The academic year my wife and I spent in China’s Sichuan Province was a time of ups and downs, but we look back on the experience with fondness.
In July 2024, on the eve of our marriage and two days before we headed off on a month-long tour of East Asia, my partner Maria received an unexpected phone call offering her the opportunity to teach in China. As I listened in to the conversation, my ears pricked up at the mention of ‘Chengdu’. I’d recently reconnected with my friend Rob from Liverpool, who’d told me he was living in the Sichuanese capital. Maria and I had discussed the possibility of her teaching in China through a Spanish government programme, but we’d never considered it seriously. Now that she had a concrete offer, and we knew we’d have a familiar face close by, our perspective changed. It suddenly felt meant to be. We still had our doubts and reservations – who wouldn’t? – but with just a day to provide an answer, we decided to take a leap of faith.
That August, while we travelled through South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Maria scrambled to get her documents in order and attend remote meetings. After we arrived back in Spain, she obtained her visa and flew to Chengdu within a matter of days. I followed three weeks later after completing my own arduous visa application process.
Teething problems and language barriers
I’d visited China – specifically Hangzhou – in 2011 as part of a university exchange programme. Returning 13 years later, I noticed how much the country had changed since my first time there. Its technological advancement was particularly apparent. With one or two mobile apps, we paid for everything from public transport to fresh fruit from street vendors. We used the same apps to browse restaurant menus, order coffee and takeaways, and book tickets to cultural sites. Our dependence on technology caused some teething problems, but we came to appreciate the convenience.
Futuristic China: the eye-catching exterior of the luxury SKP shopping centre in southern Chengdu, with the bamboo-like ‘Tower of Life’ fountains in the background.
We also relied on technology to overcome the formidable linguistic barrier. Our move happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to learn the language in advance. Mandarin is notoriously difficult to pick up – particularly for speakers of non-tonal, alphabetic languages – and we hadn’t achieved anything close to conversational proficiency by the time we left China. Translation apps were crucial to navigating our daily interactions.
Foreignness and family
The language wasn’t the only aspect of life in China we never grew accustomed to. We were constantly stared at and reminded of our foreignness with terms like ‘waiguoren’ (‘foreigner’), ‘laowai’ (a more pejorative version of ‘waiguoren’), ‘meiguoren’ (‘American’ – because, for some reason, many locals assumed that’s what we were), and even just ‘foreigner’ in English. More alienating still were the thankfully rare instances when people photographed or filmed us without asking. And I, being from a country where forming an orderly line is practically a national sport, found the lack of queuing etiquette particularly galling. Oh, and don’t get me started on the public spitting…
Yet while these perceived infringements of good manners undoubtedly grated, the many positive encounters we shared with locals left a much stronger impression.
Maria survived the culture shock of working in the Chinese school system thanks to the friendship and support of some of her colleagues. One colleague, along with my friend Rob, helped Maria find a flat when she arrived, as the accommodation on the school grounds was practically unliveable. Another introduced us to her family, with whom we shared a few days out, including a trip to see the Leshan Giant Buddha. Months later, when Maria and I hiked Mount Emei, we got talking to a young couple from Chongqing who invited us for dinner and insisted on paying.
On another occasion, when we visited an immigration office to enquire about the terms of my spousal visa, a Chinese woman who was there on behalf of her American husband got me the answers I’d found so hard to prise from the staff. She then invited us back to her home, where we met her husband, and the two of them took us out for a delicious meal.
Those are some stand-out examples, but we had countless interactions with locals who seemed genuinely enthusiastic to meet people from another part of the world. In fact, the more pleasant exchanges painted the stares and comments in a different light. That behaviour still made us feel uncomfortable, but given how infrequently some people in China encounter waiguoren in real life, I could at least understand their surprise, excitement, and curiosity when they saw us. Had we been able to communicate with these people in their own tongue, we’d have probably engaged in pleasant conversation. And based on the experiences we had with those who could speak English, perhaps they’d have invited us to eat with their families!
Besides, as foreign as we were to China, China was every bit as foreign to us. Even our own residential complex, Family Walk, never failed to give us the thrill of an unfamiliar environment far from home.
The complex, in Chengdu’s Wuhou district, is designed mainly for couples with young children. It’s essentially an open-air shopping and dining centre surrounding a ring of apartment blocks, at the heart of which is a square with a small garden. Outside the residential ring, modern architecture and neon lights create a futuristic, almost cyberpunk aesthetic. Adults have a variety of bars, restaurants, and shops to choose from, while children are kept entertained with colourful play areas, a kiddie train, and a claw-machine arcade. It’s overstimulating, wonderfully weird, and utterly charming – and we were delighted to call it home for the better part of a year.
A typical evening among the bright lights of Family Walk, south-west Chengdu.
Living the ‘slow life’ in China’s ‘Park City’
Beyond the cosy confines of Family Walk, we never ran out of things to see and do. In fact, there are many parts of Chengdu we didn’t get around to visiting. Home to over 20 million people, the Sichuanese capital is China’s fourth-largest city by population. Residential towers, soaring office blocks, and sprawling shopping centres fan out for miles beyond the city centre.
Amid the urban density is some truly eye-catching architecture – from traditional temples, pagodas, and bridges to gleaming skyscrapers and converted factories. Almost every street is lined with restaurants, while trendy coffee shops, fancy cocktail spots, and creative craft beer bars populate the city’s more bohemian districts.
Anshun Bridge, central Chengdu, is one of the city’s most iconic landmarks.
The converted factory complex, Eastern Suburb Memory, in east Chengdu.
A cosy coffee shop on Tianxiang Binhe Road, directly opposite the Fuhe River in east-central Chengdu.
So, while parts of Chengdu may look monolithic at skyline level, the city isn’t your average concrete jungle.
Providing respite from the metropolitan hustle and bustle are the numerous parks that have earned Chengdu the tag of China’s ‘Park City’. The most famous is People’s Park, where locals while away afternoons in outdoor teahouses drinking jasmine tea, playing mahjong, or having their ears cleaned. This park culture is a significant factor in the city’s ‘slow life’ reputation.
Heming Teahouse in People’s Park, central Chengdu.
The koi pond in the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum complex, western Chengdu.
A majestic heron in Huanhuaxi Park, adjacent to the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum.
And yes, you read that last activity correctly – having one’s ears cleaned is a popular pastime in China. The practitioners, who announce their presence with a trademark tinkling of metal on metal, find a captive audience in teahouses.
If the ear-cleaning tradition strikes you as unusual, you may be even more surprised to learn that People’s Park has a matchmaking corner where parents affix profiles of their adult children to a board in the hope of finding them a partner. Translating a few profiles out of curiosity, we saw they included mostly material details, such as job, salary, and living situation.
I imagine that neither public ear-cleaning nor QR-code matchmaking would go down well in Europe. Witnessing such customs in Chengdu, though, is part of what made our experience there so memorable. Life in China is so different from life in the UK and Spain that every day was an adventure. We felt many emotions – both positive and negative – during our time in Sichuan, but boredom wasn’t one of them.
Shopping and dining in Chengdu
When we did find ourselves without a plan, we simply headed to one of Chengdu’s many shopping centres. We’re not especially materialistic and don’t spend much time shopping, but we found the malls in China unusually appealing.
In this part of the world, shopping centres offer more interesting dining options than the typical fast-food and coffee chains of their Western counterparts. We spent many a weekday evening or weekend afternoon in Chengdu malls, browsing for local trinkets, comestibles, or – in Maria’s case – cosmetics before stopping for something to eat and drink.
The relatively low cost of living in Chengdu meant that we dined out far more often than we do in Europe. There were occasions when we missed Western food – good pizza, for example, is hard to come by in China – but having cheap, authentic Chinese restaurants on our doorstep more than made up for that.
Maria and I became particularly fond of Xinjiang cuisine. Readily available in Sichuan, it resembles a cross between Turkish food and what Westerners might consider ‘typical’ Chinese fare – which makes sense given that the Uyghurs, the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, are a Turkic people.
We also frequently enjoyed Dongbei (North-east) cuisine, with its sweet-and-sour fried pork and tangy vegetable salad, as well as other regional Chinese and Asian cuisines.
It’d be remiss of me not to mention hotpot here – the Chongqing staple that has also become part of the fabric of Chengdu’s food scene – but I, incredibly, tried it only once. (Sacrilege, I know.) That’s not to say I didn’t like hotpot; it’s just that there are many Sichuanese dishes I preferred, such as dandan noodles, Mapo tofu, and – Maria’s and my absolute favourite – Kung Pao chicken.
You may be familiar with the latter – known as ‘Gongbao jiding’ in Mandarin – from your local Chinese takeaway menu. However, the Kung Pao chicken in Chengdu is a different animal altogether (not literally; it is very much still chicken). It comprises small cubes of meat and rounds of spring onion flash-fried with red chillies, garlic, and ginger – all tossed in a sweet-and-sour sauce. In my opinion, though, the most crucial element is the Sichuan peppercorn, which provides the tingling or numbing sensation – what the Chinese call ‘má‘ – that we found so addictive. The result is more than a dish; it’s a full sensory experience with a flavour profile locally described as ‘scorched-chilli lychee’.
A mouth-watering plate of Gongbao jiding from our favourite local restaurant, which Rob introduced us to.
This may explain why I enjoyed it so much. Lychees – otherwise known as ‘Fruit of the Gods’ in my world – are a favourite of mine. At one point, our local supermarket was stocking literal tonnes of them thanks to a bumper harvest in southern China. I once got my hands on more than 20 for the equivalent of about 60 British pence. They didn’t last long.
Our supermarket visits were an experience even outside of lychee season. The shelves were stocked with all manner of enticingly packaged treats, and there was always an abundance of fresh fruit and veg on display that we rarely see in Europe. Less appealing to us was the meat and seafood section, where the assorted organs and marine creatures offended our Western sensibilities.
On a more serious note, it was in the supermarkets that China’s relatively poor animal welfare standards were most apparent to us.
I was picking out eggs during one shopping trip when I heard high-pitched chirps coming from nearby. Have some of the eggs hatched?! I wondered. No – the truth was somehow even more startling. On the floor next to a display was a polystyrene box containing a couple of dozen live chicks. They were being offered as part of a promotion: buying one box of the branded eggs got you one chick; buying two boxes got you three.
Another time, we witnessed a member of staff haul a large fish out of a tank before clubbing it to death right there on the supermarket floor. The customer didn’t bat an eyelid and gratefully collected his ‘catch’.
If food, why friend-shaped?
Admittedly, there’s always a degree of hypocrisy when someone who eats animal products takes issue with how animals are treated. Whereas most Westerners might baulk on being reminded of the provenance of their meat, I suppose people in China are generally more willing to confront the processes that turn a sentient being into food on a plate.
This contrast can also be observed in the differences in food packaging. In China, pictures of piglets, bunnies, or ducklings, for example, are often used to represent meat products, while in the West – where such ‘cute’ imagery would likely put consumers off – the animal is typically shown in its edible form, if at all. That seasoned duck and rabbit heads are popular snacks in parts of China only supports my hypothesis.
This isn’t to say that locals don’t appreciate these animals’ cuteness – if anything, the opposite is true – it’s just that they don’t necessarily see adorability and edibility as mutually exclusive.
One day, while crossing the square outside our flat, I heard that same chirp I’d encountered at the supermarket. It was coming from the small garden outside the neighbourhood copy shop. Taking a closer look, I spotted a small fuzz of yellow in the long grass. A Family Walk resident had evidently bought a box of those branded eggs and was raising their free gift outside the shop.
Maria and I made a habit of checking on the chick every time we crossed the square, and it soon became clear he was being well looked after. We named him Cluckin’ – a fowl pun that plays on the name of China’s biggest coffee chain, Luckin Coffee (whose Family Walk branch, incidentally, was our chief caffeine supplier during our time in China).
Cluckin’ living his best life in the grass.
Cluckin’ still thrivin’ a few weeks after we first found him, and now showing signs of being a cockerel (at least according to my limited knowledge of avians).
Maria and I enjoying a Luckin Coffee outside the Family Walk branch. Our block of flats is the middle building directly in front, while Cluckin’s copy shop is out of frame to the right.
I still wonder what became of our dear Cluckin’. In another manifestation of my meat-eating-Westerner hypocrisy, I sincerely hope he didn’t end up as Gongbao jiding…
Please bear with me
While China has a (somewhat exaggerated) reputation for treating just about any animal as food, one famously cute creature is strictly off the menu: the panda. Honestly, I’m amazed I’ve got this far into a memoir about Sichuan without mentioning the black-and-white bears. To say panda-related art and merchandise are ubiquitous in Chengdu would be an understatement.
There is, of course, a reason for this obsession: most of the world’s giant pandas live in Sichuan Province. Chengdu itself has its own reserve, the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which we visited when my dad came to stay. Our first panda encounter, however, was outside the city at the even more snappily named China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, Dujiangyan Base.
Located at the foot of Qingchengshan (Mount Qingcheng), part of a range that is home to one of the largest wild panda populations in China, the Dujiangyan Base offers a more authentic experience than its urban counterpart. The facility is heavily forested and far quieter than the Chengdu reserve. It specialises in giant panda rescue, rehabilitation, and rewilding.
A life of leisure: two adult giant pandas chowing down on some bamboo.
A giant panda and her cub at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, Dujiangyan Base.
As endearingly clumsy as the giant pandas were, we were just as spellbound by the less-celebrated red pandas. These raccoon-like ailuridae are in fact the original ‘panda’. They were only lumbered with the ‘red’ or ‘lesser’ descriptor to distinguish them from their ‘giant’ namesake, whose formal description came four decades after their own. In truth, the two carnivorans have little in common beyond their overlapping habitat and thumb-like appendages, which are both connected to their shared appetite for bamboo.
A red panda at the Dujiangyan Base.
“Today’s the day the teddy bears have a picnic…” – red pandas enjoying lunch at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
Mountains and ancient towns
Pandas aren’t the only reason to travel to Qingchengshan and the wider Dujiangyan area. We visited the panda base on the second day of a weekend break in the tongue-twisting township of Qingchengshanzhen. On day one of our trip, we explored the mountain itself.
Mount Qingcheng was the setting of our first hike in Sichuan – a hike that, in retrospect, felt like a warm-up to the more gruelling Mount Emei climb we completed months later. Like its larger cousin, Qingchengshan is both picturesque and mystical, with dramatic scenery and ancient Taoist temples. It was on this very mountain, in the 2nd century AD, that Taoism was established as an organised religion.
The interior of Tianxi Cave, the birthplace of organised Taoism.
The cascading rooftops of Tianshi Cave, Qingchengshan.
The gate that marks the beginning of the pedestrianised path to the mountain from Qingchengshan Railway Station.
Outside the hyper-modern metropolises of China, locations like Qingchengshan stand as bastions of local tradition and cultural heritage.
A little over 20 minutes south of Qingchengshanzhen by road, and just 10 minutes south of the panda base, is another such site: Jiezi Ancient Town.
Admittedly, China’s ancient towns, in our experience, fall short of providing a crystal-clear window into the past. Catering for the hordes of (chiefly domestic) tourists who crowd their stone-paved streets, they’re as likely to feature a Luckin Coffee as a traditional teahouse.
I’m not complaining, by the way: historic surroundings don’t negate my dependency on caffeine. Nor, even, do the marked-up ‘scenic-area’ prices.
Besides, overlooking the mod-cons, these towns genuinely are ancient. They may have been rebuilt over time – an unavoidable consequence of their largely wooden construction – but they artfully retain their old-world charm nonetheless.
Like Jiezi, the nearby Dujiangyan Scenic Area sits at the foot of a mountain. Of all the scenic areas we visited, Dujiangyan’s is the one that most impressed us. It comprises a traditional Chinese garden, a hillside ancient town, a temple-dotted hiking route, and – perhaps most famously – the world’s oldest surviving damless irrigation system.
An elevated view of the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, which has been providing water for Chengdu since the 3rd century BC.
A Chinese stone guardian lion, with Yulei Pavilion in the background, pictured from Guanxian Ancient Town, Dujiangyan City.
The mountainous province of Sichuan, then, is a land of firsts and superlatives. Even beyond its global significance in all things panda, Taoism, and irrigation, it happens to be the cradle of tea cultivation.
Mengdingshan, specifically, is the birthplace of the brew. On a weekend visit to Ya’an, we explored the mountain’s plantations and sampled its delicate Ganlu tea variety.
The giant teapot that welcomes visitors to Mount Mengding.
Tea plantations on Mengdingshan.
Despite having a population of over 1.4 million, the city of Ya’an felt provincial in comparison to Chengdu – and even to Dujiangyan, which is half its size. We didn’t encounter any fellow waiguoren the entire weekend, and Shangli Ancient Town, about a 45-minute taxi ride north of central Ya’an, proved the least touristy and most isolated of all the ancient towns we visited. It was on this trip that the truth of our situation hit us like a tonne of tea leaves: We’re really living in China.
Yazhou Covered Bridge, Ya’an City.
Longxi River, Shangli Ancient Town, Sichuan.
Over four months and many more adventures later, we bade zàijiàn to China, to Chengdu, to Family Walk, and to friends old and new. To this day, we reminisce about our experiences in Sichuan, from the everyday to the extraordinary. And when do, we feel grateful for that unexpected phone call on the eve of our marriage – and for the leap of faith it inspired us to take.
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