My life as a backpacker began in Western Europe.
On that first trip, I travelled alone for more than a month, moving through fourteen cities with a backpack and a fairly active imagination about everything that might go wrong. I had heard that women travelling alone in Europe attracted unwanted attention, so I dressed as much like a boy as I could. I had been warned endlessly about pickpockets in Italy, so I wore my daypack on the front, hidden under an oversized jacket. I was so cautious that I hardly spoke to strangers.
Looking back, I must have been quite a sight.
London was the final stop on that journey. I was travelling on a standby ticket and could not get a seat home, which left me unexpectedly stranded for a few extra days. With time to spare, I wandered through the West End, and somewhere between the theatres, shops and people on the street, my carefully constructed masculine disguise began to lose its appeal.
I bought clothes. Then shoes. Then more clothes.
Some of those pieces stayed in my wardrobe for years.
That first journey through Europe opened a door to a different understanding of myself, and London left such a strong impression that I kept finding reasons to return. Years later, after a long absence, I came back again.
This time I stayed in Spitalfields, in a house roughly three hundred years old. The floors creaked, the walls were uneven, and every staircase seemed to carry some trace of the lives that had passed through before me. To some people, an old house makes noise. To me, it was telling stories.
People are much the same. If we listen only to the surface noise, we often miss the person underneath.
Spitalfields itself felt like a place where the past had never quite agreed to leave. Old houses stood beside cafés, shops and restaurants created by people from all over the world. History had not been preserved by freezing it in place. It was still being lived in.
Part of the reason I had returned to London was to spend time with a young couple who had built their life there. They had taken food from southern China and reimagined it in a London setting, not by disguising where it came from, but by allowing it to meet another culture.
One evening I went to their restaurant. Upstairs, there was dim sum. Downstairs, tea shared the menu with alcohol, which somehow felt perfectly at home in London. The drinks list was so imaginative that I felt slightly intoxicated before ordering anything, and the food had the same playful spirit. Salted egg had even found its way into ice cream.
At the next table, a Western woman was eating with an expression of such complete delight that I wanted to take a photograph of her. Manners prevailed.
A few days later, I went out for another dim sum lunch, this time somewhere very different. The restaurant was almost entirely black—black screens, black window frames, black bar—and only after I sat down did I remember that I had once visited its Shanghai branch.
The restaurant had already transformed Chinese food into something recognizably London: loud music, champagne alongside dim sum, mostly Western diners, and a sense that none of this required explanation.
I had only come for tea and something to eat.
When we arrived, a member of staff warned us that there would be a lion dance at three o’clock. It would be noisy, she said, but we were welcome to stay.
Of course I stayed.
Then the drums began.
The sound was instantly familiar. The lion moved through the dining room, teasing children, playing with the crowd, pretending to bite someone’s head. The Western diners were delighted. Everyone was laughing.
And I started to cry.
I had seen lion dances countless times before. It was not nostalgia in any simple sense, and I was not suddenly homesick. What moved me was seeing something so familiar to me appear so naturally in a place far from home, not as an exotic display that needed to be explained, but as something alive and completely at ease in its new surroundings.
For a few minutes, there was no reason to ask whether what I was seeing was Chinese or British.
It was both.
That is one of the things I have always liked about London. The city seems able to hold very different things without insisting that one must cancel out the other. You can sit in an elegant dining room eating highly polished Chinese food, then walk outside and buy a jianbing, a savory Chinese crepe, from a street stall and eat it as you wander.
Sometimes the street version is better than what you find back in China.
Old houses stand beside fashionable shops. Traditions are changed, borrowed, stretched and remade. The old does not have to disappear simply because something new has arrived, and the new does not have to apologize for being there.
Of course, London does not offer beauty and cultural harmony at every turn.
Shopping in a busy part of the city can feel more like an advanced video game.
On one visit, I became aware of three young men quietly following me. I turned left; they turned left. I turned right; they did the same. When I stopped, they slowed down, circled around and somehow ended up behind me again.
Their interest in my backpack was becoming difficult to misunderstand.
The game was easy enough to end. I stopped, took the backpack off and held it in front of me.
They walked past.
One of them gave me a look that seemed to say, Fine. You win.
After they were gone, I checked the bag. One of the zippers was already halfway open.
At that moment, my thoughts about London became considerably less poetic. I wanted to go back to the countryside.
Years earlier, on my first trip through Europe, I had been afraid of almost everyone. I had travelled wrapped in layers of self-protection, imagining danger around every corner. By then, I was still careful, but I was no longer frightened in the same way.
Perhaps growing older does not mean becoming fearless. It means learning what deserves caution and what does not.
Near the end of the trip, I walked into St Pancras International and saw a line of enormous pink neon words suspended above the station:
I want my time with you.
People moved beneath them carrying suitcases, checking departure boards, meeting, leaving, hurrying somewhere else. I stood there for a while and looked up.
If those words had been hanging in a gallery, I might simply have regarded them as a work of art.
But they were in a railway station.
In a place built around movement, departure and people running out of time, someone had placed a sentence asking for something very simple: time with another person.
That may be why London has stayed with me for so many years.
Art is not always something hanging on a wall, waiting for us to admire it. Sometimes it lives in a three-hundred-year-old house, in a Chinese dish reinvented in another country, in the sudden sound of drums in a restaurant, or in a sentence floating above a railway station.
On my first journey through Europe, I was busy trying to see the world and just as busy trying to protect myself from it.
Years later, I began to notice something else.
What remains with me is rarely the number of places I visited. It is the moment when something made me stop—a room, a sound, a stranger, a familiar tradition appearing somewhere unexpected, a few words above a crowd.
Perhaps art was never separate from life.
Perhaps we simply do not always have time to notice it.