Travel Back To China: 2025 Edition

As I mentioned in the last year-end retrospective blog, I traveled back to China again this year (to be more accurate, at the end of 2024). I migrated to Canada just before the Covid, which is why I only started to go back since last year after the Covid measurements were all lifted. I think it’s worth a blog post every time I go back there since China, as a country I spent most of my life, not only made what I am today, but also still has so many connections with me. Most of my friends and extended family members are still there. I also find going back every year instead of living there all the time makes me a better observer. I can notice the changes easier since I’m comparing the things from year to year instead of from day to day. I can notice the things that may already get used to for the people living there all the time. I also have more motivation to observe since the short time of visiting is so valuable to me. So here it is, the 2025 edition of travelling back to China.

Toronto

My wife and I planned the travel dates in October. We decided to go back during the Christmas and new year’s holiday instead of Chinese New Year. Mostly because I can take advantage of some public holidays so I don’t need to take that many days off, and it’s also easier to coordinate with co-workers since most people are not there so it’s hard to do projects any way. However, the flights are really expensive during the holiday season. Most of the tickets need multiple stopovers. Then we thought, why not take the opportunity to visit some places on the way? We stopped in Tokyo for a few days last year when we travelled back, so why not do something similar? We’ve always wanted to visit Europe. So this time, we went big with our plan to stay in London on the way to China, and Paris on the way back to Toronto. So the whole trip is like: Toronto -> New York -> London (stay) -> Shanghai -> Zhengzhou -> My Hometown. Then for the return trip: My hometown -> Beijing -> Paris (stay) -> New York -> Toronto. Crazy, right? But travel to Europe with only additional expense of hotels is such an attractive idea, and the travel last year gives us lots of confidence of travelling with a baby.

Before I went back, I had just finished reading Other River by Peter Hessler. Then I started to read Country Driving again, another book of his written more than 10 years ago. Peter Hessler, as an American, most of his books are about his experience when staying in China, which I absolutely love reading. It’s an interesting coincident that his coverage of China happens to fill the gaps of my own experience: he started his China experience from 1996, about 4 years after I was born. Then he left China in 2010, one year after I started my University life and started to experience and think about the Chinese society by myself. In 2019, the year I moved to Canada, he went back to China again, so his recordings helped me to fill the gap since then. It’s a shame he needed to leave China again in 2021 (or lucky I guess, considering the Covid measurements in China after that). It’s really refreshing to read the perspective of someone from a different culture. Like I said above, it makes the person a better observer. His books also inspired me to write blogs like this to record things in China. Reading the books, it feels China is changing so fast. Even for his newest book Other River, it only covers the early stages of China’s Covid measurements, which seems already outdated after only 2 years. It seems to be impossible to grasp China as a whole. On that level, there is no difference for my blogs: it’s just some observation of a snapshot of China by a person.

Other than reading the books, I didn’t really have much plan for the trip. The work was busy because I needed to wrap up things before leaving for vacation. It’s flu season and combined with vaccines, my daughter gave a hard time to the whole family. We only started to pack before two days of leaving, and only had a very rough plan for the travel in London. But that’s enough: a detailed plan is mostly useless when travelling with a baby. It’s better to adjust based on the situation and plan accordingly, which I’m already very good at.

London

After transferring through New York, we arrived in London in the morning. I was very excited since it’s my first time to be in Europe. We booked the hotel to be in the core of London, so that we can walk to most of the destinations. We took the train from Airport to the hotel. The train stopped before reaching our destination, which was annoying but understandable to me: I know the idea that some trains don’t run the full range and go back early. We took the next train coming, only to find out it’s a different line. Turned out it is really a train station instead of a subway station, which can serve trains to multiple directions. When we realized it after one station, I overheard someone else also took the wrong train, who is also the first time came to London.

Anyway, with this small bump, we still arrived the hotel very early in the morning and my daughter has already slept in the stroller. While it’s not time for check-in yet, we left the luggages at hotel and headed to British Museum. We planned to visit the museum on the first day since the time spent there can be flexible: we know it’s impossible to see the whole collection in a single day, so we just take whatever time is available. Luckily my daughter slept the whole morning, and we ate some (awful) food in the museum after she woke up. It’s really a rare opportunity to be able to see so many valuable collections, especially the ones from very early civilizations like Egypt and Assyria, which I always fancied, as well as some rare collections from China. Without realizing it, we spent much more time than we had planned, until it felt like a rabbit hole and it’s impossible to see all the things I want to see.

There were not so many people on the way when we walked from the hotel to the museum, and I thought that’s just how London is. However, we we went back, we found the streets were packed with people. The shops, restaurants, malls, trees, streets, basically everything, all had very beautiful decorations. The holiday spirit was really magical. I’ve never seen anything like that. Especially with the European style narrow roads, the whole city was like a gigantic Christmas market. At night, we walked in the main shopping areas and the lights are so gorgeous. It felt really magical and unreal.

Other than the holiday vibe, I also enjoyed the culture very much. There are so many civilizations that has long history in the world, but the only ones I’m very familiar with is the Chinese culture and its influences in East Asia. I’ve been to some other countries like US and New Zealand, not to mention Canada, but those countries are all colonies where the new comers don’t have a long history there while the native people’s culture has been long shadowed. But in London, I got the opportunity to experience another totally different culture that has a long history and had great influence to the world. I visited places like Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, National Gallery and so on. But I had the most stunning experience at Westminster Abbey: I didn’t do much research for the travel, so before I went there, I just knew the architecture is beautiful and it’s one of the must see sites in London. But when I entered there, I was shocked to know the burial site is actually in the abbey, just under and beside your steps. This burial style is unthinkable in Chinese culture. The sculptures are beautiful and gorgeous. It felt strange that there are so many great names buried in such a small space. It makes the grand church felt crowded. It’s like walk into a Hollywood party with all kinds of stars, except the people there are magnificently more famous and important: the kings, queens, scientists, writers and so on. The building truly represents the country’s culture and glory: the custom, the history, the religion, the art, and the people.

We hit another similar bump on the way back: we took the wrong train again when we went to the airport. There were so many people in the airport and it’s a total mess. Fortunately we left early for the airport and were able to take some priority line with my daughter, so we didn’t miss our flight. With that and a really long trip, we finally arrived China.

Hometown

Nothing reminds you how fast time passes more than a baby’s growth: last year when we went back, our daughter couldn’t even crawling. This year, she is running all over the places and speak so many words. Watching her learn new things everyday, trying to talk and interact with all the family members brings so much joy to everyone. However, things were not so smooth at the beginning: when we first arrived, my daughter had a mild fever. Nothing too bad and she recovered just after one day. But when we took her to my mother’s place, she was still very tired from the disturbed sleep schedule and jet lag. It took her some serious cry before we could put her to sleep. The crying made my mother and my grand parents very worried. It also made me wonder if it’s worth spending so much time, effort and money to go back just to stay for less than 3 weeks. But after my daughter had enough rest and wake up, she played with the family so happily. On each of the visits, she tried to remember and bubble the words that represent everyone, like grandmother and so on. During one of the visits, my grandfather told us that my uncle, who is in the US, cancelled the plan to go back this year. He said that with anger, which is normal since he is a serious man with a bad tamper. But there was also sadness on his face that he tried to hide but failed to do so. It’s that moment I decided I would go back every year as long as there are no events like a pandemic or a war.

Talking about a war seems exaggerated. But look at Ukraine and Palestine: this is the world we are living in. During my time there, a possible war between China and Taiwan has been brought up as a chat topic multiple times at different occasions. Even when I took a taxi, the driver was watching a video on Douyin (Chinese version of Tiktok) about attacking Taiwan (what’s wrong with the people nowadays that watch videos when driving??). The creator said in a very exited tone that if China attacks Taiwan, the war must be finished in one week no matter what the cost is, otherwise China will be screwed. The taxi driver agreed after watching the video, then out of blue, started to criticize Xi, talking about Xi’s bad education background and how his constitution amendment will make him infamous forever. Anyway, I think Xi wouldn’t start a war as long as he has strong control of China’s politic power. After all, why would he risk the power? It would only happen when the economic is so bad that there is civil unrest, or there is strong challengers to his rule (no one is on the horizon right now), or his old age blinds his judgement. But I also heard the rumor that says the war will happen before 2027, which is the 100th birthday of the Chinese PLA, which made me less certain about my thoughts. After all, it wouldn’t be the first irrational decision Xi has made. That’s how it works in China: without trustworthy media and transparency politic practise, the information is transferred through rumour and the discussion is done with guess.

Most of the conversations like this happened at the dinning table. I had high expectations about the food before I went back. Some food in my hometown are very hard to find in Toronto or even in other places of China, and they are so delicious in my memory. However, the food has been underwhelming this time. Maybe the expectation was too high. Back then when I was in high school, the same street had two high schools with less than 500 meters apart. The schools had a tight schedule: the classes starts before 8:00 in the morning and ends at about 9:00 at night. There is a larger gap in the noon because Chinese students usually take a nap during the noon. But there is a very small gap between afternoon and evening. So naturally, the street become a place that has lots of small restaurants and street food. It was packed with students when the afternoon classes were over, and the food stalls would occupy the roadway. It’s a mix of chaos and relaxing, which is so hard to forget. I spent almost every dinner there during the 3 years of my high school life. I would buy some gaming magazines after dinner, or rent some books, or skip the dinner all together and spend the time to play video games in an Internet cafe.

It’s telling that all those industries about my after dinner activities have (almost) vanished. Let’s first address the weird thing if you’ve never heard of it: book rental. Yes, it was a very popular industry on that street back then. It’s very like movie rental. The books were mostly pirated novels from the Internet. The quality varies but usually on the lower side. It’s perfect for spending time during boring classes, which I did endlessly. But once the mobile phones are popularized in students, all the book rental stores are just gone: since the most popular books in those stores are on the Internet any way. Internet cafes are not so popular anymore but are not totally vanished: even with everyone has their own computer nowadays, it’s still useful for some friends play video games together. Gaming magazine is mostly the same story: there is less business but they are not totally gone. But the one I read the most in the past had closed the business. I only found it out many years later and it made me very sad.

Actually, not only the after dinner activities have vanished, even my high school was vanished all together as well: it’s moved to a suburb like location and the students must live there. The original site became a middle school.

On the other side, street food has lasted much longer. So like before, I went there again but only found the food stalls were all hidden in a nearby street. Curiously, I asked one of them why, and they told me there is an inspection from government for the award of “clean city”. This is typical campaign style governance: when an event like this happens, there will be a campaign across the city to make very absurd policies that makes normal life very inconvenient. The policies are also unsustainable, which is reverted soon after the events passed. It happened so many times in the past so I didn’t feel surprised. But I also found there was no high school student buying the food, which is kind of strange since it’s the time when after classes are over. I asked again and was told the remaining high school adopted “military style management”, so the students were not allowed to go out during the rest anymore.

“Military style” school is trending in my hometown now. I really hate it. I think it’s just many parents don’t want to have the responsibility to raise the kids, and just throwing them into the school with strict rules. Chinese people value education very much. But a lot of them just like buying education, and think that’s enough. Like if they’ve spent enough money for the kids and the kids still didn’t turn out to be good, they’ve done everything they can and it’s not the parents’ fault. However, they don’t realise that parents are a big part of the education and no money can buy that part. And their standard of “good kids” are simple: have good scores in tests and be obedience. This explains why military style schools are so popular: the students spend little time at home so that the parents feel like they have less responsibility, and it sure sounds effective for raising obedience kids. Not all schools adopted that approach, so the business for after school classes are also popular even after the government abruptly banned the practise a few years ago. I even saw some “AI study room”, which is the most weird AI hype business I’ve ever seen, and one of them spells “AI” as “Ai”. I asked my friends what it’s about, and apparently it’s just a place that the parents can drop the kids after school, so that someone can monitor them to finish the homework. Education is surely one of reasons of my immigration to Canada: I don’t want my children to experience the kind of education I’ve had, which somehow even managed to get worse.

I also noticed the security for the schools seems to be leveled up. There are some barriers and police present in front of the school gate when parents picking up kids after school. Maybe partly because of some random attacks happened across China not long before, with some cases targeted students.

After I started the hobby of retro computing, I started to buy more from Chinese used market since it’s much cheaper. This time I traveled with Thinkpad X220 instead of Thinkpad X1 Extreme, mainly want to test how it works when travelling, but also as an opportunity to buy some parts for it. I upgraded it with more RAM and bought a new battery for it. It turned out great: not only it can handle everyday tasks like Internet browsing without any problem, I can also play some light games on Steam. The small size of it makes it very easy to use on the road. Like I said in the last blog post about year end retrospective, I’ll write a more detailed blog about this laptop.

Beijing

Last year when I went back, I only stayed in Beijing for one night. This time, I went there for a slightly longer time of one day. I took the high speed train to Beijing, which is very common in China. It’s fast, cheap and much more comfortable than plane. I really wish Canada can build some high speed trains so that we don’t need to go to the airport just for a one hour flight.

I was able to meet with my cousin and some friends there. The lunch I had with my cousin was unexpected: we found a hotpot place where the brand is supposed to be a very popular one which both of us had multiple times in Beijing. But after ordered the food, we found out it’s a knock off: instead of XX Hotpot, it’s actually Authentic XX Hotpot. Unsurprisingly, the food was terrible. Which is a shame because I don’t have much opportunity to have food in Beijing anymore. But it’s also hilarious that two people that each stayed in Beijing for almost a decade can still fall in to that kind of scam.

Like me, my cousin started to hate staying in Beijing after a few years. I think it’s a common thing between people in Beijing. Unlike southern China, no city in northern China is near the level of Beijing. So naturally, lots of people in northern China go to there for opportunities. However, like I said in the last year’s travel back to China blog, Beijing is a city that don’t care about normal people and can suck the energy out of the people. Because I got to stay in Beijing for longer this time, I experienced it more: after I left Beijing, I sometimes wondered, why I didn’t visit more places in Beijing when I was there, especially I worked from home during my last two years there. The visit to Beijing this time reminds me why: Beijing is a city that is so large and places so separated out. It has excellent subway. So people use it most of time. My day there was mostly spent underground in subway, where you cannot really see the city. Daily life like this makes people feel like they are just a part of a big machine. After many years in Beijing, the city was still like fragments to me. Only after I started to commute by bike not long before I left Beijing, I started to piece together the fragments and had a better sense of the city.

Subway maybe the most used transportation method in Beijing. So there is no surprise security checks happened a lot in the stations. Other than mandatory security checks at the entrance, police also check IDs randomly from time to time, which I encountered just after I arrived Beijing. I ignored them and just passed around when they were checking someone else’s ID and nobody seemed to care. I also encountered two security check points on the road, in a short distance taxi trip I took. One is on the inner city highway, which took a full lane. Another one is on the exit and blocked all the cars. It was evening rush hour, but the security checkpoints didn’t seem to care about the congestion it caused or worsened.

The gap of lifestyles in Beijing can be dramatic. Inside the second ring road, there are lots of ancient and traditional buildings left. The import government institutions are also in there. This is the Beijing when most of the people from other places think about it. However, in real world, there is little people live inside the second ring road. There are lots of companies and universities between 3rd and 5th ring road, which lacks some characters but more like a modern big city. Lots of the people live outside the fifth ring road. From a glance, many places there have no difference from an average small town in northern China. There is usually a big mall around for shopping and eating. Other than that, you mostly need to take subways for destinations. I read the awarding winning sci-fi novel Folding Beijing back when I was in Beijing. It tells a fiction society where three classes are strictly separated. I didn’t have much thought when I read it. But visiting Beijing again, taking subways underground all the day, I suddenly remembered it and found its fiction is so real on so many levels.

The night in Beijing was still cold during the winter. But it’s nice to have dinner with old friends. We met at a place that used to be the heart of China’s IT industrial. The IT companies have moved to a very remote place since then, and lots of big malls occupied the area. I remember the place as a lively area but it was kind of quite that night. Maybe it’s because of the weekday. I was told Covid also hit the commercials big. After dinner, I slept over at a friend’s place, who owns a home but is renting now because his wife was transferred to another location temporarily. It reminds me the time when I was renting in Beijing. During my first months in Beijing, I was searching a place to live with a friend. We took the subway to a potential place that is very rural like. When my friend heard the landlord would pick us up from the subway station with a van, the kind that is usually seen in movies used by kidnappers, he was so afraid and tried to convince me to turn back. Nevertheless, we rented that place at the end. When another friend first came to Beijing, I was going to move away so I gave him the place. He said it was so remote that he felt like he already left Beijing just after the moment he arrived. I still have fond memory about the subway station there: standing in a rural place with dirts, grasses, strong wind, and snow sometimes, without any obstacles, you can see the elliptical shaped station from very far away. It is elevated high above the ground with the subway track going through it. The station is very new and shinny. It’s spacious and bright inside. During the early morning and late night, with the track and bridge hidden in the dark, the only thing you can see is the illuminated station floating in the air, with trains flying in and out slowly. It’s really like a space station in a newly developed planet. It’s the magic node connecting this area to the outside. People rushed in in the morning, packed the train so full that sometimes the subway station staff need to push people onto the train. Then people rushed out during the evening, when the moon took over the sky and climbed above the station. When I had dinner with the friend again and talked about it, he told me that place has been developed so much. There are lots of new buildings and commercials. Partially because the IT industrial in Beijing has moved to that direction. I wondered if the station can still be seen from far away.

Paris

Time is so fast in China and it’s time to leave before we even adjusted. We planned Paris as the detour during the way back. I always knew Paris is a nice city, and France has so many influences to the world: its art, fashion, food, culture, politics and so on. But not until I saw lots of the city scenes of Paris when I watched Olympic games last year , I started to have the desire of actually visiting it someday. I’ve never thought the day would come so soon.

With the experience in London, we carefully looked up the train we needed to take from the airport to the city. This time we didn’t take the wrong train, but instead, witnessed a scam/robbery: when the train was approaching a station, there were three men wanted to get off. I stood with the stroller where my daughter was sleeping, and they squeezed pass me. In retrospective, I felt something was not so right because they were kind of rude. But this is another country so I didn’t know what is normal. There was a couple, maybe in their sixties, stood not far away from me. When one of the men passed the couple, he dropped a coin and started to look it up by lifting their suitcases, with the other two men joined to help. Soon the train stopped at the station and the door opened. Suddenly, the men started to grab the bags and suitcases by force. Luckily, the couple protected their luggages well. Before the robbers could grab anything, it started to attract attentions so they were forced to give up and started to run. Just after the moment I realized what happened, they were already at the door. I thought: “Shit! My suitcase is at the door!” But maybe the suitcase was too big and didn’t seem to worth much, they just glanced at it and escaped without a second thought.

I’ve heard Paris has petty crime problem, but witness one just after arrived shocked me and really let my guard up. Luckily we didn’t have much trouble to get to our hotel. And we only saw another similar accident once in the following days, when two police men chasing another men near Eiffel Tower.

Our hotel is at prime location: just across the Seine river from Notre-Dame. We took the similar plan as we were in London: visited Louvre Museum on the first day. It’s hard to not compare it with the British Museum. Even though I heard the British Museum had much more collections than Louvre Museum, no one can argue the architecture of Louvre is much more majestic. I would say the building itself is one of its most amazing collections.

The weather was not so good there. It was raining on the first day we arrived, then turned very cold on the second day. We visited Notre-Dame very early in the second morning, and just after we went out, it started to rain very heavily. The wind was so strong that it broke my umbrella. I was wet very soon without the umbrella. Despair and frustrated, it suddenly started to snow! I almost wanted to give up the day and went back to the hotel. But the rain and snow stopped pretty soon, so we continued the plan to walk in the city. After we’ve reached Arc de Triomphe and found a place to eat lunch, the sun started to came out. We headed to Eiffel Tower after lunch. The cloud soon cleared up and the city was so bright. The good weather continued through the day. When we walked across Seine river during the evening, the sunset was so beautiful: the water reflected the red sun, with rosy gold color on all the grand buildings nearby: The Conciergerie, Sainte-Chapelle, Notre-Dame and so on. Then we heard a soft song from a street singer on the bridge. At that moment, I thought Paris is really the capital of romantic.

Paris is truly beautiful. In the days there, the amazement only increased when I explored more and more of the city. I’ve never seen such a large area that has so many beautiful architectures in such a consistent style. It’s like being thrown into a totally different world and it’s really a dream like experience. Yet it has so much history. When I visited Chinese cities, I can associate lots of history events and figures to the places I visited, which gave me a much deeper feeling. Few foreign cities had that effect on me (maybe I would count Kyoto as one of them). But in Paris, even I have very limited knowledge of France, I can still associate lots of history events and figures to the places I visited, because there are just so many of them and it’s hard to not know, or at least heard some of them as long as you’ve studied basic history and literature in the middle school. That along makes the city so much richer than just a “beautiful city”.

Overall the experience in Paris is very positive even considering the accidents I witnessed. The food is also surprisingly good. Somewhat like its history, the rich of the tastes is something I rarely got from the non Chinese food. The only thing I wish could be better is how long I stayed there: three and a half days are just so little for a city like Paris. But it’s already what we could do for a vacation with such packed schedule. And considering it’s only a detour, which means we didn’t pay more for the flights compared to go back directly, we couldn’t ask for more.

New York

We transferred through New York again when we flew from Paris to Toronto. We spent lots of time in Paris airport because the check-in agent couldn’t figure out our complex passports, visas and routes. The plane was also late for a little bit so the time left for transferring in New York is very tight. I’ve had so many connecting flights but this time it’s different: we needed to go out of the boarding area when the plane arrived, and do security checks again to enter. More than one bags alerted during the security checks, maybe because of the baby food and snacks we brought. So I was asked to do a full body check, which certainly didn’t help with the tight time. I was asked multiple questions for the consensual, only to find out it’s the kind of the search that is very common in some Chinese airports and train stations, which almost every passenger need to do.

After packing the bags again following the search, I was very tired after such a long trip that I miscalculated the time zones, and thought we could barely make the next flight. So we ran to the gate only to find out there is an additional one hour. We didn’t pick up checked in luggages, because those are usually carried to the final destination with the planes. But it turned out we needed to do so for this transfer. We only knew that after we’ve arrived Toronto when couldn’t find our luggages. I filled out a form to have them be shipped to my home the next day, and went back without those suitcases.

I was so tired after came back, and still dreamed Paris for a few days after. However, the trip turned out very good and it makes me more determined to travel back every year. And I got some good rest and was able to get the time to write this blog post. Thinking about the travel, it’s almost like living two life styles: in Canada, the time is slow, long and peaceful. I spend most of the time on work, research and my own small family instead of socializing. While in China, the time is fast. I spend almost all the time to connect with my extended family and friends, eating outside and so on. Then there is also visiting exciting places on the way. Hopefully I can continue to go back and record it every year in the foreseeable future.