Jul 24, 2016
China, Tibet
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Death

 Yarchen and Sertar, Sichuan, China  ཡ་ཆེན གསེར

Home to two of the biggest Buddhist monasteries in the world, something is going on here and no one’s talking.

Access to Sertar has just begun to be prohibited for foreigners, but there’s a feeling that Yarchen may suffer the same fate soon. Since I’m technically not a foreigner, I was able to waltz right into both places. (As with Tibet province.) Plenty of domestic tourists. Nothing felt amiss.

I took two overnight trips while based in Garzê: first, to Yarchen Gar (Chinese: Yaqing Si 亚青寺), a sprawling monastery city where everyone’s a monk or nun. Well, mostly nuns — way more nuns than monks, in fact. The view from the hilltop is a sight to behold.
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Jul 22, 2016
China, Tibet
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Invitation

Rongbacha Village Horse Racing Festival
 Garzê, Sichuan, China  དཀར་མཛེས་

Tibet isn’t just the Chinese province of Tibet. Despite having parts annexed into other provinces, Tibetan culture is still well and alive in Sichuan and Qinghai, where Tibetan-majority autonomous areas exist — in some ways, you could say it’s even more Tibet than Tibet.

Garzê (Chinese: Ganzi 甘孜) is probably one of the more famous areas, with domestic and foreign tourists (often those who can’t enter Tibet) alike, but even then it’s hardly a hotspot, with its somewhat remote location in the far west of Sichuan 四川 province. Eschewing any further package tours from Lhasa, few to none of which stop in Garzê, I chose to head to Garzê the local way: wait six hours for a share taxi, then sit for 40 more hours (of Tibetan pop and rap, Bon Jovi, that Vengabus song from the 90s, Bollywood music, and Tibetan covers of western music) as it heads through beautiful but gruelling roads that don’t even exist on the map, crossing rivers, pushing the car up muddy slopes, sleeping in the car as drivers alternate and continue through the night. Everyone was so tired the second night that we gave up and stopped at a guesthouse for all of seven hours.

We were split into a two-car caravan, with Sonam driving the car I was in, along with his wife and two kids. Being stuck in a car together with people you don’t know for three days makes for either massive awkwardness or a quick friendship — and luckily, the latter happened. His young children were remarkably patient and well-behaved (or just sleepy) in a very bumpy and long car ride, and I got to know them a bit — Sonam’s from the Garzê area, his wife Wamu from Shigatse where they live, and they’re heading over to visit his family.
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Jul 11, 2016
China, Tibet
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High

 Shigatse and Mt. Everest, Tibet, China  གཞིས་ཀ་རྩེ་གྲོང

As if 3600m Lhasa wasn’t enough to leave me breathless, why not head to the highest place in the world? (This, in a year where I headed somewhere close to the opposite already!)

It may be the most touristy thing to do in Tibet, but it’s worth it. (It’s also much easier and cheaper as a Chinese national; access to Tibet is restricted to guided tours only if otherwise.) I joined a four-day tour to the Chinese base camp of Mount Everest — known as Qomolangma in Tibetan (ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ) and Chinese (珠穆朗玛峰), or just Zhufeng 珠峰 for short. (Being the demarcation of the Nepalese border, it’s known as Sagarmatha there.) We crossed some of the highest roads in the world, passing by countless stretches of stunning scenery: fields of wildflowers, Tibetan villages, impossibly blue lakes (oxygen-deprived, due to the altitude) like Yamdrok-tso, monasteries, and even the Kharola glacier above 7000m with the viewpoint leaving me heaving at 5560m! I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
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Jul 7, 2016
China, Tibet
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Unspoken

 Lhasa, Tibet, China  ལྷ་ས།

It took two days to get from Xi’an to Lhasa (with a one-night stop in Xining, Qinghai) by train. China’s rail network is one of the largest in the world, and its 10-year-old extension to Lhasa (Chinese: Lasa 拉薩) is an incredible feat of engineering, climbing the Tibetan Plateau from an elevation of 2300m in Xining, past 4000m somewhere along the line, and about 3500m in Lhasa — so quickly that every single person on the train not already acclimatised to high altitudes suffers from altitude sickness. And that train is full, full, full: vacationers trying to beat the summer heat elsewhere within China, student backpackers, Tibetans returning home or just visiting…

Aside from being breathless and suffering from a mild headache, arriving in Lhasa looks like arriving pretty much anywhere else in China. Hop on a public bus, pass through large shopping areas and glitzy screens, and–

Oh wait. Are we in China? Of course we’re in China. Flags flags flags flags flags. Hmm. I don’t recall ever seeing this many Chinese flags in any city before.
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Jun 30, 2016
China
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Scale

 Xi’an, Shaanxi, China 西安

Xi’an is one of the most significant cities in China, having been its often-renamed capital during some of China’s most significant dynasties. It’s so full of cultural and historical significance, with plenty of attractions showcasing it, that one of my hosts says “You could pick up a rock and it would probably be considered a cultural artifact.” At one point during the Tang dynasty sometime around 750, Xi’an (then Chang’an 長安) was the largest city in the world, and now it’s a sprawling 10000 square kilometre megalopolis of 8 million people, with its ancient city wall still intact and forming the core of the city’s downtown.

And yet, within two hours of getting off the high-speed train from Shenzhen, I found myself in an alley next to a large hotel just outside the city wall, handing out condoms to grateful cross-dressing prostitutes. Talk about an introduction to the city.
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Jun 19, 2016
China
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尋根 / Ancestry

 Chaozhou, Guangdong, China 潮州

So this entry really isn’t just about Chaozhou, but about Chaoshan. But when we’ve spent decades claiming that our homeland is Chaozhou, not realising the difference? That’s a little shameful. Then again, I didn’t even know Chaozhou was a city until recently (I thought it was a province), and couldn’t point to it on a map if you asked.

Three-quarters of my bloodline hails from the Chaoshan region. It’s often simply and confusingly referred to as Chaozhou, better known amongst the Cantonese-speaking diaspora (of which I am a part of) as Chiu Chow, and as Teochew in its eponymous language that I cannot speak or understand. While part of the Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province 廣東/广东, the Chaoshan (Teoswa) region is unique in that it uses the Teochew language instead. (Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has six, and Teochew has eight!) While not actually true, it sometimes seems like there’s far more Teochew people outside of Chaozhou than in it! Many ethnic Chinese people you may know, even prominent politicians — particularly in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and immigrants in Canada and USA — trace their lineage to this region. Members of this Teochew diaspora have tended to lose their language within a generation, including my parents, who are still able to understand it due to being raised with the language present, but largely unable to speak it.
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Jun 16, 2016
China
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甲天下 / Under heaven

 Guilin, Guangxi, China 桂林

As a family, we took a four day trip to Guilin to enjoy its famed scenery, with the help of a driver/guide. Pouring rain every day made the trip rather difficult — despite being rainy season, it’s also China’s peak travel season due to summer vacation — but we were able to make the most of it.

Guilin and its surrounds (including Yangshuo 陽/阳朔 and Xingping 興/兴平, which we also stopped by) are most famous for the karst mountains, and indeed, the city is surrounded by them: they jut straight out of the ground, curve in impossible fashion, and even form natural arches. It’s no wonder they’re so revered that they’re consistently the inspiration to a lot of Chinese art, the style my mom most enjoys painting. And with the consistent rain, what we saw was the misty, mysterious atmosphere that the semi-obscure peaks and Li River lends, one we never would have seen had it been sun and blue skies the whole time.
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Jun 13, 2016
China, Macau
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Lusophile

 Macau 澳門

Macau is currently quite well-known as Las Vegas of the East — although, given how much more money is involved here, maybe Las Vegas should be the Macau of the West. Anyway, gambling. Not what we’re here for. But through a relative’s friend that does go to Macau on the regular exactly for that, we scored a free night’s stay at a swaaaanky hotel (with a casino attached that we just ignored), along with the fast ferry tickets. Yay, free trip!

What interests me far, far more though is Macau’s history relating to Portugal. Macau (Oumun in Cantonese) originated as a trading port established by the Portuguese, who were later given the land by China in a far less acriminous manner than the UK with Hong Kong — the Portuguese first considered Macau a colony, but later a “Chinese city under Portuguese administration” prior to returning it back to China in 1999. Like Hong Kong, Macau essentially acts as a country in all but name, with its own flag, passport, currency (Macau pataca, pegged at HK$0.97 but used interchangeably), and legal system. Portuguese is still an official language alongside Cantonese, and bilingual signs here seem so weird to me, especially in particularly Hong Kong-looking areas! Even bus routes are in Chinese and Portuguese, with no English. (Though finding someone that speaks Portuguese another matter — you’re far more likely to find English speakers.)
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Jun 12, 2016
China, Hong Kong
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Emigrant

 Hong Kong 香港

It’s taken me over a decade to focus on my birthplace.

I used to come to Hong Kong every couple of years, back when my grandparents were still alive. Being a rather lazy and petulant kid, I was pretty much dragged kicking and screaming every time, and never really enjoyed the many trips. Outside of seeing family, every trip seemed to involve spending weeks staying at a hotel next to a mall. The few times we left the confines of one of the seemingly thousands of shopping malls never really left an impression on me, and as a result, I never got to know the city or how to get around short of hopping into a taxi and magically teleporting to wherever my family needed to be.

The last time I was in Hong Kong was for a mere eight-hour layover, which I greatly enjoyed — spending it with my good friend Jacqueline, who took me around the city for the first time without it being a family obligation. That was five years ago. The last real time I spent any significant amount of time in the city was 14 years ago.

It’s a strange feeling being here. I look like everyone else, I speak Cantonese like everyone else (although with a pretty noticeable accent and diction of a non-native), I have plenty of extended family that I’m seeing, the food is comprised of many of my favourite dishes, I know the culture since it’s what I grew up with in Vancouver’s large Hong Konger community, and yet… This is my homeland, but it’s not home.
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Jun 2, 2016
Singapore
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Change

 Singapore

There’s a common saying in Southeast Asia, often displayed on t-shirts: “Same same but different.” I never really got an explanation as to why, but I think this really applies here.

I spent a year on exchange in Singapore, which concluded five years ago. I remember the first days of after arrival, how overwhelmed I was by everything: the stifling heat, the flashy buildings, the sheer amount of people, the efficiency, the incredible variety of food.
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