Living in the southwest mountains, the Chinese capital felt distant, while the world just beyond the borders seemed enticingly close. My hometown of Kunming was a gateway, a link to other communities, cultures, languages.
I remember flipping through a map book in primary school and discovering that across the vast ocean lay another “Spring City”—San Francisco. An impression of the US moulded itself into my brain early. The far shore of the ocean felt like a good place. Lakes under snow mountains and glittering skylines, layer upon layer of maple and prairie. A vast national park, called Yosemite, whose rocks were photographed for everyone’s computer wallpapers. The news often featured an inspirational figure, who also seemed to be a good father, leading the country. The world felt small; I assumed that my highland hometown must be special, too, to friends across the sea. People from every background crossed back and forth, searching for different lives; magazines in many languages wrote about a bright, open world. Children and adults dreamt of a single global village.
Like my hometown, San Francisco’s Bay Area is, curiously, neither hot nor cold. I’ve travelled across the four seasons, seen many plains and coasts, and wanted to flee most weather. Many times I thought: if I don’t stay in my hometown, I’ll live in the Bay.
J, who grew up in the Bay, sojourned in Kunming, my spring city, eleven years ago. He’d just graduated with a degree in communications from University of California, Santa Barbara, and had come to write for the local English-language press and teach my tiny English class. To us, J wasn’t a teacher but an older brother. He was passionate, scoffed at the stiff British curriculum, and summoned the principal to watch our presentations so they could replace the final exam. He shared stories with infectious excitement; we had to keep asking him to slow down. His accent was especially hard to follow, as if his words were always rushing ahead to the next destination. J was on a kind of round-the-world journey; in 2013, the Five-Star Red Flag became the twentieth in his tally. My small hometown became his base for exploring Southeast Asia. By the time he left, his count of countries visited had climbed beyond forty.
J said he didn’t like the United States. During the 2016 presidential election he, like so many, was heartsick. Leaving the US made him feel at ease. He loved the food in my hometown. Seven years ago, passing through from Taiwan, he posted on Facebook about “a brief, mostly food-centric, homecoming”.
Around the time J left my hometown, the world turned uncanny. At some point, people stopped speaking of a global village. They took to building walls instead.
Travel has never been a big deal for those of us near the border, separating one constructed nation-state from another. As a child I ate street-stall maoyadan (balut) in Hekou; much later, on a slow street in Saigon’s Quận 4, I was lucky to have it again. I didn’t know the words ‘balut’ or ‘hột vịt lộn’, only its taste. In the Hekou of my childhood, to go to Lào Cai in northwestern Vietnam you could use a passport and visa, or a national ID and a temporary pass, or a skiff on the river that marks the boundary between the countries. On another border, to reach Mong La or Tachileik in eastern Myanmar, for many years it was simply a matter of hiring an unmarked car. Farther north, schoolchildren came by day to attend classes on our side of the border and returned to their homes in Shan State at night.
It’s different now. Early last year, I headed west along Asian Highway 14, which runs for more than 2,000 kilometres from Hai Phong in Vietnam to Mandalay in Myanmar, passing through Kunming on the way. Between Jiegao in Yunnan province and Muse in Shan State, a border wall stands thick-bodied and sightless; it had been erected swiftly during the pandemic years to enforce a zero-tolerance containment policy. Here, the Pan-Asian Highway breaks—for ordinary travellers, the China National Highway 320 and Myanmar’s National Highway 3 no longer meet. Driving across the Nam Mao Valley, the mountains to the north and to the south, the golden stupas and houses on either side of the road are the same as they’ve always been. How did it come to be that a wall so tall now cleaves them apart?
I’d always thought of myself as an anarchist. I believed that any constraint not rooted in spontaneous ethics was itself unethical—be it grand religion, law, or rule. For me, only ethics existed; external discipline did not. Upon that spontaneous ethic I built a kind of primitive religion, a substitute discipline that helped me model the world and my engagement with it. Yet, as I grow older in a world that’s getting messier, I’ve had to admit the need for some constraints. And when I looked across that wall, I began to doubt my faith in pure freedom.
In truth, not every person defines a spontaneous ethics, and fewer still govern themselves by it. Across the Yunnan–Myanmar wall, in the absence of state law, it was not freedom that flourished but monstrosity. De facto Han cultural enclaves have taken root, morphing into lawless zones where telecom fraud syndicates and warlords operate with impunity. Kidnapping and trafficking run rampant. Power, growing in unregulated air, has turned into something that chills the blood. This terror made me realise that the absence of restraint was not an ultimate good; it merely paved the way for another, more primal power. Only ‘good’ restraints can mend what must be mended, but the definition of ‘good’ is itself something that can only be enforced by power. How can we ensure that power is only ever wielded by those who are ‘good’? Finding no answer, I’ve wavered between anarchism and the notion of a social contract, and ultimately chose to live in diaspora in the fullest sense—moving between places, cultures, and identities, never fully rooted in any single nation-state, never fully committing to a single system or power.
The word ‘diaspora’ comes from ‘diaspeiro’ in ancient Greek, meaning ‘to sow over’ or ‘to scatter’. Its early uses include reference to the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. J’s Jewish grandparents fled to the US during the Second World War. After leaving my hometown, he stayed briefly in Puerto Rico, then settled in Taipei; three years later, he found a new job in Tel Aviv. J left my hometown, fearing the government’s increasing surveillance, and left Taipei when tensions with mainland China escalated, worrying about the same authoritarian reach. He used two Chinese proverbs as his signature on social media for many years: “山高皇帝远，千虑一失”. The mountains are high and the emperor is far away; even the best laid plans can go wrong.
Nine Septembers ago, when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, I teased J that trouble seemed to follow him. He didn’t escape conflict in Tel Aviv either. After the attack on the Nova music festival near Re’im on 7 October 2023, he bought one of the last tickets out of Israel, before the airport closed, and fled to Thessaloniki in Greece. Soon after, J returned to the Bay—the home he’d once tried so hard to leave behind.
A year later, the man the young J had railed against won the US presidential election again. J must be very sad, I thought.
Inevitably, the world’s gaze returned to the United States. I began to practice the diasporic life, arriving in Australia, the ‘Western’ world’s most marginal edge. Students from New York University came on exchange to Sydney that April, when bright tents spread over campus lawns around the world, protesting Israeli violence in Gaza. We talked between classes. “I’m lucky I’m not in the US this year,” one of them said.
In the two months after security forces entered Columbia University, I encrypted all my data through local servers. Three years ago, fear had driven me to learn everything I could about computer networks; in the cat-and-mouse game of data privacy I found a small peace. I never thought a day would come when, beneath the banner of universal values, I would lose all trust—in the courts, the police, the internet service providers and regulators—just as I had in the suffocating past I thought I’d escaped.
The costs of a diasporic life keep rising. Once, we moved freely across borders, carried by curiosity and hope. Now we flee from one crisis to another, seeking ever-shrinking zones of safety. In the end, will we, too, come to build our own walls against the world?