After living here alone for the past week without any sign of another student moving in, I assumed I would have the entire four-person suite to myself. This wasn’t the case.

As I was practicing guqin, my door swung open and our dorm manager came in with a young man carrying a bulky suitcase, his guide—a local student—helped him with his lighter belongings.

“Sorry—I forgot to knock,” the dorm manager said to me.

“No worries,” I replied as I got up from my seat.

As my new suitemate was getting settled into his room, the dorm manager mentioned that a third person would be joining us. No idea when, where he’s from, or what his name is, but there’s some third person supposedly joining us some time down the road.

My suitemate’s guide noticed my guqin and remarked, “Oh, are you a part of the guqin club?”

Hold up—there’s a guqin club on campus?

“No,” I replied, tilting my head in curiosity. “Can you tell me more though? I’d love to join.”

“Yeah, hold on,” she said. “Let me introduce you to the club president…”

As she typed a few things into her phone, my mind wandered towards other possibilities.

“Is there a calligraphy club too?” I asked eagerly.

“Yeah, do you wanna join that too?”

“Yes, please!”

And with that, I joined two clubs in one night.

At this point, my new suitemate had finished moving his luggage in, and we introduced ourselves. He’s from Seoul and had just finished his bachelor’s degree in Chinese language. Later, I found out that he’s also a Classical Chinese geek, although he switched his concentration from classical to modern Chinese about a year and a half ago.

Having just arrived, my suitemate was both exhausted and hungry. And so, we walked to the dining hall and talked over a bowl of spicy noodles before going shopping for household essentials. Since he arrived on a Friday night, he’d have to survive the weekend without a data plan, since starting a student phone account required a student ID, which he couldn’t get until Monday.

In the meantime, he survived by using my hotspot every so often and sneaking into the local McDonald’s for their wifi.

He even left campus on an adventure Saturday night, taking the subway into the city to meet up with his guide for a date. He came back with a bag of roasted chestnuts for me!

It’s a bit odd, as I’ve gone my entire four years of college without ever having a roommate. I did have a suitemate my senior year, but I was living with someone I had known since freshman year rather than a complete stranger. Although, it’s a bit comforting that even the strangers I end up living with share quirky interests like Classical Classical literature. Now, I wonder if our third suitemate is also a history/literature geek…

As part of our residence permit applications, my classmates and I have to prove that we don’t have any major illnesses, and to confirm this, we had to go to the hospital and get a thorough (and I mean thorough) medical examination.

We gathered bright and early at 6:30 am outside the dormitory and took a private bus to the hospital (I suppose it was a travel clinic that specialized in exams—no patients were being treated here). There were already a handful of people lined up waiting for doors to open by the time we arrived.

Fortunately for us, the school had made a group appointment in advance, so we were able to get prompt assistance. I was told that my American medical evaluations had no validity here, so I paid my 500 rmb examination fee and received a checklist of stations to go to.

The first was a blood test. Now, I’ve mostly gotten over my fear of needles, but I’m still a terribly difficult person to draw blood from (or so all of my medical providers have told me). I kindly told the nurse this as I sat down, and she stared at me, stuck a needle in, and drew three vials of blood on the first try.

“Please,” she said to me. “We deal with all kinds of ‘difficult’ people here. This is nothing.”

Wow. Okay. Got it.

I was still in awe at smoothly it went when she waved me off with a cotton swab so that she could extract blood from the classmate next to me.

Afterwards, I went through a number of tests: urine, height and weight, blood pressure, among other things. The more interesting ones included an electrocardiogram in which they attached strange things to my arms, legs, and belly. Not sure what it was for.

What I really didn’t understand was why I was also given an ultrasound. I joked with the nurse, saying that I am very confident that I’m not pregnant, but she responded seriously, “You never know until we check.”

I suppose. My results came out as I predicted—I am not pregnant.

Having finished my examination, I waited downstairs in the lobby as my classmates slowly funneled through the lines. I was number 10 in line—someone else was 97. I checked the time. It’d take them at least another two hours.

And with that, I went off to find breakfast. After wandering on the streets for a few minutes, I stumbled across an 85C bakery. Immediately, my thoughts returned to lovely days in California.

I walked in, only to be a bit disappointed. The selection here is vastly inferior to the bakeries in Los Angeles. There were no Marble Taros, no Mango Swirls, no cheesy-potato things. The prices though, were identical, making this the most expensive breakfast I’ve had in China.

I left with $3 worth of bread. The same amount of money would have paid for a nice dinner at the restaurants near campus.

I walked back to the hospital lobby, munching on my bread along the way. Upon arriving, I started coughing. Why did the lobby of a medical facility reek of cigarette smoke?

I traced the stench to the stairwell. Someone was smoking inside despite all of the no smoking signs plastered throughout the building.

Sighing to myself, I sat in the opposite end of the hall and made friends with the other classmates who had finished.

“Are any of you hungry?” I asked.

“No,” one classmate from Holland replied.

Then she saw my bag of pastries.

“Oh my god. There’s an 85C here?!” she jumped up.

“It’s really expensive though,” I replied.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve been craving it. Can you show me where it is?”

With that, I brought a group of three students to 85C. It was on this trip that I met a few new friends—mostly classmates from the Philippines and Indonesia.

This week started bright and early with our first Chinese class. As an international student, I was grouped together with everybody else in the program and assigned to Class 6. While there were theoretically 8 levels, Class 8 was never open, and they didn’t want me in Class 7 because otherwise I wouldn’t have any classes to take next semester.

And so we started the first lecture of Class 6 with “Conversational Business Chinese.” These were terms that were neither unfamiliar nor remotely interesting to me. When the dreaded two hours ended, I was resolute on switching classes. Fortunately for me, I got to skip Tuesday’s class due to a mandatory medical exam (read more about that here).

I came back on Wednesday for our main Chinese class in which our teacher spent an onerous amount of time correcting tone pronunciation and tongue curls. During the break, a classmate from Uzbekistan came up to me.

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be in this class?” he asked.

“This is what I was assigned, but I’ll probably switch out,” I replied.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how much of a difference it would make for me to join Class 7. Everybody here was an undergraduate who started learning Chinese relatively recently. I still didn’t feel like Class 7 would do much for me.

And so, this morning, I went into the Student Affairs Office to ask if I could take classes with regular Chinese students. The secretary stared at me.

“At this point, I think the other students don’t feel too comfortable with me in the same class…” I admitted.

Ms. Lin, the director sitting behind her, hollered to us, “Just add him in!”

“But—” the secretary interjected. “He’s an international student!”

“And? He can obviously keep up with the Chinese classes. He’ll stick out less there than in the classes he’s currently in. Put him as sophomore/junior standing,” she instructed. “Alright kiddo, you can choose any of the core classes in the department.”

That was mostly true. I went into the registrar’s office to get the course list, but as she printed it, she also crossed off a few that I was told to not take—mostly because they were completely irrelevant. These included English for Chinese Teachers, Introduction to Maoism and Chinese Socialism, and Technology for Education. I wasn’t planning on taking them anyways.

And with that, I was approved to take Classical Chinese Grammar, Readings in Classical Chinese, and Chinese Culture in the World. While I wouldn’t receive credit for these (not that I needed credit), they would fulfill my Fulbright course audit requirement and give me a deeper understanding of the cultural background behind tea culture.

Let’s see how this goes!

While I won’t be making very many friends with the international group, this means I’ll have plenty of chances to meet local students—although they might already have their friend groups solidified by now. While I’ve made a few friends during our trip to the hospital for medical examinations, none of them are in my class, so I suppose those won’t be affected.

Most of the international students here tend to congregate with other students from the same country, but being the only American, there isn’t anybody for me to chat with. However, I’ve made a rather surprisingly close connection with the Japanese international students. One of them, Yamada-san, is in Class 6, and I suspect that she’s from Kyoto as she tends to use “-haru” as part of keigo.

In any case, we have a Mid-Autumn Festival gathering for international students tomorrow afternoon, which should be good for group bonding, and I seem to have been invited to the Japanese students’ dinner this Saturday.

I’m actually not sure what to start off with for this blog post.

I suppose first, I’ve been without electricity for the past four days now, and despite having filled out a maintenance form every single day, nobody has come to fix it (although workers have come to my building to fix other things)… In any case, I’ve essentially gotten used to this rustic living. My body has adapted to being without AC, without hot water, and without a washing machine. Meanwhile, I’ve been charging my phone at restaurants and other public spaces. My battery, now at 50%, has sat off the entire weekend because I wanted to make sure I could use it as needed. Although, since I have class tomorrow morning, it should be fine to use it now and charge it in class—I hope.

Now, let’s move on to the more interesting things that have been happening. Yesterday, I took the bus and went to my first guqin lesson. The bus ride there was absolutely terrifying—I felt like I was on a roller coaster rather than a bus, complete with sudden lurches, abrupt stops, and a cacophony of car horns.

Now, the guqin lesson itself was rather straightforward. However, it wasn’t without its surprises. When I walked in, I noticed a proudly-framed photo of my new instructor standing next to Ven. Master Hsing Yun. Small world. I sat down and my instructor started me on the basic hand techniques. As I practiced, he’d chat about my experience in the US, and how odd it is for someone from the US to want to learn guqin.

• 

• 

I had just finished explaining that I would only be in China for year when he stopped abruptly.

“One year…” he muttered.

He came over and stared at me, “You’re going to have to take extra classes every week, but I’ll get you up to speed. I want you to go back as someone who can claim this lineage.”

I stared back at him, absolutely taken aback by the kung-fu movie-esque exchange. “I would love to take extra classes.”

“I’m serious,” he continued. “It would be really good to have someone who can play guqin in the US. I want you to learn something that typically takes people three to five years to learn—but you only have ten months. You’re going to be practicing at least one to two hours a day. If you’re not ready to commit, it’s going to end up being a total failure.”

My mind jolted back and forth—hell, when would I ever get this opportunity again?

“I’ll do it.”

He laughed, “Alright. Now let’s see how you progress in the next week or two. Just because you can put in the effort doesn’t mean you’ll soak it up that fast.”

And with that, my guqin journey started. I left the classroom hugging a cardboard box with my new instrument inside and got home eager to play. He had given me instructions to learn three songs before my next class, which at that point was only 24 hours away.

• 

• 

• 

And so I practiced.

Having not held a musical instrument since middle school when I was third chair of the four cellos in orchestra, I had completely forgotten how to read notation. Fortunately, it didn’t matter because guqin has a totally different notation system.

Playing a string instrument again brought back not so fond memories of painful fingers and the process of developing calluses (although truth be told, I never developed calluses in middle school because I never actually practiced at home).

Perhaps it’s because I’m more mature now, or perhaps it’s because I can play a song on my own rather than being relegated to playing some long C note for measures and measures, but while I still lack the hand-eye coordination to play guqin smoothly, it’s much more enjoyable than when I was playing cello.

At 10 pm, I decided to stop—I had memorized one song, completely failed at the second song, and could fumble my way through the third.

The next morning, I practiced for another two hours after breakfast, my fingers still raw from the night before. By the time I got to class, I had memorized one song, could fumble through the second song, and had parts of the third song memorized. Proud and ready to show my teacher my progress, I hopped on the bus.

The bus dropped me off on the side of the freeway, and after walking for 15 minutes in the blazing sun, I realized this was definitely not the right place. I walked back, cursing T-Mobile for failing in international data coverage. Using a combination of cached and screenshotted maps, I eventually found my way to where my class was supposed to be—except I couldn’t find an entrance.

After asking two local residents who had never heard of a class here, I decided to ask one more person: a college student walking up the hill.

“Hi, sorry to bother you, but do you know where Minjiang College is?” I asked.

“Yeah, you’re at Minjiang College right now—I go here,” she replied with a bit of confusion.

“Ok—so I’m taking a guqin lesson and it’s supposedly somewhere around here.”

“You sure? I’ve never heard of guqin lessons at this school.”

Well damn. I showed her the WeChat conversation in which my teacher specifically designated that this would be the location for our next class. She looked at it and thought to herself.

“Can’t you just message him and ask?” she seemed very confused.

“Unfortunately not. I don’t have a Chinese SIM card,” I admitted.

“Huh?” her confusion grew even greater, if that was physically possible.

“I’m from the US,” I explained. “I got here last week, and I don’t have a Chinese phone plan yet.”

“But… you’re not white,” she pointed out.

“I’m not. But not all Americans are white,” I replied.

She accepted my answer and kindly let me freeload off of her hotspot so I could call my instructor. He didn’t pick up.

“Well, instead of waiting in the heat, why don’t you come with me? If you’re into guqin, you must be into other traditional arts, right?”

“Yeah—do you do any arts?”

“Mhm, I’m training as a lacquer artist. It’s kind of dangerous though. The lacquer can trigger some really nasty allergic reactions.”

She pulled up her sleeve to show red blotches of irritated skin.

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, so feel free to look and ask me about stuff in the workshop, but do not touch anything.”

And with that, we walked up the hill and into the lacquer workshop where a few students and instructors were making trays.

“We mostly make export goods here,” my host explained. “Most of it goes to southeast Asia.”

As she showed me around, pointing out how lacquer is durable, light, and elegant, she gave me a brief overview of the different stages of lacquerwork, from the initial layering to decorating and buffing.

“Fuzhou has three treasures,” she said. “Bodiless lacquer—which is what we do—is one of them!”

“That’s cool! And what are the other two?”

“Dunno,” she replied. “I’m not a native Fuzhou-er.”

We laughed, and after watching them work, I finally got a response from my guqin instructor: wait there, I’ll pick you up.

I bid farewell to my wonderful host for the afternoon and walked back into the sun to see my guqin instructor standing outside. He was waiting for another lost student as well. We ended up walking towards the student dorms and entered what really was just a dorm. I suppose someone at the college must be a guqin fanatic and donated the space? The dorm resident popped in and out a few times, but like most college students just stayed on his computer in the quiet recesses of his room.

I left class with a note to return on Wednesday. I would take three classes per week and try to learn at least three years worth of material during my time here—if not more. In my conversations with my instructor though, I realized that this innocent hobby ties into my tea research a lot more than I had expected.

In terms of contemporary tea culture, there’s been a trend of viewing tea as a method of spiritual cultivation. While this perspective and function of tea can be traced back to Tang dynasty writings, it has reemerged with the “tea meditation” or 茶禪 aesthetic. This simple, no-frills way of serving tea is partly informed by Chinese interpretations of Japanese tea, but also an attempt to repackage tea for a modern “literati” lifestyle. That is, the geeks like me who live in the 21st century yet strive to learn arts like calligraphy, guqin, and tea appreciation.

In my guqin instructor’s elegant words: There is the Way of Tea, but music is also a way. To learn the way, you have to walk it—how long and far you walk determines where you end up.

To my instructor, guqin is an art that is also cultivation. In fact, his curriculum includes classical Chinese philosophy and neo-Confucian writings to balance practice and understanding.

While I’ll have to end this blog post here since it’s getting late, he mentioned a few other key points, one being the role of lineage in guqin circles. I’ll address this further in a later post. I’ll also update this post with pictures once I have stable electricity and internet.

While I’m not too jetlagged, I woke up at 5 am this morning and decided to head out early to explore campus while it was still cool.

However, I woke up with a piercing sore throat. Nonetheless, I went downstairs and got two vegetable buns and a hot soy milk-cereal for less than a dollar and kept walking. Having nutrition and hot fluids soothed my throat, and I got halfway into campus before reaching the library.

As I passed students trying to memorize English passages and perfect their pronunciation, I walked into the reference section to see what they had in store. To my delight, there were plenty of calligraphy dictionaries. They also had a rare books collection that included Ming texts documenting the region, but I didn’t have my student ID yet and didn’t want to risk entering and getting interrogated, especially while my speech was hindered by an increasingly painful sore throat.

After a while of lounging around in the air conditioning, I went back to my room, stopping at the store to get some laundry detergent and drinking water on my way back. With a cold coming on, the last thing I would want is not having potable water.

Without much to do, I watched an episode of March Comes in Like a Lion on Bilibili and went back to the noodle place for lunch. On my way back, I decided to stop by a pharmacy, where I was promptly greeted by a clerk asking for my symptoms.

“Sore throat,” I replied.

“Cough?”

“Not yet.”

“Runny nose?”

“Yes.”

“Is the mucus thick or thin?”

“Thin.”

She came back with two packages and rang me up. On my way back, I peeked into the bag and laughed. She prescribed me Yinqiao tablets and Banlangen to drink—exactly what the herbalist at Wing Ming would prescribe me over a decade ago. I guess my health habits haven’t really changed.

On my way back, I was approached by an over-friendly student who asked me if I was a first-year. I suppose I was since this is my first year here, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk.

“No,” I replied curtly.

He didn’t get the memo. “Well, then what year are you?”

“Researcher,” I muttered as I kept walking. He stopped in his tracks, confused at why I would be a researcher. I suppose I look a bit young for that.

As soon as he stopped following me, another student called to me, “Are you okay? You look ill.”

Why yes, I am on the verge of becoming quite ill indeed. “It’s just a cold; I’ll be fine,” I answered.

I got back to my room, downed the medicine, and the flames in my throat subsided for the time being. I could talk again with relatively less pain, and swallowing was more of a gritty annoyance than a torturous bodily function.

I decided that I would return to the registration booth because after looking at my class list, “Conversational Business Chinese” really did not appeal to me at all.

After speaking with one of the Chinese teachers and explaining my situation she agreed that since I have no need for transfer credits, I could presumably take whichever classes I wanted. And just like that, I eliminated a few hours from my schedule, making a bit more room for research.

I got home to an exceptionally warm room. My air conditioner had stopped working. In fact, upon plugging my phone charger into the wall, I noticed that all of my electrical outlets had stopped working. I went downstairs to report the situation.

The incident reminded me of resonance theory—the Chinese concept of microcosmic and macrocosmic resonance. Essentially, it is the idea that a micro- and macrocosmic systems reflect each other, meaning that breakdowns in one plane directly impact its surroundings. This is why the Emperor traditionally held ritualistic roles to balance Heaven, Earth, and Mankind. In my own situation, it was as if my electrical sockets were reflecting the breakdown in my immune system.

Although, perhaps I shouldn’t discuss use the term immune system either. Rather than attributing my distress to external forces such as bacteria and viruses I was exposed to on the plane, the Chinese pharmacist insisted that this was due to me not drinking enough water, that I had eaten too much junk food, and to not getting enough sleep (all of these were true). The idea was that if my body had been in a harmonic balance, I would not have fallen ill. Now, the medicine she grabbed for me would aim to restore balance by cooling my system down and helping it reach equilibrium.

In the meantime, I’ll drink more water and get more rest. I’d like to be well by Saturday, since that’s a long day of walking (and also the day of my first scheduled guqin class).

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.

Earlier today, my cousin Emily reminded me that I need to document this trip, preferably through vlogging. I actually regret not documenting my time in Taiwan and Japan, although I don’t think it would have been very interesting. Roughly 90 percent of my time in Taiwan was spent in a Buddhist monastery, and a good chunk of my time in Japan was spent in a classroom. Perhaps videos of my adventures to various temples and historical sites would have been nice.

I never liked listening to my own voice though. I hate seeing pictures of myself just as much. But there’s something about my past writings that I enjoy reading (despite cringing at all of my old essays). It’s like I’m speaking to myself, but without hearing the weird tones of my own voice. There’s more thought put into it, and that means much less rambling. I can also fact check myself and make sure I’m not spewing incoherent falsehoods.

While I will take more pictures and ostensibly a lot more video this time around, I think the majority of my records will be in writing. Perhaps this will give me a chance to practice English as well. While I am sure that my Mandarin (and possibly Teochew) will improve during my time abroad, I am worried that my other languages will decline.

毎日アニメを観ると大丈夫かな

In any case, my trip to China will involve a lot more exploring, and I look forwarding to visiting tea meccas such as Wuyishan, Fenghuangshan, Hangzhou, and maybe Yunnan.

As I write this entry, I am reminded that this very act of documenting my tea travels hearkens back to the distant legacy of Song dynasty tea connoisseurs who explored scenic mountains and drank newly-grown tea prepared with fresh water from nearby springs. Just as how Song Zi’an’s 宋子安 Record of Sampling Tea Along the Eastern River 東溪試茶錄 documented teas in Fujian a thousand years ago. If Song Zi’an was alive today, I’m sure he’d have an Instagram, blog, and YouTube channel (and WeChat because… China).

Who knows—perhaps a thousand years from now, this blog will be a primary source for some pitiful undergraduate Asian Studies major who’s trying to desperately finish a thesis.