The note I keep sending

There is a note in my notes app called "china - for friends." It is a few years old now and I have sent it to maybe a dozen people. Every time someone tells me they are finally coming to visit, I open it, read it top to bottom, fix whatever has gone stale, and paste it into the chat. Then, a few weeks after they leave, I open it again and edit it based on what actually confused them.

It might be the most useful thing I have ever written, and it is just plain text.

Three lines

The first version had three lines:

• get Alipay working before you fly, not after you land
• trains sell out around holidays, book early
• my phone number

That was it. A friend was coming through Shanghai, she asked what she needed to know, and I typed those three lines because they were the three things I was sure about. Everything since has been accretion. She asked about the subway, so a subway line got added. Someone else asked whether his credit card would work anywhere (mostly no, hence line one). Someone asked if he needed a visa at all, and I had to go check the current rules, and now there is a section about the 30-day visa-free entry that I re-verify before every send, because it is the section most likely to be wrong by the time I paste it.

At its peak the note was about forty lines.

What got deleted

Adding lines is easy. Deleting them is the real editing, and it only happens when a friend comes back and tells me which parts they never used.

The paragraph about carrying cash went first. I had written it out of caution — keep a few hundred yuan on you, just in case. Three people in a row told me they exchanged money at the airport and then never touched it. By day two everyone pays with their phone, even at the fruit stall, even for a bottle of water. The cash paragraph was me describing a country that had already stopped existing. Deleted.

A recommendation for a specific map app went next, after the app changed enough that my instructions no longer matched its buttons. Instructions about software rot faster than any other kind of line in the note. I learned to describe what to do rather than what to tap.

The best line in the note is not mine. A friend replied after her trip with: "add this — airport wifi asks for a local phone number you don't have yet, download your maps before you board." I pasted it in verbatim and it is still there, in her wording, not mine. A note you keep for years stops being entirely yours, and I think that is a feature.

Why plain text

The note has outlived two phones and one migration between notes apps. Nothing broke, because there was nothing to break. No formatting, no embeds, no links to a doc that needs permissions. When I send it, it arrives as words, and words still render everywhere.

There is also something honest about a note with no publish button. It has an audience of exactly one person at a time, so there is no temptation to perform. I never wrote "China is a land of contrasts" in it, because you do not say that to a friend. You say: the train station security line takes twenty minutes, bring your passport, not a photo of it.

Where the overflow went

Eventually the note got too long to be a note. The apps section alone grew to fifteen lines, each with a caveat — which one needs setup before departure, which one wants a local number, which two you actually need versus the ten that lists tell you to install. So I moved the reference material out to a small site I maintain, and the apps section of the note collapsed back into one line pointing here:

https://firsttripchina.com/guide/apps

The note itself is back down to about a dozen lines. The split turned out to be clean: general facts that are true for any visitor went to the site, where I can fix them once for everyone. Personal lines stayed in the note — my number, which SIM I use, the dumpling place near my flat that I will insist on.

The note keeps changing because the country does. A line that is true this spring may not survive to autumn, and the visa section will need checking again before the next friend flies in. That is fine. It is a note, not a monument. You revise it, you send it, you wait to hear which lines earned their place.