Features

My city Shenzhen, which means "deep ditches between the fields," is not often praised and loved by a lot of people. Truly, there are not many people who see this place as a real spiritual home—most of them come for a dream to become middle-class quickly. Humid and hot for 9 months, then followed by 3 months of dry and desolate fall instead of winter. Then Chinese New Year comes and the city becomes empty in a week. They left because they will gather in their real hometown, and those who never left are people like me who were born and raised there. 

The previous generations of my family aren’t from here, and neither are yours. My parents are immigrants from the desolate frontier city, but I was born here. You probably fly here. You board the plane and people scramble and push to cut in the boarding line. After landing, people started offering the elders seats on the shuttle bus to the terminal. The second you leave the airport terminal, what flows to you is a hot breeze and a strong smell of the city, which I call “the smell of the Central Processing Units burning.” Hop on a cab, you find out the taxi driver shares the same hometown with you when he recommends an authentic restaurant you will soon love. Arrive at your rental apartment in an urban village where buildings stand like trees in the tropical forest, you realize the landlord charges you double for electricity and water and you can’t sue because your lawyer is also charged this way. Open your window, feel the steam of vermicelli rolls from a breakfast vendor and you can pass the salt with the person who lives in the building next to yours, then get a drop of water on your arm from a t-shirt hung on the drying stick for two days. 

This is a city you won’t later remember for its lack of visual characteristics. While other cities have their own cultural identity and historic layers, here you would taste and find the blandness so strong after someday getting exposed around and finding a rhythm. The city is so tedious, that this specific boringness actually becomes interesting. You start to notice tiny differences: Subway Line 2 has more people reading books quantitatively than Line 1 during rush hours. Ordinary vines which grow namelessly throughout the year, would silently but wildly blooms with orange flowers during the Spring festivals when everyone’s away. On Wednesday, the closest Cantonese cafeteria offers the best daily soup throughout the week. 

Walk into a mall that everyone loves. Getting around your workplace on the 48th floor of a skyscraper. Sit down somewhere in a random city park. They were urban villages 5 years ago, lychee forests 30 years ago, or even still covered by ocean water and occupied by oysters 50 years ago. How can you hear the noise from a busy computer keyboard clicking and the wind blowing through the lychee trees on hot nights simultaneously? How can you smell the professionally selected mall fragrance to stimulate you to shop with the blue, speechless, damp ocean breeze? 

Here you can. They don’t fight against each other, they coexist. 

Emily Wang's personal essay won third prize in the 2024 Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest. Her poem, "icicle, the body, thus i speak with it" is included in this issue. Emily is an illustrator and storyteller born in Shenzhen and now creating from New York City. She is a proud member of the SVA Illustration class of 2027. "I channel my love for writing and poetry into crafting evocative art," Emily says. "My work blends visual and literary elements to connect with others on a deeply personal level."