My life could’ve been completely different.

Where my friends went travelling to Shanghai, Suzhou and other places, I went up to Dongbei (colloquial for north eastern China, Manchuria) to visit my grandparents.
Was it a good trip?
It’s such a mundane question, yet difficult to answer. Yes, it was a good trip, better yet, a wonderful trip, but not in the traditional sense when talking about travelling. I didn’t visit any scenic spots, I didn’t take any pictures of beautiful, interesting places, and I spent the entire National Day onboard a train.
(Unlike Patrik, who started a successful business and made big bucks.)

But I got to listen to stories about my Grandpa’s childhood, learn more about my family history and heritage from my Grandpa and Grandma, look at old photos of my ancestors, and talk about the past, present and future with them. To me, that was a thousand times more important than the dinners and the money spent on me. It’s difficult to explain what it means to feel so connected to people you’ve met three times in your life, to have sudden flashes of insight into their personal history, with the vastness of China’s modern history as a backdrop. Some of the things they went through were so difficult to comprehend, let alone adequately describe – it was a quiet, personal, private kind of trip, and that’s really the best way to describe it.

Harbin was quite nice, it felt like a cozy small town (6 million people) compared to Beijing. It was pretty clean and nice (at least the places I went) as well. Hegang on the other hand is a place that has horse carts in the city center, with an extra layer of grime everywhere (mining town) and where people drive like frickin maniacs. The drivers in Beijing appear sedated by comparison. I was relieved to be in Beijing traffic again, that’s how bad it was. Suffice to say, it’s a place everyone wants to get out of, and nobody goes there unless they have to.
My Grandparents moved to a new, renovated apartment in Hegang a few years ago, but it was quite humbling to revisit the old place they lived in for 20 years. I went there on my first visit to China in 1996, and still vividly remember how difficult it was for me and my cousin Leilei to adjust to a brick bed (a traditional kang, which is a brick construction with smoke tunnels built in so you can heat up the bed in winter), a squatting toilet and a lack of shower facilities.

Also, it makes me appreciate and love my Mom endlessly more for managing to get out of there and actually raise me in a paradise by comparison called Sweden. If this trip has taught me anything, it’s how incredible both my Grandparents are, and my parents as well, and how unbelievable lucky I am.

My life could’ve been completely different. I have this




instead of this