My entrance into China was a rude awakening. I was entering China from Taiwan via Hong Kong. Hong Kong being so small, I took the subway to the border and crossed there. I passed behind Hong Kong’s immigration and immediately a officer in a blue police uniform was yelling at someone. “Don’t cross that line,” he shouted at someone who crossed the line anyways.

Welcome to China.

The train station just past the border post was worse. The “line” was a seven hundred man push, with several people in blue uniforms leaning against metal posts in between intervals of opening gates and yelling at the flood of people pushing forward. I waited in a line for the ticket machine until I remembered someone had told me that foreigners were not allowed to use train ticket machines in China, though the machine had been equipped with English. I asked one of the guards where foreigners were allowed buy tickets. Leaning against her posts, she pointed towards another line and said nothing.

After pushing my way through the other line, the lady behind the window checked over my passport and I was able to buy a ticket. Behind the ticket hall, the waiting room was claustrophobic and had a menacing Soviet feel to it, dark and cavernous and packed with masses lugging plastic carpet bags with Mickey Mouse prints. Trains going to Guangzhou were delayed fifteen minutes. The masses groaned. There was almost no room to stand, much less to sit. The floors were covered with sunflower seeds, used cups of ramen and the remains.

I waited for about thirty minutes before a sign flashed at the front of the waiting area. “Don’t rush. Line up. Get on,” a man opened a gate and began yelling as we flooded past him to the two young girls checking tickets.

I had lived in China for two years, but I was last in China in 2010. For the past year, I have been living in Taiwan, studying Chinese literature. In Taiwan, they speak Chinese, but things are different. In the depths of the Shenzhen Railway Station, I had a realization; I understood everything that is said but nothing that is happening. I was disoriented like someone in their childhood home years later, after a stranger had been living there. Is this the China I left just four years ago. Has life in Taiwan warped my memories of what it was to be in China, or has China been warped?

Note: Most of our posts will have photos, but since I had not yet met up with our photographer, this post is lacking. Apologies.