San Francisco, Shanghai, and my past and present
Reflections on my month in San Francisco, how to think about cities, and exploring China as an independent adult for the first time
In April, I moved to San Francisco and told friends, family, and myself that I’m settling there. I wanted to end my exhausting nomadic lifestyle of the past several years by committing to somewhere - anywhere. The San Francisco Bay Area made sense: it’s my childhood home, it has jobs, and it has great nature access. I also wanted to be closer to friends that I have there.
When I arrived in San Francisco, however, I felt out of touch with the city, its energy, and its ways of living. While the landscapes and road signs felt deeply familiar to my inner child, they evoked a nostalgic disconnect in my current soul as the majority of my adult development happened in other lands. Did I mistakenly conflate past familiarity with present fit? I felt unwelcome, like an awkward stranger in my own home. I remembered the words of global-native travelers I had met along my journey: that the underlying understanding of living abroad changes one’s character irrevocably.
I took a long drive one day and exited the highway for a bathroom break. I exited at Highway 85 and De Anza Boulevard in San Jose, a major intersection from my childhood. Things have changed since I left a decade ago. There is a large Asian supermarket at the intersection now. It was a weekday morning, so the supermarket’s parking lot was quite empty. Parked near me was a young Chinese couple, loading groceries into the back of their SUV and taking care of a single whining toddler. Their sounds were the only ones in the empty lot. I suddenly felt that I was looking into the past, at a scene both familiar and foreign. Is this what my parents’ life was like when they first moved to America? On the surface, maybe, but the details are different. Asian facilities, like supermarkets and community, were weaker back then. Housing prices were a lot lower. Back then, it was a clear +EV decision to live in the US while China was still deeply impoverished and developing. But now, San Jose’s suburbia feels lonely without sufficient upside.
One evening in San Francisco, I was at a professional networking event and started chatting with a young Chinese dad from San Jose. I told him I grew up there and which high school I attended. His eyes lit up. “That’s such a good school!” he kept exclaiming, over and over. “I wish I could send my children there, but it is too expensive to live in that neighborhood.” Good school? I was surprised. It’s a garden-variety public school; the community of hardworking Asian immigrant families made the school what it is. Chinese parents had to work really hard back then. This dad I was speaking with in 2023 had held senior roles at big-name tech giants like Google and Amazon. Good, stable money. Back then, before runaway Internet success stories were a dime a dozen, Chinese dads were grinding until 2am each night at pre-IPO startups because it was either survive or move back to China. Github didn’t exist yet. Life was different.
These two moments - in the parking lot and at the networking event - affected me. If I settle in the Bay Area and raise a family, is this what my life would look like? A dull replica of my parents’ past, an unambitious existence resting on the laurels of pioneering generations that came before? 我一眼看到底了, I saw straight into my future, and I didn’t like it. Pleasure without pain and glory without sacrifice; such hedonism felled the mighty Roman Empire a thousand years ago. My father built his career in Internet 1.0 and personally advised Alibaba in its early stages of software development. Literally world-changing impact and real value for billions of people. I, on the other hand, could be a Business Operations Manager at a Series C insurance “tech” startup with good work-life balance! Surely there’s more to life than that. “你还年轻, 要继续奋斗,” I recalled my uncle’s words. You’re still young, you need to keep fighting.
In his timeless essay “Cities and Ambition” (2008), Paul Graham suggests that one can “never tell what message a city sends”, i.e., its values and personality, or “whether its message will resonate with you” until one lives there. In fact, he says “your best bet is probably to try living in several places when you’re young”. After reading this, I felt reassured that it’s okay to revert on my commitment to settling in SF. I previously tried living in SF four years ago, and as I’ve gained new experiences between then and now, it was absolutely worth a fair shot to try it again.
Recently, I was speaking with a good friend who used to live in Chicago. He still has many friends there, and whenever he visits, it’s a beautiful week of fun and friendship. But he tells me he doesn’t live there because the city doesn’t offer some things that are important to him; he consciously makes a tradeoff between camaraderie and his personal needs. I’ve pondered how this applies to my own life. Similarly, I used to live in Chicago, and some of my close friends still live there today. I visited recently and felt welcomed and loved. In fact, Chicago is actually a pretty ideal city for me in many ways: friends, good food, global transport hub, and inexpensive. But personal non-starters keep me from signing a lease in the Windy City.
One reason I chose to move back to the US instead of a different country was that many of my close friends live in the US. Something about nominally being in the same country makes it easier to see each other more frequently, even if a cross-country flight is longer and more expensive than, say, if I were to live in nearby Mexico City. But if I step back and think about my social life globally, I have maintained relationships with close friends who live outside of the US despite our never having lived in the same country or even seeing each other in-person every year. What keeps me from applying this same security to my US-based friendships is that many lack a shared understanding of the nomadic, global-native journey that I have been on, and that I share with many non-US friends.
People change and circumstances change. I lived in New York for a year and a half during my early twenties and loved it. But when I came back in my late twenties, it felt different. New York didn’t change; I changed. The message New York sends - that money is the most important thing - stopped resonating with me, although it wasn’t until I had left the city last year for the second time that I realized this.
I feel so lucky to have lived in New York in my early twenties. I maintain that New York is the best city in the world to begin a career, regardless of your profession or desired future geography. Paul writes:
“You don't have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit from it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones of your career. Clearly you don't have to grow up in a great city. Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one... you seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you've found both [peers and encouragement].
“The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over France (Pissarro was born in the Caribbean) and died all over France, but what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris.”
I’m currently in China on what was supposed to be a month-long trip to visit family before returning to San Francisco. Within a few days of arriving in China, however, I felt that I didn’t want to leave. And not in a “wow what a fun vacation! #takemeback” kind of way, but rather a “this is exactly where I need to be right now, and I wasn’t ready for it until now” kind of way. So I cancelled my return flight and am still here.
A few days ago, I took a private yoga lesson in Shanghai. I had never taken a 1-on-1 class before, and my instructor pushed and stretched my body in new and intense ways. When I finally lay down for savasana, I felt emotions deep inside my body rise to the surface of my skin and heart. It was an outpouring like I had never felt before from āsana. As my instructor’s caressing, feminine voice softly droned on in the background “放松小腿, 放松脖子”, reminding me of the trauma-releasing body awareness practice of Vipassana meditation, I suddenly felt the embrace of my mother’s spirit, and it occurred to me that being in China, surrounded by people that look like me and eat like me and and in some ways speak like me and think like me, was like being in the midst of a gigantic extended family, a core human experience I have always felt was missing throughout my childhood and adult life, and a safe haven of love, acceptance, and unspoken understanding in a world in which I have been feeling increasingly uneasy and disconnected. Is this what home feels like?
I felt like my mother was there in that moment; her energy undoubtedly lives on in China. “你需要一个女生的培养”, my grandmother’s words from the previous week popped up in my head again - “you need the loving care of a woman.” I wanted to release my emotions by crying, but I didn’t quite get there.
I’m in China for the first time since my own awakening from an NPC slumber last year. I’m also alone in China for the first time instead of being with family, which gives me the freedom to explore being here as an independent adult with a social life, daily routine, and future, and understand how I might fit in. There are more “people like me” - foreign-born, Western-native overseas Chinese - who live and work here than I expected. It turns out that my immediate Northern California network, which has output a grand total of zero ABCs who live and work in China, is an exception. Many native-born Chinese who attended international schools and foreign universities seem to feel equally disconnected from truly local China. Yet I feel an overwhelming sense that China remains my - our - collective motherland, regardless of where we grew up or went to school. These insights give me confidence to re-visit a dream I’ve inexplicably had for many years, which is to live and work in Shanghai. This is also the only live-abroad dream which has persisted despite my wanting to settle down.
While I was in San Francisco, it occurred to me that my future life partner would need to enjoy developing-country life. Developing countries take a no-nonsense, reality-based approach to life that the US simply doesn’t foster. I once had a roommate in the US who yelled at me for not using dish soap to clean a colander after using it to wash vegetables. Eating dirt never killed anyone; in fact, it fosters a healthy immune system. China, for all its modern development, grew up too quickly to have forgotten its peasant past. I love that China is the world’s most developed country for public infrastructure and tech-enabled daily consumer life while retaining developing countries’ lively street markets and informal retail, a busy sense of community, and the aforementioned reality-based approach to life. I can’t think of many other countries with such dynamic parallelism; South Africa and Brazil come to mind, but neither are safe or East Asia. East Asia just works. To quote a close friend who recently returned to Japan after living abroad for a decade: everyone is just on the same wavelength. For example, we stand on the right side of the escalator so that people can pass on the left. For all of East Asia’s mindless NPCs, I find them far more pleasant than America’s NPCs who have the unfortunate meta-characteristic of believing they’re not NPCs.
Understanding a place requires being aware of the little things. Paul Graham writes:
“A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not something you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off… the conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.”
It’s difficult to categorize the conversations that I’m having as they are so diverse. But perhaps that’s a clue in and of itself - that Shanghai is a place where people care about many different things and are open-minded to new ideas, and where anything is possible. Status games of money and power are quieter than I expected.
I can feel Shanghai pushing me to become a better version of myself. Most obviously, Shanghai pushes me to be more fashionable and take care of my appearance, something I’m embarrassed to have let slip over the years (to think I used to have a fashion blog, be a fashion consultant, and run a fashion show!) Last week, I bought a new pair of leisure sneakers, something I haven’t done since 2021. I finally threw out all of my threadbare socks, tattered underwear, and free conference t-shirts and replaced them with the lineup of basic navy t-shirts and gray socks - my Steve Jobs outfit - that I’ve long thought about but never acted upon. I’m working out regularly with a commitment that I can only recall last feeling in 2021 when I was gearing up to meet a girl in Bali. Shanghai also pushes me to be more social, be better at Chinese, be more confident, and be more aware of my own strengths and shortcomings. Here, I find myself less annoyed at people for doing what they do, such as inadvertently cutting me in line or being white.
There’s a lot of beautiful women in Shanghai. Dating in Shanghai is fun. Maybe a little too fun. Looks aside, I find it attractive and refreshingly novel that women here are (1) attracted to Chinese men, and (2) take initiative.
I’m feeling excited about China but also want to remain conscientious of my honeymoon emotions. Paul Graham notes:
“When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.”
China is an exciting place. Shanghai is an exciting place. Of course I’m enjoying myself; I biologically crave this novelty and stimulus-driven dopamine rush. But I know from experience that a city’s true message can take months to become clear. Last year, I visited Mumbai and remember enjoying it so much that I briefly entertained the idea of staying there for a while. After my initial excitement passed, however, I couldn’t wait to leave.
It’s starting to look like I will be in Shanghai for most of the summer, although I also have in my summer agenda a task to visit and familiarize myself with Singapore. Beyond summer, where I will be depends on how I feel about either place. For now, all I know is that I can’t make blind statements anymore about settling somewhere.