A hectic day indeed.

Not having keys to my dorm, I decided to stick around until check-in began so that I could move my luggage to my real room (which does have running water, electricity, and wifi). My new room, on the eighth floor rather than the first, takes a bit longer to reach, but also provides a breathtaking view of misty hills in the distance, the bustling street below, and apparently a military zone that we were told to not take pictures of.

The school tends to assign international students to dorms based on their country of origin, so I am now in a suite of potentially four people (although I am the only US national to check in today). There are probably more, but we’ll see how the situation goes. If the dorm fills up, I’ll have a roommate (although I’d prefer having the suite to myself). I like this room a lot more because the beds are a lot stiffer. Rather than having a mattress, they’re composed of a wooden board with a foam pad on top.

Overall, check-in was a terribly arduous process that involved dozens of sweaty college students waiting in stuffy rooms for about five hours. From visa checks to fee payments to a Chinese placement test, the entire process included lots of waiting in line. The vast majority of us didn’t have breakfast, making things even worse. However, at around noon—three hours into the process—one of the staff members said that half of us should get lunch since the wait would be pointless. I happily obliged.

With a short lunch break, I walked up to a steamed bun vendor—except he had sold out. The shop next to him was a fried chicken/burger joint: not good for vegetarian food. Thirsty and hot, I saw a boba shop and buzzed over.

With a refreshing elixir in my hand, I kept searching for food. None of the international students could eat at the dining halls yet since we didn’t have a meal card or Alipay/WeChat pay. With just cash, our options were limited.

I eventually settled on some sweet bread from the grocery store and came back to the dorm to complete my check-in. After finishing the five hour ordeal, I went out to shop for necessities.

First, I needed toilet paper. Second, I needed drinking water, since the tap water is unsafe.

Having gone to a small liberal arts college, I hadn’t realized how expansive some college campuses are. FJNU, with a student population of 23,000, boasts 7 dining halls (although I suppose the 5Cs also boasts 7 dining halls) and an entire street of shops selling everything from fresh fruit, electronics, to daily necessities.

I ended up getting the toilet paper and drinking water, but also got slippers for the shower, soy milk, and a water boiler because how else am I going to make tea and instant noodles? Also, I can use it to sterilize the water after filtering it.

After getting settled in, the hunger of not having a decent meal in 24 hours bit me. My last “meal” if you could call it one was the pasta I had on the plane a day ago. Famished, I started walking towards the row of shops just outside of campus.

I had found a place online that looked promising, but I didn’t have to walk all the way there. Just outside of the school gate, I came across a fast-food chain that I suppose is best explained as a Mongolian grill procedure, but with soup.

I grabbed 1.3 kilograms of veggies and mushrooms, then requested a tomato-based broth. Having subsisted on heavy doses of sugar every few hours for the past day, this nutrition-laden meal was spectacular, and it only cost me around $4!

My arrival in Shanghai came an hour earlier than expected, and in my extra time, I was able to help an elderly Vietnamese couple find their way, get my luggage cleared through customs, and munch on a cup on instant noodles.

The first thing I noticed upon arrival was the difference between calligraphic signage and announcement signage. Shop logos and names were often written in traditional characters, whereas all public announcements came in simplified.

Having a few hours to spare before my connecting flight to Fuzhou, I walked up and down the domestic transfers concourse in the airport, passing a few shops and restaurants that seemed to repeat themselves every few paces. I eventually walked into one selling Jingdezhen tea sets, which were quite nice (although too expensive for my tastes), and almost immediately, the attendant asked if I was buying one for myself or as a gift.

“If I were to buy something, it’d be for myself,” I replied.

Without missing a beat, she invited me to look at the more expensive wares since I should obviously treat myself to the good stuff.

Of course, I could probably get all of this stuff cheaper on Taobao, and that’s probably what I’ll end up doing. With that, I thanked her, walked out (still looking at the exquisite water bottles in the window), and forced myself to keep walking forward.

A few steps later, I ended up in the “art gallery”, a space where local artists are able to showcase their work. I wasn’t too impressed by the layout and didactics. It was a rather haphazard “let’s put something in this space” kind of display, and I didn’t see anything remotely in my range of interest.

Feeling a bit hungry yet too cheap to actually buy food, I grabbed one of the instant noodle packs I had brought with me. The airport had a hot water dispenser, so I’d be able to make it quick and easy. Or so I thought. As I opened the packet of garlic oil for the noodles, it squeezed out and coated my fingers in a slimy, pungent goo.

Despite the accident, I ate the instant noodles and walked over to the line for boarding.

As I was boarding the flight, my fingers still reeking of garlic oil after spilling my instant noodles on them, a young man approached me and asked if this was the flight to Fuzhou. It had been a bit confusing due to last-minute gate changes for a few of the flights in the terminal.

After a few exchanges with him, he said, “You’re not from Fuzhou.”

I had been exposed. I replied, “No, I’m not. What gave it away?”

“Your Mandarin is too proper,” he explained. “People from Fuzhou have terrible pronunciation.”

I laughed. This entire summer, people in the US had been assuming that I was a Chinese international student. Now, even after arriving in China, people still don’t think I seem American.

An hour later, we landed. After getting my luggage, I walked out to see a row of eager faces, and I searched the crowd for someone holding a placard with my name. The school’s Foreign Affairs Office told me that somebody would be there waiting.

Indeed someone was waiting. I noticed a brown-haired college student holding a sign that said “魏民安 FNU” scrawled in marker. She held a cup of half-finished boba in her hand; the ice had already melted.

I waved at her; she didn’t respond. I walked closer to her and waved again, and she gave a puzzled look.

“You’re Andrew?” she asked, her brow furrowed in a bit of confusion.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“No problem… It’s just that… I thought you’d be, well, foreign.”

I laughed, “I am. This is my first time in China.”

“Your parents must be Chinese,” she insisted.

“Sort of—my grandparents were born in China, but my parents were born in Vietnam,” I explained.

Later, I repeated this part to our driver, another student at Fujian Normal University, to which he promptly replied, “See, that makes you Chinese!”

I suppose. But after two generations of not having any contact, I felt absolutely unfamiliar with the region. The only thing I felt familiar with so far was the humidity; it reminded me of stepping off the plane in Osaka or Taipei in the dead of summer.

The drive back to campus was an absolute mess. I thought driving in LA was bad until I was serenaded by an orchestra of car horns and and a choir of Chinese insults flying in every direction. Mind you, this was past midnight when I assume the roads are quieter.

But we arrived safely, and after a long walk to bring my luggage from the gate to the dorm, I was assigned a random room for the night. Understandably, the dorm warden didn’t want to deal with the situation at 1 am. Fortunately for me, my student liaison tried to turn on the lights before realizing that my unit had no electricity. After 15 minutes of fiddling somewhere downstairs, my lights came on.

With that, I settled in for the night and logged into Eduroam for wifi. Thank goodness Eduroam exists.

And then I realized I had no running water. Trying the different sinks, I found that I could get water from the kitchen sink, so I ended up brushing my teeth there. It wasn’t much of a kitchen actually—the stove was missing. But the restroom featured a rusty toilet paper container that looked like it hadn’t provided toilet paper in decades, so brushing my teeth in the kitchen felt much cleaner.

Surprisingly, I woke up at 7 am today without the need for an alarm. Perhaps jetlag is on my side? We’ll see in the coming days. In the meantime, I hope my permanent dorm has running water.

Since I’ve announced to my family that I will be in China for a year, uncles and aunties have been asking me if I will visit our ancestral villages. Being two generations removed now, most of my surviving family has never been back to Chaozhou. The last people to have lived there—on both sides of my family—were my grandparents, all of whom passed away before I was even in kindergarten.

For my cousins and I, this meant that we had a distinctly southeast Asian upbringing. From things like bathing with a bucket, using three languages in the same sentence, to thinking that avocado boba is the OG, I never realized how unique all of this was until this past year.

Being so distant from my ancestral roots, I am curious to see what it’s like in Chaozhou. Where did my grandparents grow up? How is it now?

My curiosities grew deeper, and I decided to do some online stalking, which proved quite productive.

Using an address left on my late maternal grandfather’s gravestone, I was able to trace my heritage to Chaoyang 潮陽. As I searched deeper, I had a bit of trouble locating Shalongzhen 沙隴鎮, but then my friend Simon’s dad kindly informed me that it had merged with a neighboring zhen and was now called Longtianzhen 隴田鎮.

From this information, a few chats with my mom, and the internet at my disposable, I was able to find a general retelling of the family history online. In the Song dynasty, one of my mom’s ancestors was a scholarly bureaucrat who was assigned to Chaozhou. His descendants stayed and eventually became one of the prominent clans in the region. In fact, they have their own website dedicated to clan affairs:

This was mindblowing. Now it wasn’t just that my grandparents had lived in Chaozhou for a while; my ancestors had lived there for nearly a millennium.

Upon finding this out, I chuckled. Perhaps this genetic history can account for some of my eccentric interest in Chinese scholarly arts. My mom (and the aunties) had always joked about how grandpa would have been ecstatic if he was here to see me growing up and learning all of these traditional arts. He was an amateur calligrapher himself, although only we only have one surviving example of his writing, the ancestral tablet proudly honored in the center of my house in Portland.

Recently, I received the addresses for my paternal grandparents. My grandfather hailed from a rural village in Chao’an, and my uncle mentioned that he was a farmer. Curiously enough, the village my grandfather is from is about an hour away from Fenghuangshan, a mountain known for producing Teochew’s famous oolong tea. Again, it is as if my genetic history has predicted my interests…

A bit of online searching revealed that my father’s side settled in the area during the Ming dynasty. Unfortunately though, they also show up on contemporary low-income rosters. Even now, the village houses 1,800 people, barely larger than the Pomona College student population.

Drawing this back to the context of my tea research though, I wonder how tea culture might have evolved differently in rural vs urban areas. I suspect that urban areas, having more contact with other regional developments, would naturally have more influences on their conception and consumption of tea, whereas rural tea drinkers would have a rather stable—yet localized—tea tradition.

This reminds me of an article on Japanese ritual influences on Chaozhou tea I read a few years ago. While Ming dynasty loose-leaf tea culture was known for being free-flowing, fluid, and minimal in terms of etiquette, contemporary Chinese tea (likely under the influence of Japanese tea rituals) has become more formal and has developed prescribed orders and motions that the guest should complete.

In a chat at Hsi Lai Temple, one of the monks mentioned that to him, this overfixation on a prescribed form in Chinese tea seemed antithetical to the entire concept of tea meditation. While he agreed that there should be an order to things, unnecessary, flowery, and flashy movements should be kept out of the tea room. Training mindfulness is one necessity; preserving the spontaneity of Chan is another.

The chat made me wonder: how formalized will Chinese tea preparation end up? Living in an age where everybody seems to be eager to start their own system, arbitrary tea preparation forms regularly appear and float across YouTube—some inspired by Taiji forms, others by Qigong concepts. Or perhaps it is this tendency towards such a diversity of styles that characterizes the current shift in Chinese tea culture—going from one end of the pendulum (no ritual) to the other extreme (complete proliferation of ritual).

Perhaps it was because today is Labor Day, or perhaps it was because Nike decided to reserve one of the check-in lanes for their employees, but I had yet to experience such a long line at PDX—the line zig-zagged and eventually wrapped around and ended somewhere beyond my periphery.

About an hour later, I was at the gate with a bit more than an hour to spare. One enjoyable phone conversation later, I looked up to see that my flight was delayed, causing some concern as I had scheduled my connecting flights roughly an hour after each other. Would this be the one circumstantial cause that ends my trip prematurely? I thought to myself.

Nope. As it turns out, everything would still flow smoothly. I took a breath.

This past week, I’ve had to explain my project to friends and family more times than I can remember, and each time I do so, I realize with more urgency how incredibly strange it sounds. Here’s a typical conversation:

“So… why are you going to China?”

“I’ll be researching contemporary Chinese tea culture.”

“So like, how tea is made?”

“That’s part of it, but also how people have been writing about tea and presenting it. I’m interested in how people conceptualize tea, what it means, and how to best prepare it.”

“And this is free?”

“I’m getting paid.”

“You’re getting paid to go to China so that you can chat with people and drink good tea?”

“Sort of—it’s research. I’ll spend a lot of time reading books, and I’ll be auditing classes too.”

“Well… have fun!”

“Thanks!”

I feel like when I arrive in China, I will have a similar conversation as I try to explain what a Fulbright grant is to my Chinese classmates and advisors. Although, as a close friend has pointed out, I’d probably fit in so well that people might not even assume that I’m from the US. If anything, my Teochew/Cantonese-accented Mandarin might associate me with being from some village in Guangdong than the US. Perhaps that’s for the best.