Why I Want to Travel to China
The first time I seriously considered visiting China was on an ordinary afternoon. I was browsing through an old bookstore in London when I came across a yellowed copy of The Travels of Marco Polo. One line, underlined by a previous reader, caught my eye: “What is described here is but one thousandth of what I saw.” I stared at those words for a long time.
Growing up in Europe, China had always felt “far away”—not just geographically, but also in my imagination. We learn about the Great Wall, giant pandas, and kung fu from childhood, yet these names can feel like specimens locked behind a glass display case. You know they exist, but you can hardly touch their living warmth. That is why I first want to go to China: to discover what this country, which has fascinated the West for centuries, is truly like.
I want to go to China, to be jolted by the weight of time.
Europe has its own history, of course: the Colosseum, Notre-Dame, the Acropolis of Athens. We are used to picturing the past amid weathered stone ruins. China, however, feels different. A friend who visited once told me that as he cycled along the Xi’an City Wall, it suddenly dawned on him that he was riding alongside a structure built centuries ago. Down below, young commuters rode shared bikes to work, while food-delivery riders wove through traffic. He said it did not feel like “visiting history”; it felt like “history rushing past you.”
That layered sense of time is what I crave. On a single street corner, you might find an ancient pagoda, a Ming-dynasty city wall, buildings from the Republican era, and modern glass skyscrapers standing side by side. Where I come from, history is often fenced off behind ticket gates. In China, history can seem to still be living its daily life.
I want to go to China, to taste things with no proper translation.
Western menus often translate easily: roast chicken, steak, salad, soup. Chinese food is different. I have tried General Tso’s chicken in New York and chow mein in London, yet I know those dishes are not the real thing. A Chinese student once told me that her hometown breakfast was something called douzhi. I asked her for an English name, and she paused for a long moment before saying, “It’s just… douzhi.”
I asked what it tasted like. She replied, “Like yogurt and pickled vegetables boiled together.” I could not picture it at all—and precisely that sense of the unfamiliar draws me there. I want to step into humble hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Chengdu and watch chefs toss Sichuan peppercorns into sizzling dishes. I want to wander through Guangzhou’s dim sum houses and peek under the lids of rolling food carts. I want to eat roadside hand-pulled noodles in northwestern China. Food is one of the most honest forms of culture, and Chinese cuisine may be among the world’s hardest cuisines to fully translate. Sometimes, you have to be there in person to know what something really tastes like.
I want to go to China, to see whether the future must look Western.
We are often taught one dominant narrative: modernization equals Westernization. But China seems to complicate that idea. I watched a video of an elderly villager in Guizhou scanning a QR code on a phone to buy fruit, with a centuries-old stone bridge nearby. Another clip showed an elderly woman practicing tai chi in a Shanghai park, with towering skyscrapers and glowing LED screens behind her.
It makes me curious: can a nation hold onto its own culture and still become modern? We often talk about the “conflict between tradition and modernity,” yet China seems to be conducting an ongoing experiment in which tradition and modernity coexist on the same street. I want to witness for myself whether this experiment is succeeding, failing, or simply still unfolding. If China can carve out a different path, then for all of us, it would mean that there is more than one version of the future.
I want to go to China, to be changed by its people.
When we travel, we rarely remember the scenery most vividly; we remember people. I have read countless travelers’ accounts: a stranger on a train pressing a bag of oranges into someone’s hands; an elderly man walking a lost visitor all the way to their destination; travelers staying in hostels and playing cards with Chinese friends deep into the night.
These stories paint a picture of a special kind of warmth. It may not always be polished or quiet, but it is genuine and heartfelt. I long to be pulled into that daily life: learning to pick fresh vegetables from market vendors, being invited by elderly men in parks to play chess, and hearing neighboring diners in hotpot restaurants ask, “Can you handle spicy food?” Where I come from, strangers tend to keep an invisible barrier between themselves. I have heard that in China, that barrier can sometimes be as thin as paper.
I want to go to China, to have my assumptions overturned.
To be honest, the information about China that we receive while growing up is full of contradictions. News reports portray it as a “threat,” films frame it as “mysterious,” and advertisements reduce it to a “factory.” None of these images captures the full picture. I know that if I never go, my idea of China will always be shaped by other people’s descriptions. I want to get lost, to be surprised, to feel awkward, and to realize how wrong some of my old assumptions were. The greatest gift of travel is not simply what you see, but discovering how little you truly knew. I want to be struck by that sense of unknowing—and start learning all over again.
So if one day I board a plane bound for Beijing, I will not carry heavy expectations. I only plan to bring my eyes, an empty stomach, and a little patience. China is too vast to be contained by any single preconception. Whatever assumptions I carry with me will inevitably be challenged by what I encounter. And those fragments are exactly what I hope to bring home with me.
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