I do not have many unique stories regarding my hometown, Laixi, to tell.
I grew up in a semi-rural, mid-sized town, Laixi, in Shandong province, China. It was not a unique city in any sense: the settlements occurred organically thousands of years ago; the population, being around 200,000, was not massive; the economy and demographics are particularly average; it was just a mediocre city that experienced every other city in Shandong had experienced during the opening and reform of China. Yet this triviality created another form of culture that embraces a primitive version of existentialism that helped me introspect and enhance my identity every time I face challenges from new environments.
The trivial and peripheral attributes of Laixi, reflected in its historical, geological, built-environmental aspects, have profoundly shaped my personality. The name Laixi is interpreted as “West of Lai,” and Lai is an ancient ethnic-minority city-state conquered by Qi, a major tributary state of the Zhou Dynasty. This piece of history almost determined the peripheral and unpreferred status of Laixi: it has never gained any administrative importance and took a long time to be considered a Han race residence. In contemporary history, Laixi has been unwanted by its controlling municipality, and it was distributed to Qingdao in the end. However, residents in Qingdao never recognized Laixi and the older generation have insulting jokes about people in Laixi; only very few retired Qingdao residents have a second home here due to low living costs and mountainous sceneries. Laixi is also 60 miles away from metropolitan Qingdao, making it hard to define whether Laixi is a satellite city or a suburb. It maintains the essential functions of a city and is mostly self-sustainable; however, Laixi also heavily depends on the transfer payments from Qingdao. The dependence of Laixi on Qingdao can also be demonstrated in their built environments: in most cases, the newly built commercial complex or residential neighborhoods are of the same style as the ones in Qingdao that were built around five years ago. Laixi, despite its unique history, has lost its nontriviality and is being heavily influenced by Qingdao while not gaining any significance.
Yet life finds a way. Residents in Laixi, myself included, developed an existential and materialistic mainstream culture. Instead of being tangled by the identity crisis, we focused on physical entities and techniques that can express our emotions, and Laixi is known for hand-made kites and puppets. While the street view in Laixi is just an aged version of Qingdao, people talk with different accents, use different slangs, and have different definitions of dress codes; regardless of how Laixi is defined administratively, it is there. Every time I experience identity crisis and panic about the intertwining influence of Chinese, Korean, and American cultures on me, I would recall my existential life in my hometown and stop worrying about who I really am by having a drink.
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