Hello and welcome to my substack, which I am soft launching with the first section of an essay I have been working on called “My first apartment.” It is pretty much about what the title suggests it’s about, except that of course it’s also not. If you click the subscribe button below, you can get the full version of the essay delivered to your inbox whenever I finish it. It may not be for a while - I’m a painfully slow writer, which makes me a terrible candidate for this platform. Okay, here goes:
My First Apartment
Last month I moved into my own place, a sunny corner studio in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. I keep thinking of it as my first solo apartment and then catching myself, because I have lived alone before - it was just in another country and another life.
I was 25 when in the fall of 2018 I moved into the Nuclear Power Institute of China Dormitories, a former work unit compound in the Yulin neighborhood of Chengdu. I had been living in Beijing and come out West with a kind of manifest destiny. I was a journalist, or becoming one. Earlier that year I had published my first big feature - a profile, in VICE, of the Chengdu hip-hop quartet the Higher Brothers, who felt important to me because they were on the cusp of a generation that wanted something more than material stability. I was on a visa run in Vietnam when the story came out. I remember wandering the streets of Saigon that night, motorbikes roaring in the January sultriness, thinking I had reached the pinnacle of happiness.
The move to Chengdu was the logical next step in my becoming. Beijing was expensive; I had to tutor and translate press releases to subsidize my writing. More importantly: life in Beijing was too comfortable. I mostly socialized with other laowai and didn’t really write stories about stuff happening outside of Beijing, which was hardly representative of the rest of the country.
If I were to become a great China journalist, in other words, I would have to rusticate.
This line of thinking was not at all novel. Many young Westerners before me had come to China and embedded themselves in remote places in order extract something essential about the country and write about it. Peter Hessler is the most famous example, but it’s really it’s its own genre. Each micro-generation has had its Hessler: John Pomfret in the 80s, Evan Osnos and Michael Meyer in the 00s. My only plausible innovation was to be a woman.
And even that’s not true. Fuschia Dunlop had come to Chengdu in the 90s and been the first Westerner to enroll in the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and she had written a memoir about it, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper. I knew about the book, of course, but I not-unintentionally avoided reading it while I lived in Chengdu. When I finally picked it up last summer I found that, even four years after leaving China and my journalistic aspirations behind, my pleasure in reading it was tempered with pain - because not only had Dunlop predated me (and outdone me) in all of her adventures, she was also an excellent writer.
One wants to be the first to have done something. One wants, above all, distinction. It’s hard to overstate how strongly this desire motivated me then. And I suspect this longing, to be someone of consequence, is what drives most of the young Westerners who make the pilgrimage and stay. You have to remember the but-for world here: our peers back home were no ones working entry level jobs, toiling in grad school, crammed into crappy apartments with four or five roommates.
In this transnational arbitrage some profited financially; some sexually; some just in the relief from the anonymity and abjection of one’s early twenties; but most everyone profited. If you ask me this favorable trade is the source of the general smugness and satisfaction you find among laowai in China - a diffuse sort of aren’t we clever? ness– to which I was no exception. I was extraordinarily pleased with myself for my move, for how I had maximized my likelihood of achieving the thing I wanted most, which was of course to become a famous writer. Back home everyone knew that journalism was hopeless – too much competition and too little money. But there was enormous demand for stories about China and few Western journalists there; fewer still who spoke Chinese.
By moving from Beijing to Chengdu I was exploiting my advantage to its logical extent. There were no laowai journalists there, as far as I knew, and plentiful stories.
Sometimes, when I describe to people how I moved to Chengdu in the fall of 2018 with no friends, no job, no money and pretty much no plan, I hear that I was “so brave.” But that descriptor implies some sort of choice; a more cowardly road not taken. And I did not, in October 2018, feel like I had any other option. Once the idea was in my head that I should go West, I couldn’t stay in Beijing another month. I bought a plane ticket, shipped my meager belongings and moved toward my destiny.
A cliffhanger!!! Can’t wait to read more. (Came from the note about the cool orange slides)