The year is 2008. A YouTube video titled ROOM TOUR!!! had garnered millions of views on this recently popularized media format. On a carpeted interior of an upper middle-class suburban home, the narrator known as juicystar07 holds a video camera and walks viewers through her bedchambers of teenage wonderland—fluffy pink chair and footrest sets, pillows declaring love for boys, stacks of Victoria’s Secret body spray and Claire’s jewelry amassed over dressers and tables. It was a portrayal of a seemingly within-reach, pristinely manufactured teenage experience, one that is a shopping spree away from being achieved. Behind the screen, I watched the video with the utmost attention, taking in all the details. To me, this viewing meant something more than was intended by the creator, a snapshot of American life.

Then without warning, the video stops loading at the 08:53 minute mark. The screen shows “Check your connection” while the ethernet cable blinks its usual indicator of connectivity. I refreshed my proxy, retyped YouTube’s URL, and continued watching that video. All was intended. The Great Chinese Firewall has caught another one of its rebels.

It is not 2008 anymore, but I’ve been thinking about how my experience with censorship evasion plays into greater narratives of jailbreaking, weak resistance, cultural imperialism, and identity dialectics. The internet, with its cheesy promises of being an information superhighway, quickly turned into a political battleground between nations and people. In the age of internet censorship in China, Vtunnel and other proxies offered a portal to a world I desperately dreamed of. Evasion against censorship became my escape into a romanticized world, but also an extension of a deeply internalized imperialist rhetoric. When I was watching that video of a pink room via a proxy, I was an amalgamation of the deeply unique economic, cultural, and political intersection of a rapidly changing region. What transcended over the years of wall flipping was a polarizing discovery of self and a strenuous acknowledgment of the in-betweenness of identity. I found solace in my upbringing beyond simply a rabbit hole of illicit links, but a network of meandering streets and communal happenstances that unfurl my physicality from anonymity, into a recognition of home.

In the 2000s, China was undergoing one of the fastest capitalist developments seen in recent history. Under the former leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the country rapidly transitioned from socialism to a market economy, opening its arms to overseas investment. Reform and open up was the slogan, and millions were pushed to the status of bourgeois for the first time, exposed to cash, constructions, brands, and the arrival of foreigners. While expanding global trade, the government continued to exert strict control over free speech and personal freedom, in news, courtrooms, and the recently arrived internet. International policy was marked by a duality: welcoming towards foreign investments while intolerant towards foreign information.

The Great Firewall was the poster child of internet censorship in China. The Chinese Communist Party has always exerted a tight grip over the dissemination and circulation of information since its founding. Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, media censorship was further strengthened to prevent additional uprisings. When the internet arrived in China in the 90s, censorship was extended to the cyberspace. The Great Firewall, a cheeky wordplay on the Great Wall that defended against military incursions of former years, was constructed in 1998 to monitor and restrict the dissemination of information on the internet. Initially a response to curb the influence of the China Democracy Party, it was quickly readopted as a tool of information suppression for the general public.

In the early phases of the wall construction, China’s implementation of internet censorship was ever erratic and nebulous. A site’s availability was toggled on and off without notice, or redirected to a localized version. YouTube was first briefly banned for 5 months between October 2007 to March 2008, and then permanently in March 2009. The ban appeared to be in response to a video uploaded showing security forces beating Tibetans. Availability of other websites like Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Blogspot was equally unpredictable and patchy. Servers often redirected users to regional versions or simply refused to load. All of this subsided by the 2010s when the aforementioned sites were indefinitely blocked.

While computer scientists were working away in government headquarters, I was sitting in my sixth-grade classroom learning about mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell. American-born and living in Shanghai, I was enrolled in an international program that only admitted non-native passport holders. School staff were plucked from English-speaking countries, eager to explore the depths of the Far East, and taught a curriculum focused on parity with the West. So it was quite natural when my teacher tried to pull up an educational video on Youtube. However, the page refused to load. “This website does not exist”, the projector stared back. We quickly realized YouTube is banned now. Lesson plan adjusted, this is merely a bump in the road.

One after another, foreign websites went dark. In addition to censorship, the block served as protection for Chinese internet companies, shielding them from international competition and promoting their domestic usage. Many Chinese websites already exist to offer similar services to their foreign counterparts: Tudou for video streaming, Baidu for internet searches, QQ for instant messaging, Sina for personal blogging, Kankan for latest news… Due to self-censorship and suppression of reporting, dissent appeared to be minimal.

However, I was a child bewildered by the meaning of border and belonging, so the negation of foreign intel felt cataclysmic. My parents journeyed across the Atlantic in pursuit of the American dream only to return to the motherland decades later in search of their Chinese dream. The age of open borders and economic stipends made working and living in mainland China auspicious. At age six, I moved with them from sunny LA to bifurcated Shanghai, leaving behind kindergarten friends and a tract house a short bus ride away from Redondo Beach.

The day before first grade, I wrote my Chinese name 叶敏 (Agility Leaf) a hundred times on a gridded paper and then cried. Uprooting the only known world was especially turbulent and confounding to a child. My uncomfortableness with my ocean crossing experience was exacerbated by the discrepancy between the economic state and cultural capital of the two nations. China was known as the smog-filled, noise-polluted source of knockoff animatronics with shiny stickers on the bottom. I struggled with coming to terms with being there for the foreseeable future. What little childhood discernment I had with global dialectics was funneled into a repulsion towards the country that besieged me. With each passing year, I desperately tried to erase the Chinese side of me while further elevating my American side. I couldn’t return to America physically, so I needed to be there mentally. Access to Western material was dire.

My sentiment isn’t unique. Perhaps if you are not of Western descent, you’ve also likely felt the tug between Western hegemony and the embrace of your own cultural heritage. Eurocentrism propagates beyond Western sovereignty to the rest of the world. Imperialism and colonialism instill a sense of inferiority in the conquered and the colonized by presenting the colonizer’s culture, language, and way of life as superior. Americanism, with its glitzy Hollywood portrayal of action and global expansion brands, had the rest of the world on a hook. American culture has global dominance in terms of norms, values, and economic power.

Fanaticism towards the West wasn’t only fueled by my nostalgia or my personal interpretation, but also upheld by interactions with others. Chinese people, with cash at their disposal for the first time in a long time, were ever more enticed to leave the country. Studying abroad or immigrating promised a brighter future, higher living standards, or greater opportunities to acquire wealth, my own family has been through that same experience. My American nationality was constantly the topic of conversation and fascination of anyone I knew, friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers. My passport was coveted, my economic status was favorable, my accent blended me in as a foreigner, my options were expansive beyond borders.

Western influence was pouring in through brands, corporations, movies, and expats, with its styles of living glorified through 5-star steak houses and fancy car dealerships. This style of soft colonialism that replaces warships with logos was inescapable from every nook of China, especially in Shanghai, where economic policies were particularly more favorable towards foreign exchange. Globalism upheld an image of an ever more connected, unified world where everyone benefits without dissecting the details of power dynamics and colonial history. So when the first Taco Bell opened its first Chinese location in Nangjingxi Road, our family trip to indulge in these Chinese style American style Mexican Tacos.

It is under this economic and cultural climate that hundreds of thousands of foreigners came to Shanghai, being sent by their head corps, landing here to start business. Shanghai was particularly attractive as the country’s financial hub, plus it was relatively more culturally open due to a history of de facto colonies. Expats roamed the streets of alleyways and gathered at popular dining spots, but also formed their own bubbles that were insulated from the “locals”. Many lived in gated communities far away from commuter trains, or often, in literal golf resorts. They sent their kids to private international schools where a select British, American, and Singaporean curriculum would be taught, and I was also a part of this system. My classmates were the bratty, righteous, beloved children of conglomeration partners, political figureheads, and business tycoons.

The word “local” was tossed around to refer to Chinese people. “Local” schools were where kids rat race to the bottom of gaokao, “local” clubs were where girls flock towards mediocre white men. Segregation without law, schools that catered to expats disallowed local children to enroll, clubs that catered to expats disallowed locals, or anyone that looked East Asian. So with a ¥30 Starbucks drink in hand, we sat on the rooftop in a former French Concession townhouse overlooking the “locals”. Up here we were the reincarnation of God.

VPNs and proxies quickly spread throughout the expat community. Proxies like Vtunnel worked by redirecting the user’s connection to a proxy server outside of China, and then forwarding the request to the target site. Because the connection to the proxy server is not blocked, the firewall doesn’t see a direct request to the restricted site. They became particularly popular due to their easy setup: no need for installation, simply go to a website and type in a blocked URL in its input box. Protesting would make you disappear, bypassing regulations acted as a silent form of defiance that is not just political, but a practical approach in getting around regulations. Jailbreaking phones, computers, video games, and consoles was already a widespread practice, so jailbreaking the firewall only felt like a natural extension.

When I found out about Vtunnel, it opened a portal to another world. Having access to rudimentary common sites Google, Facebook, and YouTube felt like a luxury. Being active on the internet for the first time coincided with the rise of Web 2.0. In reaction to the collapse of the dot-com bubble, platforms discovered ways of gaining a critical mass of users by letting just about anyone put a slice of their life online. Websites didn’t look as sanitized as it does today but their focus on ease of use drew in swarms of users. People were still in the process of figuring out how to create content, gain viewers, monetize, or simply figure out what it means to be seen online and what to share, and more are learning what it means to be plugged in, where being online no longer meant having a broadband connection, but browsing the web.

The launch of YouTube catapulted vlogging into the mainstream. Early vlogs had a raw quality that made them feel genuinely intimate to watch, like peeking into someone’s diary or inner monologue. I gravitated towards the online lives of those similar in age to me but live outside the digital walls. In grainy footage edited in Windows Movie Maker, American teens sat against Ikea bed frames or stood in poorly lit bathrooms, recounting stories, pouring feelings, divulging secrets. Sometimes they put on makeup, come out when the world might not be ready for it, or run us through the aftermath of a shopping trip. Sometimes they filmed with a video camera brought along some of the most mundane of places: targets, school cafeterias, backyards. I couldn’t stop myself from enveloping in the glimpses of the details of these backdrops: coarse carpets with air vents sporadically poking out, drugstores shelves lit by LEDs and lined with plastic tubes of Garnier and Neutrogena, the crack between driveway asphalt and sidewalk concrete where wild flowers grow: unbearably mundane and so distinctly American.

Through the tunnel of my screen, I got a peek into everyday life beyond borders—bedroom musings, supermarket shopping trips, school lunch conversations. Posters on a bedroom wall acted as an escapist fantasy for the teenager residing within, and the very room they were trying to escape from became the fantasy of mine. America is out there, oceans away, but I figured if I pretended hard enough, I’d re-enact the remnants within me. I etched the mannerisms observed online onto my own body, then adapted them to fit my locality, appropriated the slang and tone of the vloggers I saw and regurgitated them feebly to my English-speaking friends. I contemplated which subculture I should fall into through the expressions of the fandom and artists, captured in Google images and Wikipedia entries. 10 years before the rise of internet “core”, I embraced genres and aesthetics divorced from physical communities, lonesomely embodying the transition ahead of its time.

On a weekend, I put on an improvised accent, dressed with my midriff showing, painted a cut crease, and went shopping in a fashion exporting plaza. The plaza was lined with small vendors promoting themselves as suppliers for overseas merchandise, the stuff that ends up at strip malls and Walmarts across the States. I tried on a hoodie with “Abercrombie” embroidered on the front. The owner of the store approached me and said, you aren’t from around here, aren’t you? I’m still this Chinese girl, with genealogy tracing back to Yandi and Huangdi, yet I no longer looked the part. I acted shocked, but inside I was elated. I have successfully disguised myself as a foreigner.

Access to the outside world wasn’t always straightforward. China has been advancing its Deep Packet Inspection technology, which allowed it to detect traffic that seems to bypass restrictions. Frankly, Vtunnel and other popular proxies were an incredibly inefficient way of bypassing the firewall. Given the amount of users on a single proxy, they were easily overloaded and slow. They also offered virtually no encryption, enabling them to reveal the full details of the user’s activity to internet providers and subjecting them to be easily spotted by the government. A proxy would abruptly shut down. We would then quickly find an alternative, relying on it until it inevitably gets blocked. A cat and mouse game that hasn’t settled into rhythm due to the newness of the regulation. Connection to the rest of the world, and therefore the formation of self, was patchy, DIYed, supported by hacks and glitches that exploit the nooks left uncovered by authoritarian reign. Bodging was a skill central to survival.

My interaction with the media in general was marked by this DIYness, often utilizing lax Chinese copyright laws in pursuit of Western media. I jammed to a freely downloaded version of Avril’s Girlfriend from QQ music, watched Cady Heron give Regina George foot cream on bootleg DVDs filmed sneakily in theaters, caught Pokemon on my DS via a game card installed with 500 games acquired for 15RMB in a digital mall, read the Vampire Diaries off of ink spread pages bought from the carts of neighborhood street vendors. Bootlegging was essential to media consumption and technology use. The jailbroke, ripped off, pirated, copied, counterfeited means of production bore a generation of escapism and joy. Fueled by 5RMB bracelets and eyelashes, I experimented with my style however I wanted, while saving up for my biannual trip to the US for a pair of JCPenny jeans or a hot topic t-shirt. Teenage identity was thus fragile, uncertain, and ever-changing.

Fluctuating signals made me desperately seek where I stand on the scale of societal denomination—between alien and native, ABC and immigrant, expat and local. Self-discovery was a collage of the online 7000 miles away and the offline around the street corner. I was raised by a peculiar side of the internet and the streets: of defiance against censorship and appliance towards Eurocentrism, of disparagement towards habitual passings and solace towards local rhythms.

In between the portals and the “can not connect”, the meaning of home is still elusive. I took to the streets in search of answers. Even though I lived vicariously through the people across the tunnel, I was still physically encircled within a wall and a border, by the flatlands that were converted into skyscrapers and newly added subway stops that seemed to appear as simple as being drawn on a piece of paper. I made friends, found community, local and transient, discovered urban niches and hiding spots. Mindless daily interactions took up a way bigger part of growing up than I ever realized, or cared to admit. There isn’t one sudden revelation, but repeated patterns, of crossing the same streets, of hopping on and off the same subway stops, of going to the same breakfast carts, that the city I was trying to escape from all this time slowly started feeling like home. Home not just because it was familiar, but because I was living in it.

The divide between screens and pavement unfolded as a fissure in my mind, like a protective chasm that separated me from the parts of self I deemed ugly, be it the frame that I was born into or an entire heritage of a civilization. As narrow and as privileged as my interpretation of the city was, it was nonetheless my restitution of teenage displacement. So I climbed onto the rooftops of buildings and snuck into sports stadiums. Stayed out after dark and waited a little longer for the sunrise. The city was grey, blue, golden. The window of elevated trains put on a showing of daily encounters and emergent interactions, never to be re-aired. I knew I would never be Chinese or Shanghainese, or fittingly American, but an idea was budding: to let myself be ok with hybridity, to not be defined by canonical terms.

Shanghai, a cyborg of a metropolis, blurs the lines among a multitude of categorizations. It amalgamates the influence of socialist rhetoric and market capitalism, shedding the oppression of colonization while riding the wave of its legacy, weaving a fabric of suppression and defiance, acceptance and heterodoxy. 25 million locals, migrants, immigrants, expats, nomads, exiles sprawl into long tangs, partitioned apartments, golf course villas, shipping containers, European facsimile high rises, former concessions, economic development districts, bus stops, food stands, produce markets, street corners, creating a murmuration that says: we are here. Officially branded as “海纳百川，兼容并蓄”, its vim isn’t the stuff forcibly memorized in eulogies but reflected on fogged-up windows of packed subways, misted by the communal exhale of strangers. I breathed out along.

Fast forwards and it’s already senior year, the last year I’ll stay in this country before heading back to the US. One Saturday, Jazzy and I walked to the subway together after art class. We spent the past 10 hours drawing the same 4 plaster heads of historical white men: Marcus Agrippa, Voltaire, Giulio Romano, and Lucius Annaeus Seneca. It’s a mandatory section of the entrance exam for Chinese art colleges. For her, it’s college prep, and for me, a convenient way of learning the geometry of drawing from life.

We talked about plans for the future. She talked about the upcoming gaokao and the practices she’s been putting in preparation. I told her about my college plans, and how much I’ll miss home after I leave.

“Isn’t your home in America?” She asks. It was already clear to the class I won’t be participating in gaokao.

“This is my home,” I affirmed.

“This is your home, sure, but it’s not your only one.” She responded, “Come as you want, leave as you wish. For you, you can stay, or leave, as you wish. For us, we have to stay, or rat race to the bottom of the TOEFL, win the lottery of visas, pay outrageous sums of money for immigration and tuition. It is your home, but you can get another one any day you wish.”

It’s not like that. It really isn’t, I wanted to tell her, but my vocal cords refused to budge. I didn’t believe it myself anyway. We went on trains headed in opposite directions and on the whole ride back, I kept staring into my reflection as the carrier submerged into dark tunnels. As much as I found a new appreciation for the city, I still knew that deep down, my plan was to leave as soon as I could. Wasn’t that what all the vtunneling was for, in preparation for my new life in America? The school year’s almost over, summer will come and go, and then, I’ll be gone.

That summer, I watched a day in the life of college videos while daydreaming about mine. As scenes in the portals became closer and closer to reality, I contemplated what it meant to uproot again, this time with my own fruition. Vtunnel was completely blocked and I was relying on spotty VPN connections. I walked around the city visiting my former lovers—noodle shops that had seen the remnants of the cultural revolution, exercise parks of rotating barrels and levitating footpads that were situated in gardens, bathroom stalls that gave boundary to sprawling shopping malls. I graffitied streets to leave my mark and boarded tiny elevators that arose to dimly lit clubs to soak up the energy. My friends were dispersing, back to wherever they came from, and the last years I spent with them will soon also be marked by the distance of locality and time.

As I was evolving, so was China. Over the past few years, with the change in leaders, a trade war, and revamped foreign diplomacy, the public’s enthusiasm towards the West was fading in favor of a more nationalist ideology. The ooos and the ahs over my passport were turning into cynicism about my standing. I have the privilege of living here as a student, but as soon as my visa expires after graduation, I’ll have no choice but to leave. It’s a reality that is becoming more and more clear as this timeline approaches. And so the story seemed to end the way it started, just as Jazzy stated: the daughter of expats enjoyed her time of privilege in a developing nation, heads back home for her selfish desires.

I looked back at my journal entries, at browser bookmarks and favorited videos, at calls and texts from friends and family, at a growing stack of transit tickets: I have also become a cyborg—neither properly online nor always in reality, an amalgamation of internet tidbits with the map of the subway etched into the lines on my palm. I wouldn’t be suppressed by the firewall the way I wouldn’t be suppressed by ideological hegemony. The most freeing thing I did was looking within the walls that confined me. Growing up is writing a complicated love letter to the places that embryonated me: a sectioned-off world online that bleeds into reality, and a physical world that I spent so much time ignoring. Embody the good parts, relish in the bad, and pay attention to them both.

On my last night in China, I connected to the VPN one final time. Tickets printed, bags packed, all my belongings stuffed in a single suitcase that I’ll take across the ocean. Tomorrow the sun will rise twice. Tomorrow I won’t need this proxy anymore. I don’t know when I’ll be back, and as I would later find out, I wouldn’t be for years on end amidst a global pandemic. I can’t tie up this story neatly with an ending like, I found home and it is the one inside my heart all this time or, I’ve grown up and now I feel at ease in my skin and where I belong. I’m still in a liminal state, hopping between portals, wandering through links and streets to find something that speaks to me, something truly authentic. The tunnels that I dug, they followed me around, as the escapism I kept chasing, as my romantic pursuit of the otherworldly, as intentionally getting lost just to find a way out. Along the way, I have shed layers of mimicry in an embrace of patchworking all that influenced me, the noted and the latent. It’s an acknowledgment of my love for the genre-defying, labelless, in-between ways of being.