then, I have stopped expecting. I eat what is in front of me. I go home to the home I have made. The other home will wait. It always does.