going back to China

Where have I been? Traveling.

First of all, I am Singaporean, but my parents were born and raised in China. It was a very interesting time. My parents (and by extension, my grandparents) witnessed the rapid development that China underwent. I once interviewed my mother for my final project in my 7th grade history class, and she told me about food rations, coal stoves, and going to bed cold and hungry. Now, pretty girls sit in front of buildings of steel and glass, talking to their phones on a tripod propped up in front of them and people looked at you funny if you paid with anything but WeChat.

But I digress. What I mean to say is that I am merely a tourist. My extended family on my father's side lives in Chengdu, one of the biggest cities in China (it's like the fifth, after Shenzhen or something). It's best known for being the home of hotpot and giant pandas (of which I did not see because I was too lazy to. Nor did I eat hotpot, but I got maocai, which is like hotpot but they put everything in for you and present you with the finished pot).

They speak a dialect of Chinese, as all regions of China does, called Szechuanese. Some of the interesting parts of Sichuanese is that they use (or at least, verbally they do. I'm not sure if it's the same character) child (孩子) instead of shoe (鞋子). So, where you hear someone say "我的孩子在哪儿?" in Chengdu, they are not looking for their kin, but rather something to slip their feet into before they go outside. Instead, they use 哇哇 (doll) to mean child. They also say 刷 (brush, I think is the character they use) for play. It took a couple blank stares at my grandma to realize what she meant when she asked me "现在喜欢刷什么呀?"

"My aunt has such a thick accent," I commented to my mother as we were walking back to our hotel.

"But you looked like you handled yourself well," she responded.

"Oh really? I barely understood anything she said."

"Haha, you're just like your dad. Brandon (our old neighbor) thinks he is pretty good at English when all he does is smile and nod to whatever he says."

"Yeah, it's not difficult. You just watch their expression. When they look at you with an expectant face, waiting for your response, you laugh a little and it all works out."

My mother stops in the middle of the pavement. Concerned, I looked at her. She was bent over, and it took me a hot second to realize that she was laughing. It really wasn't that funny; I mean, I was just responding honestly. I'm glad that she derived a lot of joy from how I navigated family gatherings.

My father was almost an air force pilot. He had passed all the physical tests. Apparently, he had really good vision, better than 20/20 (where did those genes go lmao, not me being only able to see three inches in front of me). But then, from what I can understand with my not-too-great Chinese listening comprehension skills and my grandmother's accent, they found out that his uncle was a political dissenter of the Chinese Communist Party, and my poor father failed the background check.

Instead, he was one of a handful students in his high school to go to college, become (slightly) near-sighted, and then worked at a car factory as a mechanical engineer.

What's he doing now? He took a very early retirement and now sits in front of his ten-year old computer watching Chinese cooking tutorials (that he emulates rather deliciously) and playing Go mindlessly. We love a good househusband.

The amount of compliments I've gotten about my skin in America in the past 5 years: 0

The amount of compliments I've gotten about my skin in Asia: 5

Like I get that family members compliment you, but literally the first thing they say to me is "Ah, your skin is so white!"

It's kinda crazy how much people in Asia (esp China) care about their skin. So many UV-blocking umbrellas and the goofy ahh sun hats that look like oversized baseball hats without the cap. Like, just brim. It's goofy.

On the plane:

Ooh, we're above the clouds. Look, the top of the clouds look the same as the bottom.
I wonder if I can see any other planes flying around.

Nope, why have I never seen another plane in the sky before? I mean, if there aren't any clouds in the way, I can see the land below us. It must be at least a mile's distance so I should see at least a mile around us, probably more, and there are also no clouds in the way.

looks at horizon

thinks about the argument against flat earthers that we can only see so far because the earth is round

You know, the horizon isn't exactly the most circular looking. Maybe the reason we can't see forever is because we got the fog like in Flatland. Wait, if you keep walking forwards in Flatland, would you get back to where you started? No, that would mean Flatland is on a sphere, which wouldn't make sense since it's an inherently 2-dimensional world. Imagine if our world was on the surface of a 4d sphere.

Wait, Flatland would be so wacky because it's in 2 dimensinos. It's not simply connected, unlike higher dimensions.

I can't believe I'm thinking of topology right now.

Shit, that's S¹ (a circle in 2 dimensions) that I'm thinking of that doesn't have trivial fundamental group. Rⁿ is contractible for all n. It's the universal cover of so many things.

I went on to read Hatcher's Algebraic Topology on my phone, because I was bored on the plane.

I've heard that you can buy books from the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series for cheap in China because Springer has some agreement with the country that makes math textbooks more accessible in China. So instead of getting it for 50 USD, you can get it for 50 RMB (and I'm told the conversion is 7RMB per USD).

I mentioned that I wanted to check out bookstores to see if they have these items, and my relatives have recommended several places for me to visit. However (and also understandably), they don't sell graduate-level math textbooks at your regular old bookstore.

One of the places was a pretty big bookstore, in the basement level of a giant shopping district called Tai Koo Li (太古里). My aunt was the one who suggested the place, and she and my mother went to sit in the (overpriced) bookstore cafe to chat while I perused the store. My disappointment at the lack of nonrecreational math texts was subdued by the fact that there was a limited selection of anime merch.

Eventually, I returned empty-handed to them. They were still chatting, and told me to go read some more. I was halfway through informing them that I was in fact illiterate (in Chinese) when I got the message and promptly excused myself. There was a small section of books in English, most of them being classics. I didn't want to start a book and have to leave it halfway through, never to finish it again, and so I stood there and judged their selection.

I found a collection of short stories by J.D. Salinger, the guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye. Well, isn't this perfect? I could read a short story for a couple minutes, while my aunt and my mom gossiped. I took it out of the shelf, and the first story was A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Recalling that there was an anime in my anime to-watch list titled Bananafish, I started reading what I assume to be the (or I suppose, an) inspiration for the anime.

In the interest of time, I speedread the story. I can't really tell what good writing is, but I mean, it was fun to read. I like how you have to piece together the puzzle in short stories. You get to infer the backstories and personalities of different characters from a couple scenes. (In this case, there were three scenes total, and most of it was conversation.)

Anyways, the point is, the ending is kinda crazy. If you have 15 minutes, go and read it and come back. Then, you'll understand what I felt after reading the last sentence. I stood up from the step of the stairs I was sitting on with not a single thought in my head except, "Welp, that was traumatizing."

I really hope the anime Bananafish does not end like the story.

As part of hot girl summer (see: summer goals https://listed.to/@angelofd3sth/52155/summer-goals), I'm buying new clothes in China. I mean, walking through Tai Koo Li, you could see tons of super trendy outfits, along with people wearing lolita and cosplays. I told my mother about my fashion plans, and she told me that she was also tasked with buying new clothes for my nephews (one aged 3 years and one 4 months).

I watched a couple short-form videos on Xiaohongshu, which is like, from what I understand, a fashion/pop-culture-focused version of Tiktok? (Of course, there is also Tiktok in China, but you had to download the Chinese version, Douyin, and at that point, my brain was tired from trying to decode Chinese 24/7). I mostly looked up affordable and trendy places to buy clothes in the area and I came up with a list.

I have a rough idea of what I want to buy, but I didn't really plan much beforehand. It's really important that you have set pieces in mind that you want to buy, or else you might end up overspending. My mother assured me that this was fine though, because my grandmother had pulled out 7 year's worth of red packet money (because the last time I went to China was precovid) from underneath her mattress and handed it to me the moment she saw me. It was a lot of cash, and they don't even use cash in China anymore, and it wasn't like we were going to use RMB in America, so spend it I did.

On the first day of shopping, we went to some shops near Tai Koo Li. I was humbled by the skirts at the first store that I went to, that offered only one size. You know what, I still bought one pair of cargo pants there tho, but no black denim with chains (and I never got to buy black denim with chains for the rest of the trip). The second store I went to thankfully had different sizes, but it's kinda hard looking for larges in a sea of smalls and mediums.

I bought some clothes that were kind of streetwear. There were more look-at-me-i'm-so-petite kind of clothes at both stores though. I looked at myself in the mirror and it was just odd. Needless to say, I am not petite. But maybe it's all in my head, and so I bought a top and a bottom of that genre.

It's okay, I'll lose weight when I get home, is what I, and also my grandma, told myself throughout the trip.

Unfortunately, the streets full of luxury and wannabe luxury brands (fucking wannabe brandy melville with their tiny waistlines) was no place to get toddler and baby clothes, and so my mother's quest was not yet complete. She talked about a place where she had gotten clothes for the aforementioned nephews two years ago and so we decided to go check it out.

It's a place with blocks and blocks of stores selling cheap knockoffs. It's actually so massive, and there were so many clothes. The quality of most of the clothes were understandably ass, but my mother mentioned that you could find some nice pieces here and there. We wandered around and chanced upon the building that had all the stores that sold young female fashion (my demographic!) and so we went in.

It's kind of organized like a really really large thrift store that's split into smaller stores that sold somewhat different styles. Only all the clothes are new. And there were girls who followed you around as you browsed, complimenting the way you looked and how it would fit with this top and that bottom.

My mother had mentioned that you could bargain and hack the price down by as much as half, but my linguistically-challenged ass could barely hold a conversation with the nice ladies that I didn't even try. I probably got scammed. I mean, it was approximately as much as the stores I had went to the previous day. Now I have fake Chanel. Oh, and I also copped myself some knock-off Jordans.

But yeah, this place is exactly what fast fashion is irl (since most of it happens online). Cheap, terrible clothes that were designed and manufactured as quickly as possible to sell to the young and the impressionable. I saw people drag around big trashbags filled with clothes like they were Santa Claus. I kind of lost my appetite to buy anything, but then I was sweet-talked and lowkey social-pressured into walking out with a purchase.

Just remember kids, fast fashion bad. I felt so much better when I went to Uniqlo and picked some nice 100% cotton basic pieces without people following me behind asking me what kind of styles I'm looking for. Yeah, it was more expensive, but that's the price you pay for quality now. At this point, it is lowkey too much to ask for nice tees at Walmart (at least, the Chinese one I went to). Not a plug for Uniqlo, even though as I'm typing this, my fit is almost all Uniqlo, with an ornamental plaid shirt I picked up at wannabe Brandy Melville for color.