Afra Wang at The Ideas Letter:
Last summer, a few American writer friends and I traveled across China on a self-organized tour of AI labs, factories, and industrial clusters. Among them was Aadil, a twenty-two-year-old Bay Area engineer who loves the Cantonese rapper SKAI ISYOURGOD and deploys Chinese memes with the fluency of someone raised on the Chinese internet, despite never having lived there.
After the trip, he wrote some reflections on his Substack:
Shenzhen is such a dope city. Legit looks like the future more than any city I’ve been to… Huaqiangbei is massive. Honestly I’m thinking about doing a month-long hardware residency there so I can crash course EE by building stuff hands on.
It is crazy how much their society grinds. It’s in their DNA. The work ethic is insane. Shenzhen was dirt and mud forty years ago and now it’s the world’s example of a cyberpunk city.
Reading his words, I felt a familiar pressure—a small internal shift I had sensed accumulating for years. I left China at 17, in 2012, arrived in the U.S., and absorbed the ambient narratives of American centrality that still held cultural authority then. I spent much of my twenties trying to construct a language that neither flattered nor demonized either country.
But seeing China through Aadil’s eyes forced me to recalibrate.
More here.
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