xiamen, Fujian | 厦门福建
Day 1 | 第一天
Each of us made our own arrangements to arrive in Xiamen, Fujian - the starting point of our tour.
After a twenty-five hour long journey from NYC with a brief stop in Hong Kong, I arrived in Xiamen Airport, Fujian. Xiamen seemed like a relatively small airport; a few terminals with one main area to collect luggage and enter customs. I already changed USD for renminbi | 人民币 in Hong Kong so I immediately looked for a TAXI outside. I intentionally changed money in Hong Kong before arriving in China because I wasn’t confident in my mandarin skills; at least I knew I could communicate in English in HK. However, I got to practice my negligible mandarin skills right away when asking the driver to take me to the hotel. Luckily, I had the name and address of the hotel written so all I had to say was “Wǒ xiǎng qù zhè jiā jiǔdiàn” | 我想去这家酒店.
Driving through Xiamen, the very first thing I noticed was how green the city was, and how clean the air quality felt. There was lush landscaping along the streets, sidewalks, and even on overhead highways. This was not the China that I experienced twenty-five years prior, and contrasted with my memories of living in northern China in the mid-1990s when coal was the primary fuel for energy, and I can recall wiping a thin layer of black soot on my face after being in the streets of Beijing for a day. I’ve also been swayed with the media coverage on China’s air quality over the years that only focused on polluted regions. In fact, Xiamen is often included in lists of Chinese cities with the best air quality.
In all my prior travels throughout China, I never made it to Fujian | 福建. It was a place I wanted to visit someday to get a better sense of its physical and human geography since many recent immigrants to NYC Chinatown are of Fujianese descent as well as many of the children and families I’ve worked with professionally.
So I was excited to spend time getting know aspects of Fujian. ■