Trip to China
With some of my relatives, Ina and Lolo :D
This is the second time I was in China since I left. Stunned by how modern my city has became, I was more drawn to the people I got to meet, as it has being just about 3 years since we last chatted.
Lolo and Ina
If you can’t see it from the picture above, I really like Lolo and Ina :D. Three years no see, we still had a good time chatting at the dinner, hearing things happening in the new school Lolo went to, plus all the fun things happened at Ina’s kindergarden.
5 years apart from Lolo and 12 years apart from Ina, It’s quite nice to see how similar we still are. We all played piano when we were kids, enjoyed watching cartoons, and likes to order 东坡肉 when we are at a resterant.
Kimi
Kimi was one of the only non-relatives that we visited during our stay. We lived in the same neighborhood back in China, played together for a few times, and have known each other ever since.
If I was surprised when I met Lolo and Ina, I was shocked when I met Kimi lol. Recently with COVID, has being video chatting with Kimi every now and then. Independent, active, and competitive, she is now studying at a high school in the UK, playing lacross and compete for her high school team, started learning German, taught herself both C and Python, and have coded programs that would take me hours to code myself :’). Kimi wants to major in Math and Computer science when she is in college, and want to be a reseracher/mathmatian once she graduate.
Kimi’s passion towards winning, her sense of presistance across whatever she is intreted in, has always being something that I looked up to. She is probably prepping for her college aplication as I am writing this, wish her best of luck out there :D.
Grandpa
When I felt everything has changed, my grandpa stayed, eh, exactly the same lol. Still the same hobby, same stories that he tells, same color of jacket when going outside, and the same facial expression when we finally needed to leave.
Being in the army for most of his life, my grandpa kept his rountine 20 years after he retired. He would often wake up at around 5:30 in the morning, take a hour long walk around the West Lake, buy some breakfast at the stand he always goes to, walk back to the house, sit in the living room, watch 朝闻天下 while eating his breakfast at exactly 7.
Why do I know these, well, waking me up at 5:30 and drag me on his walk happens to be a part of his routine while I was there :’).
Aside from this rather unpleasent experience though, I did enjoy the stay with my grandpa. We would play chinese chess together and laugh at each other’s play (okay mostly mine) for the whole afternoon, walk to the grocery market to get dinner, and talk about all the changes in the city while I wasn’t here.
My grandpa refers people at my school as 美国佬, the language we speak as 美国话, and ask me to teach him that one day, so he could come to my place for a visit. He still doesn’t know which school that I went to, but this never gets in the way of him showing how proud he is about me, whether it’s in person, or on video chats yesterday :).
Ending thoughts
Aside from how fast time flied, realized how people centric I am from this trip. Didn’t feel much when I walked around my elementary school, but memories flushed back after talking with teachers who used to teach me there, the exact same with my relatives, Kimi, and grandpa. It was a great time meeting these people again, happy that we got the chance to go back and visit.