I grew up in Beijing. This is my home. It is the place where all my dreams end up back in, waking up in the middle of the night, staring at the stars of Massachusetts outside my dorm window. Aren’t they the same stars as in Beijing?

 

I have divided my conversations into three sections. Yanqing, Chao Yang, and Shunyi. 

 

Yanqing was where my parents grew up and where my grandparents, great grandparents, and everyone before lived. It is a tiny area on the precipice of Beijing, surrounded entirely by mountains on its four sides. The air is thin there. The sky is always blue as the ocean, the pollution of Beijing City seems like a completely different world. Our chinese culture describes a place like that as 山清水秀  (Clear waters and verdant mountains). My memories of youth have often carried the imprint of Yanqing. We have two houses in the village, both designed and built by my grandfather, my father, and my uncle. The ceilings were wooden structures and covered up with newspaper. The entire family, my father’s siblings and my cousins,  gathers back at Yanqing on holidays and festivals. I also went back there often with my grandparents. The room always smelled like mud and fire. My grandmother burns wood to cook food. When it is ready, we place a short table on the shared bed of everyone in the room and sit around it to dine. I remember the winter air seeping in from the creases of the windows and feeling the warmth of the bed heated under by fire. Now I am the tallest in the family, and many of those people passed away together with the memories of their time. 

 

Chaoyang was the first half of my life. My parents were successful but still growing their work. The three of us lived in an apartment in the Chaoyang area, and my grandparents lived next door after they moved out of Yanqing. We were happy, the family was tight. Grandma cooks the dish for the family, grandpa sometimes helps with the noodles. Most of the time he spent reading and writing. My parents were often not home. Every night after dinner, grandma brings me to the park nearby where I get to play hide and seek, spinning top, and dancing with the kids and aunties. Father “trained” me in the years of childhood, bringing me to new places to practice talking to strangers. There was once when I had a fever and was waiting with him in the hospital. My father made me walk around and tell the other patients that “you are the greatest, you will recover soon” while raising up my thumb. There was another old aunty in her eighties, who I used to see at the park everyday in a wheelchair and I always told her that I have magic powers that will heal her. I keep repeating the positive affirmations father has taught me. As I grew older, it seemed that she recovered too, and began walking on her own. She tells me that it's my magic spells that healed her. Father also brings me to his meetings and his workers, where I sing, dance, and speak in front of hundreds or thousands of people on the stage. I met a lot of people during my days in Chaoyang. Kids, old aunties, sick people, healthy people, working people. 

 

I moved to Shunyi in primary school. This was when my parents made more and our space transformed from an apartment in a building to a house with 4 floors. Rich people feel cold, father used to say. 

 

“It’s because everyone has enough things going on in their lives that they don’t need to waste their time talking to neighbours", he told me. 

 

In Chaoyang or Yanqing, you know your neighbors and everyone living next to you closely, like relatives. In Shunyi, living under a “castle”, the moments of pure human connection diminished. 

These three areas embody my 18 years in Beijing. Memories, joy, tears, frustration, and the hope to escape. But this is where my dreams keep returning to. I made the Lives of Beijing to capture the spiritual outcome of living in these three areas, as a true reflection of who I am. 

 

The culture of the East is quiet and reserved. We are like a canopy, a forest, incredibly collective seen from the outside. However, whenever one tries to walk into these forest, and bypass all the initial hindrances, one discover the vividly flourishing diversity. It is diversity born from conformity. Many things remain conformed, though not always true. There are also ones brave enough to not be conformed.

 

Upon speaking to people, one phenomenon I have noticed is that most native Chinese people don’t like speaking to me. I find much more ease reaching out to the foreigners visiting Beijing. It is not their fault. There is much we cannot say here and to avoid trouble, most people just avoid conversations at all. The best example of this was a lady I met, who before I said one word, screamed into my face in mandarin “Fuck off we don’t speak to strangers”. It is a sad and foreign feeling. Many times I am doubting my belonging. 

 

Many people spoke to me for much longer after the camera recording stopped. That is when the true stories originate, but they will have to be the stories between me and a stranger, and that's it.