Wednesday, March 22, 2023 // The Statement — 7

The air looks different, al-
most imperceptibly, like the edges 
of colors have changed. The sky 
seems more vivid, trees warmer, 
taller. Is that possible? The build-
ings seem to shimmer with red 
halations — but not a western, lust-
ful, aggressive red. It’s a Chinese, 
happy, fortunate red.
My uncle picks both me and 
my father up from the Běijěng 
Capital 
International 
Airport. 
Both of us have been on an air-
plane for the past 18 hours — we’re 
exhausted. The city, even at night, 
still lights ablaze with the musk of 
cigarette smoke and the chorus of 
car horns. I can’t place why; I find 
deep comfort in that mess.
It’s the first time I’ve been 
back in six years since we moved. 
My father offers reasons why we’ve 
returned: because my family wants 
to see me and because I need to 
experience Chinese culture first-
hand. But, frankly, we both know 
the real reason: I am back to re-
member.
To remember is not an easy 
task. Memory, her green, fickle 
mistress, is a complex, elusive en-
tity, one much more complicated 
than our classic understanding of 
her suggests. Many of us wish to 
walk in her footsteps, to pin her 
on the fireplace mantle like a coy-
ote pelt and indulge in her past, 
promised beauty. But personally, I 
am here because some part of me, 
ever since I immigrated to Ameri-
ca, feels null, void — ripped out of 
its shell. I long to unearth those 
missing parts of me, to feel that 
all is normal in the world again, to 
remember. 
To start our search for her, 
we must understand that memory 
is neither localized nor discrete. 
She isn’t the retelling of personal 
experiences, something we think 
of like a book in a library or data in 
a computer bank. Memory, at her 
basis, is a series of consolidated 
neural connections — silk webs 
that span all across your brain, 

igniting every lobe like fireworks 
whenever she is called. She is ar-
rangement, her body expressed 
through the streets of a city, 
branches of a sandalwood tree, 
unable to be seen like a coordinate 
point on a graphical plane.
Memory is lived; no longer 
can we view her physique as sim-
ply past experience. According to 
Denis Brouillet, psychologist and 
author of “Enactive Memory,” 
“This means accepting that our 
memories are no longer consid-
ered as the recovery, sensu stricto, 
of an event that happened in the 
past, but rather as the product of a 
cognitive elaboration constructed 
here and now.” Our memories 
are recollections skewed by the 
present self, in the same way that 
someone’s stray glance can appear 
happy to us when we are happy 
and sad when we are sad. And, like 
a forest, she moves, her roots ever 
so shifting, footpaths opening and 
closing as our sense of self ma-
tures, vestiges of my past growing 
on the tree trunks like moss.
Her highness is visceral. 
Memory is lived emotion, apparent 
in conditions like the Capgras syn-
drome, in which someone falsely 
believes that the people and places 
dear to them have been replaced 
by identical duplicates. The con-
dition is caused by an emotional 
malfunction in your brain’s visual 
processing system — a healthy per-
son can picture their loved ones 
and in turn fond emotions will 
arise. But someone with Capgras 
syndrome will not experience this 
instinctive emotional response. 
Those with Capgras syndrome can 
see a loved one and not feel any-
thing — an occurrence so alien to 
your brain that it rejects the logical 
outcomes and concludes that this 
stranger person in front of you 
must be foreign, must be an exact 
replica of those people you know 
and trust instead of themselves. To 
remember, then, is to feel.
Run your hand along your 
neck and feel the spots your old 
lovers used to caress. Press your 
body against the apartment wall 
and feel the bumps: holes where 

posters were hung, places where 
past tenants have cried, have 
loved, have been loved — places 
where she lingers in the air. 
Passionately, 
she 
dances. 
Memory is dynamic, a dialogue be-
tween two systems of information: 
storage and retrieval. This simple, 
extended definition of memory 
has profound implications; her 
back arches and we see her in a 
new light — exosomatic memory. 
Memory can be something that 
is not purely an internal process, 
but something stored outside 
the brain. This is not news to us; 
we remember materials for a test 
in our class notes, our past lives 
through journals, history through 
textbooks. These are tangible 
memories, physical artifacts, im-
mune to biological follies.
In that sense, I’ve known 
Běijěng like an encyclopedia. I 
can tell you its population, its nine 
city gates and vivid details about 
its rich history. But these facts are 
uninteresting and largely over-
whelming — so many bits of infor-
mation that fly by and splatter like 
bugs on my mind’s windshield. 
While this is, undeniably, an im-
portant type of memory, I did not 

return as a historian. I am back as a 
taxi driver, who experiences mem-
ory like a bloodstream, who knows 
the city not as facts but as a place 
beyond language, as somewhere 
more immutable. 
Běijěng is a million different 
places. Go there and you will see 
districts of technological superi-
ority and capitalistic achievement 
far beyond what New York City’s 
Fifth Avenue or London’s Chel-
sea Street can offer. But blocks 
away there will be sìhéyuàns and 
other reminders of the old past, 
porcelain statues in her form. It is 
a city knowable only by its dichot-
omy, where rapid financial growth 
meets the roots of a purple past, 
where marble altars meet concrete 
and steel lattice.
Běijěng is a city of stone, ce-
ramic roof tiles and the old king-
dom’s gardens, embodying the 
remnants of a lost grace. But it is 
also a city of poverty. Poverty that 
the country rectified with capi-
talistic development — allowing 
a new city to spring up from the 
ashes of the cultural revolution 
and grow to unimaginable heights 
of magnificence. 
An attentive traveler walk-

ing through Běijěng will see two 
cities: one on wooden roots, an-
other on a concrete tree. Its new 
incarnation is undoubtedly supe-
rior, providing better health for 
the citizens and more economic 
opportunity, but its values drifted 
among its materialism. Before the 
clock strikes midnight, Běijěng is 
a rich, unimaginably beautiful city 
that is pretending to be a Western 
metropolis — while the edges fail 
to hold its political weight. The 
people speak in hushed tones, 
driftless, rich in metrics of quality 
but poor in the soul. 
Come with me to Tiěněnmén 
Square and I can tell you the amount 
of people that died on May 35. 
I can recite the exact times 
everything happened and its so-
ciopolitical ramifications, but I 
think it would be more resonant 
if you stood in that square and felt 
the tension tearing at the edges of 
your vision like a fisheye photo-
graph. Listen to the chips at the 
edges of Tiěněnmén’s bricks and 
hear the gone people sing, feel 
that hope extinguished and wit-
ness the death of the good China. 

Design by Grace Filbin

Finding myself in memory’s corridors

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

 DARRIN ZHOU
Statement Columnist

