I love this city dearly. It’s home to me in every sense of the word. Having spent my early childhood there I’ve seen Beijing in all its contradictions: the dazzling and the decaying, the hopeful and the hard edged. I still think about those long bus rides I used to take every weekend for math camps and violin classes (the classic weekend itinerary of a dutiful grade school Chinese kid lol... though I was an epic fail at violin...) From the suburb then through Qinghe, Zhong Guancun, and Gu Lou and back, the route passed empty lots, migrant towns, the heart of China’s Silicon Valley, and the old hutong neighborhoods where time itself seems to move slower. You see the full spectrum of life. It’s a city of immense complexity, impossible to capture in a single narrative.