I used to hate Chinese food.
But my whines (or cries—ever dramatic, I often cried) went unheeded as my parents dragged me to our town’s only Chinese restaurant, David Chen’s, for our ritualistic Sunday night dinners.
Hunger aside—anyway, there were always frozen bagels waiting for me back home—I found a way to enjoy our trips to David Chen’s. As the rest of my family enjoyed deep fried carbs marketed as Chinese food, I lost myself in the Song Dynasty scroll prints that lined the walls of the sanctified establishment.
At that ripe age of six, David Chen’s was my only exposure to China. But the country of the scroll prints—of pagoda-studded misty mountaintops and an alphabet of inscrutable drawings—had already intoxicated me.
I grew up in the blindingly affluent, comically homogenous hamlet of Armonk, New York. While only 45 minutes from downtown Manhattan, Armonk is a world away, polluted by all of the venom of small town provincialism and insularity.
A queer, asthmatic, book-loving kid with a penchant for memorizing facts out of the almanac and willing to do almost anything to avoid competitive sports, I took every opportunity to affirm that there was a world beyond the otherizing suffocation of Armonk.
China, the impossibly distant country of the Song Dynasty scrolls, was my paragon, the promise of a world as radically different from the pettiness of my hometown as possible.
I was in the sixth grade when one of my peers visited China. When she announced her upcoming trip to our Hebrew school class, our teacher exclaimed, “China? China!” And then she spelled it out, just to clear up any extraneous uncertainty, “C-H-I-N-A?” Although half my lifetime ago, my ears still ring with her repeated exclamations—China? China! C-H-I-N-A?
I overflowed with envy, the sort of jealousy that eats to the core and drives raw determination. Up to that point, China had been just a symbol, the antidote to my inability to feel at home in the only town that I had ever called home. But now, I knew someone was going. I could go too, it struck me. I decided that I was going to get to China.
As I got older and slowly brought myself to stomach American Chinese food, I enriched my China passion with more careful academic investment.
This started in my ninth grade global history class, during which I was fortunate enough to have been placed with a teacher who harbors an impressive arsenal of knowledge and a personal fascination with all things East Asia.
By the time I turned 15, the sun had set on my days of experiencing China through Song Dynasty scrolls on the walls of David Chen’s. My China became the story of Tang Dynasty technological finesse, the cosmopolitan intrigue of the Mongol Dynasty and Zheng He’s astounding explorations to Malacca, Mecca, Mogadishu and everywhere in between.
July 10, 2006 was the most exciting day of my life, a prodigious superlative indeed, as I boarded a stuffed Continental 777 at Newark Airport’s gate C121 and headed over the Canadian Arctic, the North Pole and the Siberian steppe to Beijing.
Far too exhilarated to fall asleep, the scale of the feat of reaching the modern political heart of the Sinitic world—the civilizational system that inspired Song Dynasty scrolls and funded Zheng He’s voyages—roused me to the peak. I was going to China, C-H-I-N-A.
Now, seven years later, going to China has become almost mundane. I have lost count of the number of times that I have officially entered and exited the country (begging the perennial question of whether or not Hong Kong entry and exits count), and I have crossed the Pacific or Arctic en route to or from Asia 22 times.
Cumulatively, I have spent over 18 months of my short life in the People’s Republic, more time than I have spent anywhere else aside from Armonk and Cambridge. I know the Guangzhou and Beijing subway systems better than those in New York or Boston.
As such, I have sacrificed an element of the enigma that drew me to China in the first place. Especially as a Fulbright researcher, it has been far too easy to lose sight of my broader China story in the minutiae of my ultra-focused and often academically highfalutin (at least I am self-aware) project.
But it takes just a step back—a heated conversation about my research with a Chinese friend, a getaway to the wild western Provinces, an afternoon in an (air conditioned) Song Dynasty art museum—to get my blood pumping again.
Besides, whenever the time does come to head back to sterile, stagnant Armonk, there is always something that pulls me back to China, to the paragon of my childhood musings.
And for the record, I now prefer a good Hunanese or Cantonese meal over almost any form of Western food.