🇨🇳 China: Starting with the People

There are countries you can arrive in with almost no preparation, open a map, save a few places and gradually figure everything out once you are there.

China feels different to me. 🇨🇳

The more I read about it and the more I talk to people who grew up there, the more I realise how little you can actually see if you look at the country only through a tourist’s eyes.

There is another language, its own digital services, an enormous historical context, habits that are not always obvious to an outsider, and ideas about family, work, relationships and society that are changing right now.

You can read dozens of guides to Beijing, save the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China and a list of restaurants serving Peking duck.

But none of that answers the question I find most interesting.

How do the people who grew up here see their own country?

Why we decided to discover China this way

I have wanted to properly visit China for a long time.

So far, my encounters with it have been brief.

Twice, I ended up here in transit, walked around the airport, tried to figure out the internet, ate Chinese food, talked to people through a translator and noticed the same thing both times.

A lot of it was completely different from what I had imagined China would be like before arriving.

People helped me figure things out, staff genuinely tried to understand my situation, someone would pull out a translator so we could properly understand what had happened.

Even such a short experience made me wonder how many of our ideas about the country exist simply because we have never spoken to the people who actually live here.

That is exactly why I do not want to open China on FROGI with an article like “20 places you must see in Beijing”.

First, I want to get acquainted.

Sometimes one random meeting gives you more than ten guidebooks

Completely by chance, while travelling around Bali, I met a woman from China.

We started talking through a translator and quite quickly went much further than the usual small talk.

We talked about travel, work, marriage, parents, children, social expectations and life in Beijing, Shenzhen, Yunnan and Hong Kong.

She told me how she personally sees modern China, where her views align with traditional culture and where she completely disagrees with it.

And at some point, I realised this was exactly the kind of conversation I had always missed in ordinary travel content.

Not an explanation of the country from above.

Not a list of rules.

Not an attempt to explain in five minutes “what Chinese people are like”.

But a conversation with one specific person who has her own life, personality, experience and relationship with the place where she grew up. 🌏

And that is exactly why her story is interesting.

It does not explain all of China. It simply lets us see one real perspective from the inside. :::

She grew up in Shandong and lived in Beijing for ten years

Our new heroine grew up in Shandong, studied, worked and spent around ten years living in Beijing.

Later, she left her job and, at 29, went to study in Malaysia, even though for someone from a fairly traditional Chinese environment, that decision might not have seemed like the most obvious one.

That is where she met her current boyfriend.

After studying, she returned to China, lived and worked in Shenzhen for a while, and then decided to move back to Beijing — a city she still considers her own and deeply loves for its historical heritage.

But for her, China does not end with the capital.

She talks about Yunnan, where she feels a completely different rhythm of life, recommends Chengdu if you want to see another side of the country, talks about Xi’an, Shanghai and Chongqing, and explains why she sees Hong Kong very differently.

And the longer we talked, the more I wanted to stop building my picture of China only from other people’s articles and start listening to people instead.

This is how we are going to discover China

FROGI will still have the usual practical materials.

We will cover Beijing, transport, internet, payments, apps, neighbourhoods, food, travelling between cities and all the things someone needs before their first trip.

But alongside them, there will be people’s stories.

Because knowing how to buy a train ticket is useful.

But understanding why someone still wants to return to Beijing after living there for ten years, why Yunnan feels completely different to them, and how the views of the younger generation inside China are changing helps you see the country a little more deeply.

I think that is where a real journey should begin.

Not with trying to see everything.

With curiosity about the people who already call this place home. ❤️

And the first story will be about her.

About how, at 29, she left a stable job, moved alone to another country to study and accidentally changed the entire direction of her life.