Letter From Manhattan 2


Thomas Dai | Longreads | January 21, 2025 | 5,159 words (19 minutes)

Two things happened to me right before I moved to China in 2017: I fell in love, and I witnessed a solar eclipse. The first experience caught me by surprise and basically unhinged me, so that for the three months I spent apart from L that summer, I could not be counted on to write sentences, or buy groceries, or maintain reciprocal conversations with friends. All I did was sit in my childhood room in Tennessee—I’d briefly moved back in with my parents—rewatching old episodes of Friday Night Lights and pining after L, a state of abject need everyone around me found, in a word, intolerable.

The second experience required protective eyewear and was planned to a T. I knew exactly when on August 21 the moon would intercede in between planet and star, and where I should be when that happened. Both events were, in their different ways, total (i.e., I was not the same person afterward). In both cases, I was unprepared, gobsmacked, a clammy-skinned ball of emotions reeling about in the kind of directionless dusk that only an infrequent celestial event or something approximate, like falling in love for the first time, can conjure. Bands of shadow quivered like muscles out on the lake. I looked up at the sky, sobbing at the stupid, inarticulate fullness in me.

Experiencing these two events in short order made moving to China feel almost mundane in comparison. Growing up, I’d visited relatives in the country on a semi-regular basis and had lived there for a year right after college. L, on the other hand, had never set foot outside of America, save for three nights in Mexico we both decided not to count. At that point in our relationship, he and I had only been dating a few months. That I’d asked him to relocate his life to a foreign country with me felt like a titanic imposition; that he’d actually agreed, a twist in the plot.

By the end of September, we were living in Chengdu, a city of 14 million known outside of China for its spicy food and proximity to pandas. We chose Chengdu not for either of these reasons but for the city’s freewheeling reputation: Chengduers supposedly hate working and love to entertain. The city seemed, for lack of a better word, “cool”—the kind of place two young people can go to disappear.

My apo and agong were not so young when they moved to Chengdu in the early ’70s. They had two children to raise, and familial roots back east in Zhejiang they’d been forced to abjure. For as long as I can remember, my grandparents have lived in a tenement building just off First Ring Road, a forgettable structure with the coloring and shape of a cinder block. The apartments inside are humble affairs: two rooms, one for living, the other for sleeping, with a cramped annex in between containing a kitchen and small washroom. My mother came of age in these environs, and these environs are where her parents have stayed.

To me, the city represented something else entirely: not a homecoming, but an exit. American politics had been skewing rightward since Trump’s election, especially when it came to outsiders, immigrants, or “CHAI-nuh,” a word our new president used like an epithet. I was well aware that Xi Jinping’s China was no better, no lower down on the scale of chauvinistic ethnonationalism, than Trump’s America, but as I joked to L at the time, at least the politburo was more consistent and purposeful in its authoritarianism. Here in China, there was not even the imprint of a functioning democracy to feel disillusioned by. We could lose ourselves to a novel context for a time, a maelstrom of politics and social dynamics, yes, but one we didn’t have to try too hard to understand.  

In any case, I wasn’t trying to defect from one nation to another. I was trying to build a life somehow external to that binary choice, a life one might call, sans irony, cosmopolitan. But what does such a life even look like? I didn’t know back then, but I knew what I thought it wasn’t. For most of my life, I’d maintained a China-America Venn diagram in my mind. On the American side, I’d placed language, sexual openness, art and self-expression, racism but also civil liberty. To China I had ceded family and blood, food and gathering, racial belonging cut by cultural opacity, social conformity, and silence. A cosmopolitan life would center those elusive traits and values that straddled both sides of the graph, that made such a stringently divided outlook seem unnecessary in the first place.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that L and I spent the bulk of our time in Chengdu lounging about an apartment complex called Manhattan 2, surfing the web using a VPN service that made it seem like we were in Brisbane. Our Manhattan-but-not apartment rambled across two stories connected by a floating staircase. Its amenities included a shell-like tub enclosed in a minimalist glass cube, sleek red cabinetry, a little garden where I hung up our his-and-his laundry, floor-to-ceiling windows that made the most of Chengdu’s anemic light. While living there, L and I did not cook one single meal or regularly check our social media accounts, which were blocked, or think in any constructive way about our “careers.” We worked sporadic hours at English training schools for bosses who didn’t care if we had the right visas or not, periodically leaving and reentering the country to reset the clock on our stays. We went out late and came back early, smiling stupidly at each other as the cab’s meter played its pre-recorded English jingle: “Welcome to Chengdu, a new global city, home of the panda!”

As that city yawed into motion outside, I’d watch neon galaxies collect and then fade on L’s face. My hand would find his on the seat, hazarding a squeeze. “Where are you going again?” the driver would inquire, uncoupling our hands. I’d tell him to take us to Manhadun Er on Xinxiwan Lu, because that was where we lived that year: 10 stories above a road named for “New Hope.”

So long as there are nations, there will be people trying to get out of them, tracking ceaselessly from one to the other while maybe wishing they could belong to the world instead. Philosophers have a name for this desire; they call it “cosmopolitanism.”

Within the Western tradition, the origins of this school of thought are usually traced back to Diogenes of Sinope, who apparently identified himself as “kosmoupolites,” or a “citizen of the world.” The writer Kwame Anthony Appiah subdivides the philosophy into “moral” and “cultural” strains. Moral cosmopolitanism is basically Liberalism 101: the idea, still radical to some, that every human should be treated equally regardless of creed, race, nation, or sex. Meanwhile, cultural cosmopolitanism focuses on the glorious mixology of global art forms and social movements (see the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints on 19th-century European impressionism, to cite just one of infinite examples). Both these strains must exist for any truly cosmopolitan ethos to endure, or so Appiah argues. They are the all-important addends of an equation he sums up as “universality plus difference.”

Cosmopolitan rhetoric enjoyed something of a renaissance in the late ’80s and ’90s, a time in which fevered visions of a post-national world order were migrating out of the academy and into public consciousness. For many of us born into that time—after the Berlin Wall’s felling but before the World Trade Center’s—cosmopolitanism has always seemed like a rational thing to aspire to, a new-old way of aligning oneself in a world freed of obvious alignments. I’m sure we have called it different names, this statelessness of the mind. Whatever word we land on—be it pluralism, globalization, worldliness, etc.—I believe the underlying conviction is the same: that it is to the world at large and not just one country or community that we each owe our allegiance.   

Everyone L and I knew in Chengdu had also come to the city from somewhere else. At the English training schools where we worked, our colleagues had passports from Poland and Lithuania, South Africa and Belarus. My boss had grown up in New Mexico, though he’d spent most of the last decade in China, long enough to father two sons and start an English teaching business with a woman from Lanzhou he was now trying to divorce. In Manhattan 2, L and I lived above a trio of sandy-haired Californians, or maybe Canadians who’d lived for a time in Oakland (I couldn’t keep their story straight). The “Cocktail Boys,” as we called them, kept a giant bovine skull and two unused surfboards on their terrace. They were distractingly handsome in the right lighting, which made their entrepreneurial enterprise, a cocktail delivery service they called Nova, seem less asinine than it was.

And then there was Kristen, a kiwi of Chinese descent I’d met three years earlier while hitchhiking down the Karakoram Highway. Back then, Kristen had been studying Mandarin at Sichuan University; now she was a Chengdu local, not quite bendiren but more embedded than your usual expat. Kristen worked as an event promoter for an arts venue called NuSpace. She deejayed and made her own electronic music, splicing together samples of ’90s R&B and Uyghur hip-hop. While living in Chengdu, I would sometimes read Kristen’s blog, Kiwese, where she posted album reviews, tour dates, and the occasional pensive reflection on the Chengdu underground scene. I found her writing refreshingly frank, even when the content wasn’t always cheery. It was heartening to know that even one of those people who seemed to move so effortlessly through the world also felt the friction of her transit. “It tests me to be confident in myself,” she wrote once, “to remember where I’ve come from (an isolated set of islands in the Pacific Ocean) and where my ancestors have come from (rural villages in southern China), and to have patience.”

I was also trying to have patience—with myself, and with Chengdu. I wanted to feel comfortable there, to find my own routine within cosmopolitanism. About once a month, L and I would have lunch with my apo at a KFC by her apartment. We’d eat spicy drumsticks shellacked in grease as Apo looked on, an expression of contented disgust on her face (though she didn’t eat meat, my apo nonetheless insisted on taking us to eat “American food” whenever we visited her). After each meal, we’d walk around her neighborhood, noting the new construction—the city was building its seventh subway line right in front of her building—as Apo kept telling me different versions of the same advice: It was nice I’d come here to Chengdu, but I should hasten back to my studies in America when I was done with my “break.”

Apo didn’t really understand what I was doing in China, or who this laowai was who kept crashing our lunches. I called L my “roommate” or “friend” when introducing him to Chinese relatives. Being explicit about our relationship seemed like too much trouble—not for me, but my mother, who’d field most of the questions and bear most of the blame. In any case, I didn’t see my relatives enough to make it an issue. We lived in separate worlds within the same city.

When put into practice, the cosmopolitanism espoused by critics like Appiah and exemplified by people like Kristen is all about making “conversation—and, in particular, conversation between people from different ways of life.” In Chengdu, I was paid by the hour to sit in an apartment in Tongzilin my boss had turned into our “school,” simulating such conversations for the children of local elites. Most of my students were studying for their TOEFL exams so they could attend high school or college in the US. During our private lessons, I’d ask them questions about their hobbies and family life, and then I’d help them translate their answers into what seemed like a suitably Western response.

Oscar was my favorite student—Oscar, who liked wearing Off-White sneakers and vacationing in Siem Reap and who rolled his eyes whenever I gave him printouts of New York Times articles about the clearing of migrant worker settlements outside of Beijing. Oscar’s father held some unclear but important position within the provincial government. His mother ran a local hospital. The goals he set for himself were the same ones set by all my students: entry into a tony New England prep school, followed preferably by Harvard or MIT. But unlike the others, Oscar also had a casualness to him, or perhaps just a better grasp of conversational English. He liked to sit around after class and gab with his teachers about soccer and video games, so much so that I started worrying he wasn’t socializing enough with kids his own age.

Oscar kept coming to class even after he’d been accepted by a tony New England prep school. It was almost summer by then, and I didn’t much feel like teaching. We’d sit around the classroom, watching movies about American high school students—highly stylized accounts, I told him, of the life he’d soon be leading. Oscar liked Dead Poets Society but didn’t care much for Boyhood (too long and too Southern). After these screenings, I’d ask him to write a short essay analyzing the themes of each film. “X has an important message to share,” these essays all began, and somehow, the message was always the same: “It takes great courage to get what you want from your life.”

I didn’t really know what Oscar wanted from his life: whether he’d try and stay in America, like my parents had, or come back to China, like most of his peers. I told my coworkers that Oscar was the most Westernized Chinese student I’d ever taught, a label we expats—people who’d gone to great lengths to get out of the West—always meant as a compliment. It was easy to assume that success abroad and acting Chinese were inversely related for our students. Aspiring to one meant dispensing, to some degree, with the other. And who better than the assimilated American Chinese guy to teach Oscar how to dilute his Chineseness, to write “critically” and perform as an individual, to talk and eat and maybe even think like an American, to quickly and quietly earn his degrees?

One might argue that a similar math applies to Americans trying to make it abroad, and yet in most parts of the world, following a local way of life is associated with tradition and even backwardness, while familiarity with America and its cultural products signals one’s openness to the world, their cosmopolitanism. I didn’t make these scripts, but I have followed them. It would be overstating many facts, that is, to say I taught Oscar how to be a cosmopolitan, unless it’s also true that the best world citizens are those of us who can successfully pass as American.

Back in the 19th century, Chinese immigrants in the Americas were often called “celestials.” The term was not intended as a compliment but as a reminder of the Chinamen’s origins in a mythic “Celestial Empire” in the East. As far as anti-Asian slurs go, I much prefer “celestial” to its historical descendants. A celestial sounds like a star-person, a space traveler not unlike a cosmopolitan. From way up there in the heavens, a celestial watches the world below.

In Chengdu, I came to feel that I, too, was floating above the city. Every day began and ended for me in Manhattan 2, with L spooning up behind me and those glorious windows at our fronts. We would lie there for hours, neither fully asleep nor awake, two mannequins stored behind glass.

In Chengdu, I told myself to write but always wound up at the mall instead, trying on mock-neck sweaters at Uniqlo. There were many malls in the city, and one of the largest was called Global Center. It had a Burberry, an InterContinental Hotel, and a Godiva Chocolatier; it had sushi restaurants, day cares, an indoor water park with a wave pool and slides.

In Chengdu, I went to see all the latest American films at the theater: Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Blade Runner 2049; Black Panther; Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; Avengers: Endgame; Solo: A Star Wars Story; Thor: Ragnarok; Incredibles 2. Because I saw these films in China, I could rest assured that they’d each been vetted by a team of unseen censors. These censors were notoriously persnickety, alert to even the barest suggestion of anti-Chinese bias. An action flick from 2006, Mission: Impossible III, had run afoul of the censors by including a chase scene through Shanghai that showed laundry drying on rooftop racks, a common enough sight in Chinese cities, but one not in keeping with the country’s newly developed, laundry-less image.

In Chengdu, I read books by André Aciman, Walter Benjamin, Jorie Graham, Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, Teju Cole, Jess Row, T. S. Eliot, Chris Kraus, Du Fu, Jenny Zhang, Jenny Xie, Zadie Smith, Elif Batuman, Audre Lorde, John Hersey, Roland Barthes—cosmopolitans, all.

In Chengdu, I listened to music made by the local band du jour: the Higher Brothers, a foursome of tatted-up rappers whose biggest hit was about how everything, everywhere was “Made in China.” The Brothers had lifted their moniker from the Chinese appliance maker Haier, a company whose mascots are a pair of Speedo-clad robots—one blond and white, the other black-haired and Asian. These cheerful boy wonders could be seen embracing on many a Chengdu appliance, including the air conditioner above my Manhattan 2 bed.

In Chengdu, I had this constant, low-grade worry that L would get lost somewhere in the East, and that I would never see him again. What this worry turned into was a lot of helicoptering on my part (I rarely let my blond-haired Haier Brother out of sight). When we fucked, my fingers would splay on the rose-printed wallpaper above our headboard, a mauve expanse scripted all over with the French word for love, l’amour. Sometimes, our amour-making would be like a gentle girdling of stems. Other times, we’d enter a roiling rhythm, my hands probing for clandestine anthers and sticky stigmas, his chin notched into my shoulder as my feet flexed on his calves, all our horticultural parts pollinating each other at once, me and the wallpaper and L.

In Chengdu, I was always looking for some reprieve from all that vapor and smog. Once, I took L to a nearby holy mountain, hoping he’d see that China, too, had views. We climbed to the top, only to find that a sea of clouds had enshrouded the mountain’s peak. Pretend there’s an open sky in front of you, I said to him, recounting a composite collection of memories from long ago: all the different times I’d gone to a temple and done whatever it is Chinese people do in such spaces when they aren’t religious but feel drawn into the orbit of “their culture.” Pretend that all the clouds are level below you, and that you’re standing here with your mother and her parents, watching a murder of crows fly in and out of that sea. Maybe my grandparents had been spry enough back then to complete at least part of the climb. Maybe my mother walked at their pace as I raced ahead up the stairs. At the top, I knelt before the Puxian Bodhisattva’s golden statue, the 10 faces that look in every direction at once.

In Chengdu, I eventually lost track of my backstory, my wants. Was I an aggrieved American sheltering abroad? A diasporic Chinese recalled to his mother ship? The reality is I was many things: a fretful boyfriend and lazy teacher, an aficionado of Chinese malls, a black-and-gray-clad presence at Kristen’s late-night sets, a cheerless expat and writer of shitty poems. And all of that was okay, all of that contributed in small and big ways to the cumulative head rush of that year.

What I have been attempting to diagnose is just the seamlessness of that time and that place, how Chengdu flowed, quicksilver and plastic, all around me, how my experiences there were all essentially inert, flattened into sheets made from the mind’s gauziest materials. To say it bluntly, I did not feel like I was actually living there, and this seemed like both a Chengdu problem and a me problem, a detaching of person from world.

About the time I started thinking of leaving Chengdu, I went, as one does, to get a new tattoo. I brought the artist a panel from The Whole Earth Catalog, a compilation of Hokusai’s early edehon drawings, and asked for a tattoo on my arm imbued with a similar feeling. Hokusai’s drawings and woodcuts are known for representing Japan’s “floating world” of ephemeral pleasures. The specific drawing I’d selected showed a traveler in a shallow stream, walking against the current. I told the artist I wanted a clean, rectangular border around my tattoo, just like in the Catalog. The artist warned me this might break the “flow” of the piece. I told him that was precisely the point.

When the tattoo was finished, L and I wandered over to an old monastery, where we had tea and then walked around a garden studded with pools. Each pool was housed in a massive stone basin, and each basin had a karst island at its center. This was one of our favorite places to go in Chengdu. It was easy to imagine each cistern as a space apart, set aside for the turtles perched on slimy roots, the mosquito larvae siphoning down air from above, the minnows darting as quick as vision itself through flooded canals in the rock—all of it encircled and framed. It was just as easy to see our life in Chengdu as its own private island, a world-within-a-world that we shared. My assumption that I’d be the native informant and L my foreigner charge never really panned out. It was he who told me to breathe when I got that abscess in my mouth; who fished my to-do lists from the trash because he said he wanted to remember what we’d done with all these days; who helped get us to every unheard of destination I proposed (a park full of trash called Phoenix Mountain, a field of flowering rapeseed where a missile factory once rose); who pretended not to notice when the waiters responded very slowly to my unpracticed Chinese; who cared enough to keep floating beside me in all that sculptural air, a celestial just like me.  

I eventually followed my apo’s instructions. I applied to graduate school back in America and accepted an offer later that spring. By summer, L and I had quit our jobs and begun planning an autumn return to the States. We changed the HEPA filter on our air purifier one last time, the foam stained sooty and black, and carted the contraption up to my grandparents’ apartment. Everything else we put on the side of New Hope Road so that the residents of Manhattan 2 could pick out what they wanted.

With not even the pretense of work to keep us in Chengdu anymore, L and I took a trip to Langmusi, a picturesque town on the Sichuan–Gansu border. I booked us onto a two-day horseback tour of the countryside—a bold choice, seeing as neither of us had ever ridden. The Tibetan teenager who was our tour guide never said a word to us, but the horses knew where they were going, and besides, that green yonder needed little explication. We spent the first day blissed out on pastoral scenery, and the first night sleeping in a one-room hut, cheek by jowl with a pair of yak herders whose relationship to our guide was difficult to ascertain. After a hearty dinner of yak sirloin over mian pian, we all settled down in front of a tiny television to watch the nightly newscast. The CCTV anchors were discussing an escalating migrant crisis on the US–Mexico border. Their main visual aid was a now-infamous photograph of a Honduran girl in a bright pink sweatshirt, crying inconsolably as a border guard pats down her mom.

Our hosts wanted to know when we planned on going back to America, and we told them soon, in just a few weeks or so. They told us to be careful, and then they said, more to each other than to us, that China was so safe, and that this was the best thing about it. That night, it stormed, raindrops pinging off a corrugated tin roof.

What does the cosmopolitan say during conversations like this? Does he vehemently denounce the sight of children being separated from their mothers by officers of Earth’s wealthiest nation? Or does he ask his Tibetan hosts pointed questions about their own relationship to the Chinese state, the invisible strings attached to their new television, the scholarships to college in Lanzhou being offered to their sons in exchange for obedience or quietude? In theory, the cosmopolitan refuses any of the easy answers offered by nationalism. He abstains from picking a side, and indeed advocates conscientiously for the humanity of all parties: the Honduran migrants and the American border cop, the Chinese-Tibetan herders and the American-expat tourists; they’re all of one stock, one kind, one worldliness.

I’ve always found it easy to find my way to the cosmopolitan position when people start pitting nations against each other, because it’s a nice position to take, one that telegraphs its own aversion to quick-tempered hot takes. Problems emerge, however, when one tries to turn cosmo-theory into cosmo-politics, what Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins think of as an “actually existing cosmopolitanism.” Politics, for better or worse, is about finding common cause with someone else. It’s about picking a side and accepting that side’s foibles—not carte blanche, of course, but for the sake of taking concrete steps toward a shared objective. The side one picks doesn’t have to be that of a morally derelict nation, but it most definitely can’t be that of a woozily abstract world. A person is well within their rights to be from everywhere, all at once, but they have to be accountable to at least some of those places.

The people sleeping in the hut that night were all citizens of the world, but they were also subjects of two nations at cross-purposes with each other. The more privileged ones could perhaps daydream and act to the contrary, but in the end, they, too, had to acknowledge the nation they had come from, and could always return to, in a pinch. “Are they really so cruel, those Americans?” my hosts asked me in Chinese. The cosmopolitan that I am said nothing. He shut his mouth. He slept.

That spring, the National People’s Congress voted almost unanimously to suspend Xi Jinping’s term limits as president, a move that my own country’s president hailed as “great.” America and China’s usual state of equilibrium—one bought by economic codependence—was starting to unravel, with tariffs levied on Chinese solar panels and American soybeans. The years since have only continued that trend. Visas have been revoked, journalists expelled, classified documents thrown in open fires outside consulates in Houston and Chengdu. The job I had in Chengdu, glorified English tutoring, has now been effectively banned in China as part of a larger effort to root out Western influence. And less than two years after I left China for the last time, a pandemic began in Wuhan and swept across the world, a scourge that seemed like the epitome of a cosmopolitan problem, but one that both America and China responded to by doubling down on their nationalism and fingering the other as the culprit.

I came to Chengdu not knowing that a time of cosmopolitan dreaming was coming to an end—not just for me, but for so many other navel gazing expatriates. Now that I’ve left China, and don’t know when I may return, I feel more chagrin than ever about how much I took my time there for granted. That’s the thing about cosmopolitanism: It bamboozles you into thinking the world’s interconnectedness will always win out; that borders may shut, but only for so long. And in the meantime, you never actually feel like you’re living in Chengdu, or Bangkok, or Paris, because to really be in a place, you have to recognize you might lose it.

So, what did I lose, in leaving Chengdu? Nothing specific, which is perhaps the banal tragedy of it all. What’s most galling to me now is that I came to Chengdu already having ties to that place, attachments I didn’t nurture because I was stuck in the mindset of the cosmonaut who figured he’d always be back. After China sealed its borders to foreigners in 2020, all I could do was reminisce about my grandparents’ blue-curtained apartment just outside the first ring, how every summer as a child I’d come to rest beside Apo on the couch while Agong went out to buy a few youtiao and Mom rubbed menthol ointment on my mosquito-bitten arms. Mom and Apo would be jabbering in a dialect I didn’t understand, and the television would be on, though no one paid it any mind, and from these days of rain outside and doldrums within, I decanted an idea of what it means to live in a familial place, an idea about how time can actually be taught to stop in certain rooms with certain people, because a few years would pass and still the apartment sat unchanged, with me reading Harry Potter by the window as Apo and Mom kept chatting and Agong snuck a cigarette by the pungent hole in the bathroom, and later, we’d all walk together to a park by the Fu River, where I’d run through my wushu routines, jumping and circling, and the sweat would collect in the folds of my clothes, only to be pulled out later by the soapy water of that pink plastic basin that helps me remember the floor between Apo’s feet, and she’d finish the laundry the next day, still talking to Mom, who was in the other room, chopping leeks and squashing roaches, and when this was done, Agong would ask me, because my arms were finally long enough, to hang the clothes out on the metal bars that jutted out from the window of their apartment, and I would do this using a kind of hook on a long metal pole, hoisting the still-wet clothes out through the window and into the open air, where the garments would fall into the line set for them by gravity and the tentative, chess-like movements of my pole: wet clothes clinging to wire hangers that somehow never let them go.

Thomas Dai teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho, where he is an assistant professor of English. His first book, Take My Name But Say It Slow, is out now from Norton. You can find out more about him and his work at his website. 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands