West 3rd Ring
Beijing, China
I hesitate to claim this corner of Beijing as a home. I spent the first four years of my life here, but I have almost no memories from that time.
Since then, I’ve been back on just a handful of occasions, never longer than a couple of weeks at a time. The most significant trip was in 2013 after I left New Zealand. I wanted to visit my relatives and experience Beijing and Shijiazhuang as an adult.
That said, the trip lasted only a month and I don’t think I ever lost the feeling of being a guest. Even so, I walked the streets near this part of the city where my grandparents live and eventually gained a familiarity with my surroundings. In particular, I found a comfort in the true anonymity that I felt in a place where everyone looked like me.
But in the years since that trip, I’ve concluded that my provenance is maybe similar to that of an iPhone: the hardware may have been originally made in China, but the software was definitely written in the west.
Mooncakes
(A photoessay I’ve been trying to grind out since my last visit in September 2024—but like I’ve said elsewhere: the months since have been lifechanging, so 2026 might be when I finally finish this essay)
It’s 2024 in the week leading up to the mid-autumn festival. I’m about to spend a week in Beijing—hard to believe it’s my first time visiting China since 2013.
My grandfather had passed away somewhat suddenly in early 2022. While it wasn’t directly covid-induced, it did happen while China was on full covid lockdown. Predictably, that only made everything harder.
While the country was more or less closed to visitors, as soon as China cracked its doors just a sliver, my dad jumped through all sorts of hoops to be able to visit my grandfather’s grave. The rest of us couldn’t justify the mandatory seven-day quarantine at the time, so we stayed behind.
It was a decision that I remember made perfect sense at the time, yet today makes me quite angry. Somehow, in the fog of war and mental illness that the covid lockdowns induced, ignoring my grandfather’s death seemed nothing out of the ordinary. Lord have mercy.
In the centuries (and maybe even millennia) before, the mid-autumn festival has been a celebration of the harvest. How much I had to personally harvest in 2024 then, after my search for home the last few years. I had doggedly sown the seeds of reintegration across neighborhoods, cities, countries, continents since my early 30’s—and perhaps now I was finally ready bring that harvest to my birthplace, where it all began.
Mooncakes are traditional fare during the mid-autumn festival. In case you haven’t seen one before, I generated a thematic picture for this photo essay using AI. My favorite mooncake is probably the bean paste + duck egg yolk combo that is more traditional in the south.
I’m going to offer you six mooncakes, each filled with the essence of a vignette from my week in Beijing. See which one you like best.
Mooncake 1 (童 – Childhood)
Falling backwards 8 feet off a concrete pillar and landing on my butt in the middle of a wet road was the cost of securing the best photo of the trip~
At my current skill level (i.e. low), almost all of my photos are of serendipitous origin, meaning that it was by total chance that the photo came to be. Perhaps I’ll be in a moment where I can sense “there’s a good photo in here somewhere”, but in order to get it, I kind of have to spray and pray and check the results in Lightroom much later. I think this is actually relatable to most hobby photographers.
But once every so often, a photo “becomes”, meaning that I can see the finished photo in my mind’s eye long before I take it—the composition, the colors, the mood. All of this might be accessible to me even though I don’t yet know how or where it’ll happen.
The photo above is one such photo, and this is the story of how it came to be.
My grandfather was a division leader in China’s railroad electrification effort. China’s bureaucracy is opaque to me (and most, I assume), but my understanding from the best English sources I could gather is that the Railroad Electrification Bureau (CREB) was (is?) a subsidiary of China Railway Group Ltd, a state-owned company responsible for the construction, electrification, and modernization of China’s rail network. The CREB was established in 1958 with a specific mission to electrify China’s railways, a critical step for modernizing its transportation infrastructure. Considering China’s formidable rail network today, I suppose it worked. It’s cool to be able to see the throughline of my grandfather’s legacy like that.
Headquartered at the West 3rd Ring near Beijing West Station, my grandfather was also assigned a couple of apartments right next to CREB’s headquarters. It is thus that my dad’s side of the family ended up putting roots down in a block of buildings known as the Golden Family Village.
As an interesting aside, during this trip is also when I learned about the east/west dynamic of Beijing, with the western part of the city traditionally representing the power of the communist party and the eastern part of the city being the nexus of the merchant class. Consequently, a lot of the cultural scene of Beijing is located in the eastern part of the city, not the west.
Fittingly, my dad’s side of the family is zero percent mercantile (something I discovered the hard way during the early days of CollegeVine), and so along the lie of the 3rd West Ring, you’ll find mostly government and military concerns. To the extent that there is commercial activity, it mostly follows the subway stations. As for the block of buildings known as the Golden Family Village, there’s not much of cultural scene to be found—it’s the “post-Revolution” aesthetic that I can remember ever since I was a kid. It hasn’t changed much.
A memory that’s fairly deeply engrained in me is coming out of that courtyard and smelling the putrefaction of waterlogged sewage. It came from a canal next to the building complex. I don’t know if it was the case back then, but today, that canal is owned by the city waterworks. Apparently, as part of Beijing’s intense green-ification around the time of the 2008 Olympics, the canal got a new destiny. These days, the smell is gone and people actually fish there now.
Before even arriving, I knew the photo I wanted was somewhere along the canal, but it wasn’t yet clear where.
I was to arrive an entire day before anyone else in my family, which would give me some extra quality time to spend with my cousin and his wife. In the decade that passed, my cousin not only got married, but also became a father. So much of his life had happened while I wasn’t looking—he probably felt the same way hearing about my updates, halfway around the world. But I would actually contend that very little of my life had happened in the last 10 years: I had given it all to my company.
Cousin and cousin-in-law picked me up from the airport after a long, but surprisingly comfortable Hainan Airlines flight from Seattle (the ol’ undersold empty-middle-seat upgrade!). It would take a few days to boot up the fluency of my Chinese and avoid relying on English words in conversation, but on the hour-long drive back from the airport, we quickly got on the same page with a little help from ChatGPT, which was a huge quality of life upgrade previously unavailable to me in 2013.
Our destination was my grandmother’s house in the aforementioned Golden Family Village. My grandma and aunt now lived together after my grandfather passed, close enough to my cousin’s house that they would receive daily check-ins. Even writing this, I couldn’t help but feel the pang of an abrogation of my own duties that I reflexively wished to rectify. I decided during this trip that I would be back more often to contribute my own share of service and care.
Walking up those familiar stairs and courtyard, I opened the door to a teary embrace from my grandmother, who in her traditional way, thinks very highly of her eldest grandson.
I tried my best to eat a little bit of the dinner they offered me, but it wasn’t so productive given that I was now deep into the early morning hours of my bodyclock. After 20 mins of conversation, I threw in the towel and got a ride from my cousin to the nearby hotel he had arranged for us to stay at.
Just a few blocks west at the 4th Ring, the hotel was a flagship new construction of the Hualuxe group. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how nice the hotel was; however, given that it cost essentially the same in USD as any 4-star hotel would in the US, it kind of made sense that it was unusually nice.
Yet given that we were on the western side of Beijing, there wasn’t much of a foreign clientele there, so it meant that this hotel made its living off locals who were happy to pay the local relative equivalent of Park Hyatt prices. I guess I’ve learned time and time again not to underestimate the wealth that is currently in China right now, especially among the business class.
The next morning, I went down to the breakfast buffet and was immediately beyond myself with the diversity of food items available there. We’re talking custom noodle + congee station manned with a chef, coffee and pastry bar manned with two baristas, a morning fruit station featuring dragonfruit, pineapple, watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe, a steamed foods station, a western breakfast section, a chinese breakfast section, a cereal + milk/soymilk bar, full charcuterie table, and I’m probably missing a couple more.
For that first day after a jetlagged, melatonin induced 10-hour sleep (and frankly the next 3 or 4 days after that), I was all about that breakfast. It wasn’t until later in the week that I started feeling jaded that the selection never rotated.
The hedonic treadmill, man.
It was a rainy, misty morning on the next day, which was disappointing to me as I had planned to walk over to my grandma’s place from the hotel in the hopes of snapping a few photos along the way. Fortunately, it never grew to a downpour, so it still felt possible to go out there with a camera and see if I mightn’t make something out of a 20-minute walk.
Out on the streets, it felt weird to be walking around by myself as an adult. I hadn’t actually ever done that before, always accompanied by family or relatives, an arrangement which always kind of framed me as a child, whether they intended to or not.
But here I was, freshly 36, back in the year of the Dragon—three revolutions of the zodiac—finally walking around Beijing like it’s but one of the many other cities I’ve been to.
I felt anonymous in a way that I don’t often feel because I’m usually in places where no one looks like me, instead of a place where everyone looks like me. Yet still I stood out because my body language just looks kind of different from everyone there. I’m walking around with more… individuality?
It also feels weird to be walking around with a professional camera. I keep thinking about the CCTV cameras that are on almost every light pole, which should make it feel less weird to take people’s photos since they’re being recorded all the time in public anyway, but all I feel is that I’m being watched.
At the first intersection upon leaving the hotel, I choose to get closer to the canal instead of walking the busy main street, but there’s immediately a fork in the road: I can either walk on the road next to the canal which doesn’t have a sidewalk, or I can go into what looks like a park that runs alongside the road.
The park is the obvious choice, even though it looks like it’s elevated and completely fenced off from the road. It’s got a playground and some abstract artwork staged as far as I can see. It’s peaceful too on this drizzly Monday morning. I figure I’ll walk through the park and just exit it on the other side and get back to the canal-side road.
Some five minutes later (it’s a seriously long park), a major problem: the park just dead ends. My first thought is “of course someone in China made a park that’s like 50 yards wide and three football fields deep with only a single entrance on the end.” My second thought is that there’s no way I’m backtracking.
To my left, there has been a pattern of concrete pillars with metal fencing this entire time. Presumably, they don’t want the kids to fall onto the street, even though that’s the kind of kid I need to be right now.
I get the genius idea that only a jetlagged parkour wannabe can have: what if I vault up to the concrete pillar and hop off on the other side? Maybe I’ll backflip too while I’m at it. I can already see my body fully extended in midair as I spot the landing and gracefully land in a superhero pose on one knee. The ground even shatters a little from my intense gravity. Sick.
Meanwhile, the camera pans back to reality. I’m groping at the concrete pillar trying to deperately confirm that I can indeed reach the top of the pillar on my tippy toes. I peer over the side of the piller and it looks like the park is elevated by a few feet additionally off the ground, so seen from the other side, the concrete pillar is actually something like 8 or 9 feet high to the sidewalk-less road.
Even as I’m writing this, I can’t believe I didn’t question whether this was actually a good idea. I guess I had seen a vision of myself and decided that it must be true. Leave it to my fake-well-slept-actually-jetlagged self to think it obvious that I’d be able to execute a parkour move that I had literally never done before.
So I stash the camera in my backpack, think one last time about the CCTV cameras all around, ignore that thought, and proceed to cosplay as an honorary STORROR team member… who hasn’t actually ever done parkour except in his head after watching YouTube.
With a running start, I plant my foot against the concrete pillar, kick off, and launch myself into a pretty clean muscle up over the top of the column, which is maybe only a one-foot square of surface area. So far so good. I begin to feel the rush of confidence—the distance between fantasy and prophecy blurs. I stand up on the pillar, turn 180, squat down, grip my fingers on the opposite ledge and begin to drop my body down the other side.
Except my feet lose traction against the wet concrete, and now my upper forearms are the fulcrum point for my hapless fingers trying to exert the grip strength of a V8 climb—or so I imagine because I’ve only ever done a V5—cantilevering my entire bodyweight for about a hundred milliseconds before the violent rip.
It’s the full body extension alright. Except instead of an anime hero backflip, it’s the Wilhelm Scream into the abyss.
I crash to the ground, falling about 6 feet in the air to land on my left butt cheek and left palm in the middle of the canal road. I realize my backpack has taken a decent amount of the brunt as I think to look for oncoming traffic—and thank God that I didn’t get into any worse of an accident. With the adrenaline jumpstarting my brain out of a daydream fugue, I finally realize how idiotic I’ve been.
I look at my left palm and it’s bleeding. My tailbone aches and I have a dull sensation in my left butt cheek—something bruised around the femoral attachment at the hip socket, most likely.
Fortunately, I’m able to get up. All of this happens in like a second. The best part is that I continue walking as though nothing happened because I assume somewhere there’s a CCTV minder who’s laughing so hard that their job feels worth it again. Either that or my social credit score has been lowered due to a clear demonstration of low IQ.
A few yards down the road, I find an indent in the wall as the park fencing ends and I’m able to duck into a corner of expanded road to take a quick health diagnostic. The seat of my pants is wet, but not soaked; my left palm isn’t bleeding as bad as I thought; I can move my wrists just fine. And most importantly—as I open my backpack and dig to the bottom—my camera seems completely unscathed. I must have landed just so such that the lens hood acted as an extra structural support for the lens. I put the camera around my neck again with the strap, praising the Lord and counting my blessings.
It is at this moment that—as I step out from that little alcove—I see the shot and feel it “becoming” along the canal road, composing itself before my eyes. The soft reflection of the rain, the empty street, the dreamy wisps of willow trees, the dramatic colors, and the raw wonder of a child in an adult body looking at the path less traveled.
Click.