BY Pi3
*Editor’s note: The following story was a runner-up in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here.
I still remember a day in October 2022. I was sitting on a bus—one of those iconic red double-decker buses, just like Big Ben, Paddington Bear, or Hyde Park, all of which could easily be turned into London souvenirs. I was on my way to a friend’s birthday party. It was my fourth year living in London, and in my headphones, I was listening to the final episode of The Prince, a podcast series by The Economist. This podcast, about “the most powerful man in the world, Xi Jinping,” had traced his journey from suffering from the Cultural Revolution as a teenager witness his father undergoing ‘Struggle Sessions’ and eventually, his political rise through tackling the Party’s legitimacy problems and patriotic campaigns to become China’s leader. The final episode focused on one of the biggest challenges of his political career—though not the first, nor the last—the COVID-19 pandemic.
I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus, gazing out at the typical London autumn weather—cold, damp, overcast, and endlessly drizzling. Inside the bus, however, the air was thick with a blend of passengers’s odors. The bus was slowly moving through one of the most crowded parts of the city, full of enthusiastic locals and tourists. The temperature difference between the inside and outside caused condensation on the windows, making it look as if the bus was crying.
In the podcast, it narrated the story of Wenliang Li—how he was first accused of spreading false rumors before being posthumously honored as a “loyal Party member”; it spoke of Murong Xuecun’s attempt to enter Wuhan to document the lives of ordinary people—like Jin Feng, a 60-year-old hospital cleaner who, upon learning she was infected, thinking of choosing to take her own life rather than seek medical help. Later, her husband was also infected, but no hospital was willing to admit him. He died at home. The podcast then shifted focus to Shanghai, where a city of 25 million was placed under complete lockdown.
Between the journalist’s narration, raw audio clips from the field punctuated the broadcast—a megaphone blaring orders about “controlling the desire for freedom of the soul,” and voices from high-rise apartment windows in Shanghai crying out, “We need supplies! We need supplies!”
I immediately broke down in tears on the bus. These fragmented voices came from the city where I was born and had lived for 30 years, where my parents had endured suffering just months before—suffering they dared not even discuss with me on WeChat. Partly to avoid worrying me, partly out of self-censorship. Nine thousand kilometers away, I was listening to stories that were entirely blocked in China. I felt myself being pulled back into that time of suffering—a suffering inflicted solely to uphold the legitimacy of one-party rule, to prove China’s policies were correct in an ideological battle against the West, and in the cost of disregarding humanity.
It was this toxic, inhumane political system that had driven me to leave Shanghai, to leave China, years ago. Of course, I could not have foreseen all of this when I left in 2018. China has never had a healthy environment for political discussion. There were many reasons why I chose to leave, but I never openly shared the more political ones with my friends. This ingrained self-censorship, even after six years in London, still runs deep in my bones—I have never once felt that I live in a place where I can truly speak freely and without fear.
Thirty minutes later, the bus dropped me off near my friend’s house. My friend and her husband, both from South America, had come to London for their studies and stayed after graduation. Gathering different friends from various social circles to celebrate with canapés and drinks at home was a very “foreign” concept to me. But in a city like London, where dining out is prohibitively expensive, it made perfect sense.
Simply due to my skin color or my accent, it was always obvious that I wasn’t from here. So, at these kinds of social gatherings, the question always arose: Where are you originally from? Even after years of being asked this question thousands of times, I still hesitated to answer “Chinese.” I never knew what that label meant to others, particularly through the lens of various media narratives.
The terrifying thing about language is how it smooths out meaning and erases nuance. What does it really mean to say I am from China or I am Chinese? Does it refer to the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, along with its narratives of “national pride”? Does it encompass the centuries of literature, calligraphy, music, inventions, and costumes across different dynasties? Does it simply mean a diet centered around rice and noodles? Is it the fairly large rural population earning less than 2,000 yuan per month? Or is it the privileged who buy million-pound properties overlooking Hyde Park and send their children to private schools? I cannot find a single definition that allows me to comfortably and succinctly answer Chinese.
During the party, like the other times, I tried to engage, to enjoy the diversity of London, to establish an image of myself beyond my ethnic identity—one that reflected how I see the world, the music, art, and literature I love, the people and causes I care about. But can I truly separate the two?
No one at the party knew that I had cried on my way there. But what exactly was I crying for? Was I mourning the suffering of people in my homeland? Was I grieving the sense of betrayal in deciding to leave, knowing I could never sever my cultural and personal ties to China? Was it anger? Or was it simply the disorientation of not knowing how to reconcile my identity?
In a room buzzed with chatters, laughters, clinking of glasses, I wonder—if a person could choose to be rooted nowhere, grounded in nothing—perhaps, personally, that would not be such a bad thing.
About the author
Pi3 (pseudonym) was born and raised in Shanghai, and relocated to London in her 30s. Through reading, she finds her spiritual home; through writing, she explores and connects with the world, and herself. She is a regular contributor to Numéro China and Mingpao. Photo credit: Pi3