Now that I’ve been back to Chengdu for almost a week, it feels like I’ve slipped into a stretch of time longer than it actually is. Days spilling over with errands, friends and family to meet, things to fret over.
(蓉 ("Rong") appears on every taxi in Chengdu, symbolizing the city's flower Cottonrose Hibiscus)
I had dinner with Wenyue on my first day – a musician friend who, as luck would have it, released his latest single around the same day the US banned TikTok. Timing is everything: he posted it on Xiaohongshu just as millions of “TikTok refugees” flooded the app, their arrival transforming the platform’s content ecosystem overnight.
There’s something oddly fragile about this mass migration that fascinates me. An unscripted energy took hold in the absence of Xiaohongshu’s algorithmic nudges – a rare moment where connection felt, dare I say, human. Chinese users, fluent in the app’s 双排瀑布流 (dual-column waterfall) design, stepped in as impromptu translators, while local creators wasted no time seizing the moment, amassing followers by the thousands like Wenyue just did.
It struck me as a kind of digital collision: precarity meeting possibility, chaos giving way to connection. For once, the platform wasn’t steering the conversation – people were. And in that moment, it felt a little less like just another algorithm and a little more… human (I said it again!).
Thinking in tandem with this Nokia ad…
For a more nuanced exploration of this phenomenon, check out this insightful episode from a tech podcast by brilliant friends Caiwei and Yanki that dives deep into the unfolding story.
As I’m unpacking, yet soon to be moving again. I turn myself to cultural theorist Sara Ahmed’s seminal book Queer Phenomenology, her ode to the bittersweet ritual of moving:
These ways we have to settle. Moving house. I hate packing: collecting myself up, pulling myself apart. Stripping the body of the house: the walls, the floors, the shelves. Then I arrive, an empty house. It looks like a shell. How I love unpacking. Taking things out, putting things around, arranging myself all over the walls. I move around, trying to distribute myself evenly around the rooms.
I concentrate on the kitchen. The familiar smell of spices fills the air. I allow the cumin to spill, and then gather it up again. I feel flung back somewhere else. I am never sure where the smell of spices takes me, as it had followed me everywhere. Each smell that gathers returns me somewhere; I am not always sure where that somewhere is. Sometimes the return is welcome, sometimes not. Sometimes it is tears or laughter that makes me realize that I have been pulled to another place and another time. Such memories can involve a recognition of how one's body already feels, coming after the event. The surprise when we find ourselves moved in this way or that. So we ask the question, later, and it often seems too late: what is it that has led me away from the present, to another place and another time? How is it that I have arrived here or there?
The non-linear stories of migration, of time becoming a swamp, the past and present bubbling and turning in incongruent swirls reminds me of challah/baozi or any kind of bread that requires lots of hand work.
Bundles of sugarcane on the street
Cats! Lots of cats walking around their neighborhood
A rarity in Chengdu. Sun out.
One of my go-to bar this time back home is the cocktail bar COWCOW. The chocolate cookie ice cream they made in house was a bit watery, but the communal long table is impeccable for eavesdropping gossip.
Met up with my friend Rachel and tried my hand at an ootd short video for the first time. It was so silly, but I love being silly.
Lemaire opened its first store in China at Chengdu's Taikoo Li. It was ummm… alright.
The most beautiful sweater – loose, comfy, and effortlessly perfect. It’s from a Chinese brand called Cotemp, though it reminds me of Bode in the way it feels thoughtful and storied, like it’s already lived a life before finding its way to me.
Ending my scribbles here. Here’s a photo of Wenyue and me solving the NYT’s daily Connections before the massive hiatus in city infrastructure caused by Spring Festival.
take meeee😭