Between Two Rivers

6:20pm, Chongqing.

69 floors above the city where the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers meet.

一座城市，两条江。

一个起点，两种人生。

我都走过了。

I stood there, from the 69th floor, watching the light settle into the haze, the city soften into evening. So much movement below, and yet from this height where I stood, everything felt still.

Chongqing, the city where I was born.

The place where my life began.

I left Chongqing before I turned eighteen. As the only child who had never stepped beyond my parents’ wings, I carried nothing but an obligation of fulfilling my parents’ “American dream”. What followed was a long learning journey to live in a foreign country, learning to speak, to study, to adapt, to belong, to choose, and to find my own identity.

A brand-new life built piece by piece, far from where it started.

From a high school exchange student to graduate with a Computer science degree. From finding new friendships to navigating through various relationship, some that stayed, some didn’t.

Love.

Career.

Family of my own.

Motherhood.

A friend once told me, “You’re a survivor.”

Maybe that’s true.

I have learned how to carry myself through unfamiliar places, through uncertainty, through changes.

⸻

I came back to spend a week visiting my parents and to celebrate Lunar New Year with them.

It has been about fifteen years since I last spent this holiday here.

The city has changed so much.

New streets, new skyscrapers, and new lights. More tourists. The skyline is almost unrecognizable, with only small, pockets of fragments that still resemble the Chongqing I remember.

I wondered, for a moment, whether I still belong to this place.

And then I looked at the two rivers.

They meet without asking which one came first.

They carry different colors, different speeds, different histories. And yet, they flow side by side.

⸻

Perhaps my life is also made of two currents.

One that began here, in this city of hills, fog, and rivers. Another that carried me across an ocean into the life I live now.

I don’t have to choose one over the other.

I carry both.

I stood there, on the 69th floor above the city, with both versions of my life, like the two rivers, flowing side by side.