The Lighthouse Diary

*“The Lighthouse/Beacon Country” (灯塔国) is a term adopted by Chinese internet users to satirize the U.S. and pro-U.S. liberal intellectuals. In the good (?) old days, as these intellectuals and many ordinary Chinese believed, the U.S. was the shining beacon of democracy deserving of worship and learning from. Yet after the U.S.’s perceived decline from its idealized status amid a tense trade war, ordinary Chinese netizens began to see it differently. "The lighthouse," therefore, no longer shines, but still deserves to be called as such purely for mockery.

My phone restlessly rested on the bedside table. On the screen, weather tabs for three cities were open. Next to my giant blue suitcase, I swam in an ocean of clothes: cardigans, blouses, jeans, tank tops, a padded running vest, and shorts. What about socks? Sports bras?

Lying ahead is a two-week trip to three distant and unfamiliar cities. Departing from Beijing, I would fly to New York, then to San Francisco and London, staying in each city for three to five days. The U.S. segment of the trip was for my company’s business, while the London part was more for family affairs, with my parents joining.

Anyways, what mattered to me while I swam in that damn ocean of clothes was only one question:

What the heck would the weather be like in these cities?!

Should I bring a scarf? Is my Uniqlo padded jacket a necessity? Should I bring both my thermal leggings and running shorts?

I brought all of them out of anxiety, and the majority turned out to be useless. It didn’t matter, of course, while I packed; I immersed myself in that anxiety and, to a greater degree, enjoyed it.

I also lied about the “distant and unfamiliar” part. New York was where I called home for two years while completing my first Master's at New York University. San Francisco was where I interned at a VC firm for half a year. And London? That’s where I spent three years earning my Bachelor’s at The London School of Economics and Political Science, right after two years in a small English town for A-levels.

I breezed, walked, and lived in these cities at certain points in my youth. Yet after almost eight years of being back in Beijing — the city where I was born, grew up as a teen, and eventually settled — I felt like a stranger again in them. London was slightly better since I had the opportunity to return every two years for family affairs, but the U.S. — more specifically, the U.S. today — felt like a new, nomadic land for the 2025 version of 32-year-old me.

The last time I returned to the U.S. was in 2019, pre-COVID, when Trump was still in his first term of office. Then everything happened; he was elected again, stirring up a new wave of chaos and tariffs. But what changed more of him was perhaps more of me; in the past several years, I’ve fully slipped into my Chineseness, tilted my head inward, and thoroughly adulted as a motherland child. I got married, ran a media company, and pursued another Master’s degree in Hong Kong while ignoring the (stupid) uproars of the outside world.

At a certain point, I allowed myself to be tired, judgmental, and unapologetically uncontradictory. I hated the U.S. under Trump; that was my judgment. Yet when my company organized a business trip to the U.S. with a group of our Chinese clients, I also decided I must go.

What a hypocrite!

I must boarded that damn 14-hour Air China flight from Beijing to New York (a flight route that used to be less than 12 hours and operated by more foreign airlines) for three solid reasons:

1. I held a Bank of America debit card, which was locked for almost two years due to “suspicious overseas conduct,” i.e., trying to log in to online banking from China but forgetting passwords multiple times. There were still some dollars in the account, and the only way I could get it activated was to go to a physical branch in the U.S. with my Chinese passport. (The customer service hotline didn’t work because it required a text verification to the registered phone number, yet my U.S. phone number on file had been canceled. Banks and multi-country lives are something I can never handle as a proper adult.)

2. One of my best childhood friends, whom I said many goodbyes to last summer, settled in Brooklyn. Yan, who now lives in Toronto, also planned to visit New York while I was in the city. This meant I’d have a weekend for some immersive, long-awaited female friendship reunions before work.

3. I was damn curious about how the U.S. had evolved. After COVID, now under another Trump administration —

Is everything collapsing, or is all the collapsing fake news?

Is what we hear from China a lie (after some self-conscious filtering), or are all the lies truths?

Is the lighthouse still glimmering, or does no such thing as a lighthouse exist after all?

So I packed all my questions, my beloved Uniqlo padded vest and running shoes, grinding through all my loathes — worrying about personal safety (yes, I really did), jet lag, and having no functional foreign debit cards — and embarked on New York.

I was finally there again, curious as someone new.

The (Crazy) Tips

My friend warned me before my trip: “Be prepared for an insane tipping situation. Lunch tips now start at a minimum of 20%; dinner is at least 25%. Long gone are the days of 10% or 15%!”

I was mentally prepared, but only half-heartedly accepted her words as fact. After all, my dear friend mainly frequents high-end dining establishments and boutique shops. Maybe the “minimum 20% tip” was just a small-circle, upper-class thing? Surely the entire society’s service charges couldn’t have gone this wild, right?

They could. I learned this on my first day in New York, when one of our Chinese clients told me about her experience. She’d grabbed a quick bowl of ramen at a small Japanese spot in the Lower East Side. Unaware of the current tipping landscape, she wrote down a 10% tip on the receipt and prepared to leave.

“The chef — or waiter, or whoever he was — suddenly yanked me back from the counter, jabbing at the receipt and shaking his head,” she recounted, wide-eyed. “It took me a second to realize he was demanding a bigger tip. But I’d already given 10% for a meal with practically no service! All he did was pour me a glass of water!” With limited English to argue, she eventually caved at 20% (“When I wrote 15%, he shook his head again!”) and stormed out of the ramen shop in a rage.

Between her story and my own experience the next day, I finally accepted “absurd tipping” as a cold, hard, “new U.S.” reality. Thanks to my friends’ hospitality, I hadn’t paid for a single meal in my first two days. When I finally got the chance to grab the check for lunch on the third day, I nearly slid off my chair seeing the “suggested tip” starting at 25%.

Was all the Vietnamese food we had delicious? Yes. Was the service attentive? Sure. But did any of it justify a $40 tip for a $150 meal? Hell no!

My simmering fury over outrageous tipping finally found solace (sort of) during a chat with locals. On our last night, my team invited some of our NYU partners —professors and staff — to a farewell dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant. After a glass of Chardonnay, I gathered the courage to turn to our fellow American friends, “I don’t mean to offend, but I just have to ask: What in the world is up with your insane tipping?!”

The NYU professor flashed me a cryptic smile. Without a word, he stood, pulled a black leather wallet from his pocket, and flipped it open. A thick load of cash and coins spilled onto the table napkin.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “But here’s the workaround: Pay in cash. That way, you can drop a few coins… and just run.”

The Zero-dollar Shopper (零元购)

*“Zero-dollar Shopping” is a meme that has spread on the Chinese Internet to mock the U.S. retail theft and shoplifting since COVID. The term was first invented when the phenomenon was reported heavily by official news outlets such as Xinhua.

It was a breezy, sunny morning in Manhattan. Waking up early due to jet lag, I decided to grab a bagel for breakfast before our morning meeting.

A few blocks from the bagel shop in uptown, I stopped at a drugstore to get dental floss. At just past 8 a.m., the store was almost empty, with two female cashiers chit-chatting and a male clerk organizing merchandise at the back.

“Hey, you!” My feet were almost past the exit door when I heard one of the female cashiers shout. I turned back, and before realizing what was happening, a guy trotted into the store, bumping into me and heading toward the back shelves. With agile motions and a large black hoodie, I thought he must be some kung fu master who deserved the name Black Shadow.

I quickly realized Black Shadow was a thief and suddenly felt a little excited: my encounters with thieves were very (luckily) limited — two cases, to be exact, in London and Paris. Nonetheless, in those two cases, the thieves dashed off immediately after stealing, so low-key that no trace of their appearances would be remembered. This time was different, though; Black Shadow seemed to have no intention of hiding himself from anyone or anything. His round eyes, dark skin, and calm facial expressions were uncovered and bare, exactly like an honest man should be.

After five seconds at the back of the store, Black Shadow came out. His hands were filled with two giant green packs, which, from afar, I could only identify as most likely being family-size tissue rolls.

Coming all the way just for tissue rolls??

As I stood and watched Black Shadow hustle out with his rolls, the three store clerks stood and watched with me, too. “Ah, him again,” one of the cashiers complained while continuing to scroll on her phone, “every morning!”

That’s it? Not even pretending to do anything??

Out on 3rd Ave, Black Shadow trotted at a pace so steady that I was able to follow him and to take a picture of his back. A slight speedup from my end would let me catch him, or at least get a clear shot of his face.

I didn’t have the guts, but didn’t feel guilty about it. Doing the right thing is doing nothing, by this point, I realized.

Spotted at JFK Airport’s Hudson News: very good!, very confident chocolate bars!

After posting these delightful finds on my WeChat Moments, I received messages from three friends asking me to grab some for them. Unfortunately, by the time I saw their requests, my physical body had already shifted to San Francisco, and Trump chocolate bars were nowhere to be found on the West Coast.

San Francisco has no Trump Chocolate bars but many security locks — locks guarding supermarket Oreos, juices, and peanuts; locks defending department store sweatpants and T-shirts. Yet despite this fortress of anti-theft devices, actual store staff were mysteriously absent. Thanks to it, my consumerist urges to raid snacks in CVS, to splurge on a last-minute hoodie at Macy’s (it was an unexpectedly cold and rainy day, after all) all withered when faced with the existential labor of hunting down an employee.

San Francisco was very thoughtful of my wallet.

San Francisco also has the Tenderloin, a neighborhood notorious for its rampant homelessness, drug use, and crime. As a young Asian woman who’d experienced street assaults on both coasts, I always took detours around this area during my internship in the city.

Returning as a tourist, this time I accidentally walked through nearly the entire Tenderloin, thanks to my colleagues’ determination to find a highly-rated pho spot on its fringe. However much I’d like to say “it wasn’t so bad,” what I saw, smelled, and felt was traumatizing. Drug addicts, many standing “asleep” or bent over with pants barely clinging to their hips, wobbled like zombies. Some injected themselves in broad daylight, their limbs already studded with puncture marks. Human waste littered the streets, the stench of feces clinging to every corner.

We survived the walk only because it was still daylight. After gulping down delicious beef pho, we fled in the opposite direction. Five minutes later, we were back in our hotel’s neighborhood — its tidy streets, sleek office towers, and cozy cafés a world away.

Heaven and earth could be this close, or they were one place all along.

I’m fully aware of how this diary reads so far — like one from the Little Pink (小粉红)! And I can totally imagine the responses if I posted it on Chinese social media: “Dangerous place!” “The U.S. is doomed!”

Were the things I recorded real? Yes. Do they portray the entirety of this trip? No. In reality, my journey offered as many new discoveries as familiar comforts, as much chaos as stability. I witnessed theft, but also savored the best lox bagel of my life; I walked through the Tenderloin, but also jogged along peaceful seaside vistas. Most importantly, after all, in this country where my past and present intersect, I raised glasses with some of my dearest friends, who, in the rhythms of their own lives, had lingered or returned.

In a world of loud noises, it’s the small things that matter. In the U.S., thanks to friendship and everything unchanged, I found my small things still hanging, and even steady.

Yan!

The Final Ride

On my final day in San Francisco, my colleague ordered an Uber to take me to the airport. When I got in, I discovered the driver was Chinese—unsurprising in this city.

"Where are you from?" I asked in Chinese.

"Handan, Hebei," he replied, his thick northern accent confirming.

“So how did you come to the U.S.?"

"Oh, I zouxian-ed. (a particular phenomenon of Chinese migrants entering the U.S through its southwestern boarder with Mexico) That damn snakehead scammed me almost $25,000! Left us stranded in Quito — had to figure out those fucking buses myself. Thank God Old Joe (老拜登) went easy on us.”

During our half-hour ride, I grilled him with questions, fascinated by his story. Mr. Zhang, with one hand draped loose on the wheel, the other thumbing a wooden bead bracelet, opened up after learning I was also a Northerner (北方人). He explained how he’d filed for political asylum ("Just make up some bullshit about Communist Party persecution — those dumb Americans always buy it!"), obtained a fake driver’s license for $500 ("We Chinese here can make anything happen, believe me!"), and planned to flee the U.S. after maxing out all his credit cards and cash advances.

"But how will you convert your American dollars to RMB?" I asked naively.

"Ha!" Mr. Zhang barked a laugh, his bead-fiddling finger pausing mid-roll. "What did I just tell you? We Chinese can resurrect the dead to life (咱中国人能把死人变活) !”

Maybe I’d never truly arrived in America. Maybe there are too many Americans, or simply humans — Mr. Zhangs — for any outsider to know.