Update: This story has been included in a digital-first book called UNLOCKED: Memories of Wuhan.

Half a lifetime ago I lived in Wuhan. Hankou to be exact.

My memories are vague. When I boarded the overnight train leaving the city and stared across the window at friends waving me goodbyes, I left everything behind. The noisy walking streets, back alley chaos, humid summers, dusty breakfast stalls, all of which had faded into the hidden folds of my subconscious. The hubbubs of the city went first, the neighborhood second, following which the names and faces of friends and the girls I adored. Nothing much remained of my Wuhan-ness, except for my love for the spicy food, memories of biking around with my parents, and a deeply rooted impatience in the face of bullshit. Wuhanese people are direct; the brutal heat in the summer days renders beating around the bush unbearable.

Last year I went back for a few days to visit the city with my girlfriend, and sustained a curious case of nausea during my entire time there. The source of the nausea was unknown, but I suspect it had to do with my disqualification as a Wuhan native. The city had changed so quickly that I could hardly recognize my own neighborhood. Riding a bicycle and finding my way around town like when I was little was definitely too daunting of a task. Besides, my foreign passport did not even work for any bicycle rentals. The re-gan-mian¹ and san-xian-dou-pi² were the only antidotes for my discomfort, and remained parts of the few reasons I put up with this trip back. Though when I wasn’t sitting in front of a bowl or a plate and instead lost in the middle of an intersection surrounded by shadows of concrete, the nausea would return instantly and I had to hide myself in the phone screen, call a taxi, and scramble onto the next stop on the itinerary ASAP. The next stop was one of my favorite places in the city, Qian-jin-si-lu³. Without the map on my phone and a ride-sharing app, I wouldn’t have a chance of finding it.

Qian-jin-si-lu used to be the electronics center in Hankou. My love for the neighborhood started around age 5 or 6. I used to sit on my dad’s bicycle and later upgraded to riding my own bike with him, and went to the neighborhood almost weekly at times throughout my childhood. We would first stop by a little vendor selling “Taiwanese” sausage, where for 3 RMBs I could receive a stickful of snappy mystery meat whose delicacy I haven’t been able to encounter again anywhere later in life, even in Taiwan. In a magical palace called Dian-nao-cheng⁴, the owner of a particular bootleg disc stall became our friend. He had an accent from one of the suburbs around the city, and a mole next to his mouth to go with it. Even though regulations back then were rare, and bootleg CD vendors were ubiquitous and competitive, his stall was always busy. I used to ask my dad why his business was always so good, and he told me that he had the best catalog out of everyone. This was only partly true in my experience; he often did not have the game I was looking for. Though if he didn’t happen to have it, the next time when I went there he would always be ready with the disc. With a smirk he would let me know that he always had the game, and just needed some extra time to find it. Rather than calling out his lies, I would roll my eyes and kept flipping through a long row of rectangular boxes full of video game discs laid out around his stall, next to crowds of other nerds, each holding on to a box and thumbing through the discs inside. He was usually more interested in my dad though, since he carried the cash. Seeing me getting lost in the shopping spree, he would motion dad over to go in the little back room filled with other middle-aged men, where more “merchandise of interest” were, and chatted about women in action movies. I would have picked out 4 or 5 discs by the time dad came back, and had to then start the excruciating process of game elimination. In the end, 2 discs I wanted the most would prevail and get paid for promptly. I would then dash for our bicycles locked outside the building, ready to get out of there.

I was always in a rush on the rides home, as I itched to stick those new video games into the loudly moaning CD drives and give them a go. Mom went on business trips quite often back then, so if she wasn’t home to prep food, we usually stopped by a street food vendor near home for some pan-fried pork buns or dumplings. The cook wore a permanent off-color white tank-top, folded up halfway to expose his glistening belly. There would always be a small crowd standing around his huge wok gawking at the next batch of dumplings, and the whole operation smelled like smoky pork grease. The wok was loud and cackling with smoke and fire, and in my memory everyone around it was always sweaty. The cook gave a slight nod seemingly at us and would grunt something incomprehensible when we yelled out our orders at him. We then sat down at the plastic chairs next to the huge metal wok and waited. My dad talked to me about lots of things during those wait times. I’m sure they were full of love, care, discipline, and wisdom, but at the time their most important function was to pass the time before the food came out. Soon we would receive our piping hot dumplings in a thin, transparent, and oily plastic bag to be taken home and inhaled quickly before my dive into the new games. I didn’t appreciate those dumplings enough back then, but they were the absolute best I’ve ever had anywhere, and are now forever lost in time.

Presently the taxi driver dropped us off at the entrance of an unfamiliar building, and told me this was Dian-nao-cheng. The exterior was semi-new. Layers of new paints and billboards were slapped on top of the existing concrete surface in a casual fashion. Two huge glass doors were open, but thick and heavy plastic flaps were in place to keep mosquitos out, obscuring views into the belly of the beast. I looked up and down the place, and snapped a photo to send to my parents on WeChat with a caption “guess where I am”. Feeling the heart pounding a bit I lifted the plastic flaps to let myself in.

Gone were the crowds from my memory. Business was sparse, even on a Saturday. Bored store keepers sat at their mostly empty stalls. It seemed that they were all selling electronics and pre-built laptops now, instead of desktop components like back in the day. Quite a few console game stores were scattered in-between, an unfamiliar sight that did not register in my impression of the place. I quickly became disoriented when I tried to find my way around the large but lonely space, knowing that whatever I was looking for was no longer there. Suppressing an messy buzz of emotions, I stepped into a video game shop; a mustached baseball-capped young guy sat motionless in front of a large glass desk watching some Let’s Play video on a small monitor. He nodded at me, said nothing, and resumed watching the video. He knew I wasn’t in a buying mood.

I shifted my feet around in front of some box arts behind the glassed shelves, lamenting the fact that cheap bootleg computer games were now an extinct product of history when my phone vibrated. I looked down at the screen; it was dad replying to my photo. “Where is this? I couldn’t tell.” He said. I put the phone back in my pocket, completely dejected. I was now ready to escape this hell hole. My plan was to head to a highly rated dumpling joint nearby that I found on an online review app. It was bound to disappoint.

Then my peripheral picked up something that would change my thinking. I saw an A4 paper stuck to the desk facing out where Video Watcher sat. The notes on the paper flatly stated, “blue-ray adult films available. Ask the staff at the desk.”

I chuckled to myself, looked up, and caught the look of “the staff at the desk” who picked up on my gaze, and whose mouth had twisted into a sympathetic smirk. He extended the smirk to my disinterested girlfriend standing next to me, waved us goodbye, and returned his gaze to the Let’s Play video.

I was happy though. It turned out that my childhood didn’t fade away completely. The Wuhan I knew stayed erect.