Going Back

People keep asking why I’m moving back to China, and I’ve been answering with varying honesty. The one that gets the biggest laugh at dinner parties is that I’d rather live under competent, technocratic authoritarianism than under the feckless, stochastic, increasingly fascistic kakistocracy that is the current American administration. This lands well in Chapel Hill, which voted for Harris at roughly the same rate that Pyongyang votes for Kim. But no one should take it too seriously, least of all me. The truth is duller, and sweeter, and has in large part to do with a promise my wife and I made to each other years ago.

Well before Fanfan and I left Beijing in 2016, we had a deal. We’d raise the kids in the States — give them the cafeteria social hierarchies, college application hell, prom dates, college tour road trips — and then, once they’d fledged, we’d go back. Fanfan is a Beijinger to her marrow. She endured nine-and-a-half years of North Carolina with a grace I found frankly heroic, though she’d say she simply did what needed doing, which is the more Chinese way of framing heroism. She weathered Trump’s first election within months of our arrival, the COVID-era anti-Asian ugliness, the disorientation of being a fiercely independent woman suddenly dependent on her husband for even the most routine transactions. She never did learn English, not (entirely) out of inability but out of what I can only describe as principled stubbornness. Her position, unstated but unmistakable, was: I’m not the one who chose this.

Now our daughter Guenevere is graduating from college in Wisconsin–Madison in May, and Johnny is a sophomore in Indiana. He’s got the dog with him in Bloomington. The nest is empty, and the deal is the deal. We’re going back, and deal or no, it’s also very much what I want.

But I want to be clear about what we’re leaving, because Chapel Hill deserves better than to be the place I fled.

I had feared, when we moved here, that a certain vision of American neighborliness — the casserole on the doorstep, the borrowed cup of sugar, the general orientation toward one another rather than away — was a thing of the past, if it had ever existed outside of Norman Rockwell paintings, my memories of a suburban childhood in upstate New York, and real estate brochures. Robbie and Angie next door proved me spectacularly wrong. During the pandemic, we developed an informal sourdough-for-coffee-beans barter system (he owns the beloved local chain of cafés and a roaster) that I believe constituted the most functional economy in the Western hemisphere at the time. Across the street, Herman could be summoned — faithfully, uncomplainingly, with the calm of a man who has done this before and not without pleasure — to deal with the copperhead snakes that Fanfan would discover while gardening whenever, by coincidence, I was out of town. I owe Herman a debt that probably can’t be repaid in sourdough.

There’s Brian, who at 82 is the closest thing Chapel Hill has to a patron saint. Born in what was then Rhodesia, educated at Cambridge, a wine merchant of exquisite taste and even more exquisite company, he has taken me to lunch nearly every week for three years, having appointed himself my most devoted reader and listener. He comes with a stack of newspaper clippings, book recommendations, and deep questions about our politics, history, and the good life. But what I’ll miss most isn’t the flattering attention. It’s that Brian models a way of being in the world that I dearly want to emulate — the deep and omnivorous curiosity, the moral seriousness worn lightly, the insistence on kindness, consideration, and generosity as daily practice rather than occasional gesture. I leave each lunch having glimpsed another facet of it, and I haven’t yet seen the same one twice. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve Brian, and I suspect the answer is nothing, which is rather the point of grace.

There’s Dave, one of my two best friends since the mid-1980s, who lives in nearby Durham. His proximity was, in fact, one of the reasons we chose Chapel Hill in the first place. Dave is a man of magnificent contradictions: an apostate Mormon, a politics and philosophy obsessive who can sink thirty-four consecutive free throws and has dedicated himself to the Sisyphean task of solving political polarization. He’s a prog rock head like me, a “Rush guy” who can still play all the Geddy Lee bass lines. For my part, I never tire of playing Alex Lifeson. The love he and his truly beatific wife Catherine have shown to Fanfan and me in our time here cannot be repaid, or even expressed. They are part of the reason leaving feels like something closer to loss than logistics.

I’ll miss the woods. I’ll miss the particular quality of a Carolina spring, that blessedly long stretch when the dogwoods and the azaleas along Greenwood Road conspire to make everything look like an Impressionist painting that’s trying a little too hard. I’ll miss the deer, and the groundhog who lived in the neighborhood, and the smell of the gardenias, and the specific pleasure of a slow Tuesday evening when nothing whatsoever is happening and you can hear yourself not think.

But the thing about quiet is that you can have too much of it.

Beijing is the opposite of this. Beijing is an ambush. You go to your usual café — mine is called Café Zarah, and you’ll find me there most weekdays — and you intend to get three hours of writing done, and instead you get forty-five minutes of writing and two hours of the best conversation you’ve had in months, and you walk out overstimulated and slightly dazed and absolutely certain that this is how you’re supposed to live. There’s a well-stocked guitar shop a few steps from Zarah, which is either a wonderful convenience or a terrible temptation, depending on your perspective and your bank balance.

There’s the Golden Weasel, a tiny, unprepossessing bar that has, against all reasonable expectation, become a kind of intellectual salon, the sort of place where a poet and a journalist (who happen to own the place), a diplomat, a retired professor, and a motley assortment of the kind of smart slackers Beijing’s always drawn might find themselves arguing about Ming dynasty literature at 2 a.m., hours after its delightful pub quiz has ended. I’ve had some of the best evenings of my life at the Golden Weasel, and some of the worst mornings after.

And there’s my electric two-wheeler, purchased just before the September 1 ban last year on the sale of more powerful scooters, a machine that will carry me 220 kilometers on a single charge and that makes me feel, at nearly 60, approximately 19. Beijing on two wheels is a different city than Beijing in a taxi. It’s faster, louder, more dangerous, more alive. Don’t worry: I wear a helmet religiously, and mostly obey traffic laws.

There’s the band. I play guitar in an outfit called Chunqiu — 春秋, “Spring and Autumn,” after the Confucian chronicle, because of course we named our metal band after a work of classical Chinese historiography. We played a bunch of shows last year after a nine-year hiatus, and we’re in the process of writing new material. The prospect of playing in an ensemble again after years of solitary woodshedding in my Chapel Hill bedroom is almost unreasonably exciting. Playing alone is practice, and sometimes a chore. Playing with other people is communion, and always a joy. It uses different muscles entirely — muscles that have been quietly atrophying in the land of cul-de-sacs.

And there is, I’ll confess, the imposter syndrome. I’ve spent nearly a decade writing and talking about China from seven thousand miles away, and while I’ve done my best to stay current — the interviews, the reading, the periodic visits — there’s a nagging voice that gets louder the longer I’m away. It says: You haven’t smelled the air. You haven’t felt the vibe. You don’t know what you’re talking about anymore. The voice may at times exaggerate. But the only way to shut it up is to go back.

I should say, because people will assume otherwise: this is not permanent, and it is not full-year. We’ll be back in the States regularly. We have land in the Hudson Valley that my brothers and I plan to build on someday. There is a country here we love, despite its present management, and people (and a dog) we’d cross oceans for, and we fully intend to keep crossing them.

But I’ll tell you what I’m most excited about, and it isn’t the scooter or the band or even the Golden Weasel, though these are not small things. It’s that I think China is on the cusp of a genuine cultural renaissance. I can feel it gathering, the way you can feel weather coming before it arrives. There’s a growing confidence in the shape of modern Chinese life, a settling-in that’s less about the manic pursuit of material wealth that characterized the boom years and more about something harder to name. A country starting to exhale. I don’t know exactly what form the renaissance will take, and I’d be a fool to predict it, but I want to be there when it happens.

Beijing’s not paradise, and neither of us is misty-eyed about it. Fanfan wants to go home. I want to go home. We happen to share one, which, after twenty-some years of marriage and two continents, still strikes me as the luckiest thing.

We fly out February 13th. The house on Greenwood Road still needs work before it’s ready for the market, but the furniture’s in storage, the movers have come and gone, and the rest can wait until we’re back in May. I’m going to miss the view of the woods and the pond behind our house. I’m going to miss those lunches with Brian. I’m going to miss the quiet, at least until I don’t.

But the deal is the deal, and it’s Beijing or bust.