I didn’t come to China because it felt easy.
I came because it didn’t.
China has always intimidated me as a travel destination. The language barrier feels heavier here. The systems are unfamiliar. The tools I rely on elsewhere –Google Maps, Google Translate, Uber– simply don’t exist. Everything runs on Chinese apps, in Chinese characters, through habits I never learned growing up.
That part matters.
Because despite being Chinese, this place never felt like mine.
I grew up Chinese in Trinidad, then in North America –always aware of the label, never fluent in the culture. I learned early how to blend in, how to explain myself, how to shrink difference into something manageable. China became this abstract thing in the background of my identity present, –but distant. Claimed by blood, but not by experience.
So when I started planning this journey and noticed fear creeping in, I recognized it wasn’t just about travel. It was about belonging. About standing in a place that reflected something I’d spent years not knowing how to hold. I could have chosen somewhere simpler.
Somewhere that asked less of me. Instead, I booked fifty-eight days.
Because somewhere along this journey, I learned that fear often points toward unfinished conversations –with places, with people, with parts of ourselves we’ve avoided.
China strips me of familiarity. It forces me to ask for help, to gesture, to misunderstand and try again. Everyday tasks –ordering food, finding a train platform, paying for bubble tea –become small acts of humility. I’m not navigating as a tourist alone, but as someone standing between heritage and discovery.
I’m not here to prove anything. Not to reclaim or reject anything. I’m here to listen. To see what it feels like to exist in a place that shares my face but not my upbringing. To let discomfort teach me what identity actually means when it s no longer theoretical.
So I stay.
Fifty-eight days to move slowly.
Fifty-eight days to learn without performance.
Fifty-eight days to stop treating my own culture as something distant or intimidating.
China scares me –not because it’s foreign, but because it isn’t entirely.
And that, I’m learning, is exactly why I needed to come.
