For the first time in my life, I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Two days ago, on July 22, the US ordered the Houston consulate in China to close due to evidence that the consulate had been engaging “for years in massive illegal spying and influence operations throughout the United States”. Yesterday, in response, the Chinese government ordered the closure of the US consulate in Chengdu. To support its decision, Wang Wenbin of China’s Foreign Ministry accused the American consulate of “interfer[ing] in China’s internal affairs and harm[ing] China’s national security interests”. Frankly, I don’t know which side to believe or if any accusations are even credible.

For me, this strike on the Chengdu consulate is personal. When I was 8 and went back to China for the first time in my memory, the first place my grandpa took me was the consulate — or in local terms, meiling. My grandparents live quite literally behind meiling. Once outside their apartment complex, it’s the next building down. After all those years of walking past the young, serious Chinese guards outfitted in gingko green uniforms and white gloves, I still have a hard time believing that behind the sullen pale wall lies/laid the consulate of the (technically) most powerful country in the world. The red sidewalk is cordoned off by the ever-present guards and velvet VIP ropes. In a city that never sleeps, it’s a strange sight. A silent street on which a footstep rarely falls.

I asked my grandpa why no one could walk on that sidewalk in front of meiling. As an 8-year-old, I had no idea what a consulate was nor what purpose it served. He told me it was for the American diplomats and only people with American citizenship could go inside. The only way Chinese citizens like him could step foot on the sidewalk was if they went to collect a visa or if they were applying for a visa. In fact, my parents went to meiling to apply for and claim their student visas to the US, way back in the 90s.

“Can I walk on that sidewalk then?”

He laughed.

And so everyday when my grandparents, cousins, aunt, parents took me out, I would always remember to not walk on the sidewalk in front of meiling. Ten years and numerous trips to Chengdu later and nothing changed — until yesterday.

Twenty-four million users on Weibo watched a livestream of the US consulate “shutting down” yesterday. Millions more viewed another Weibo post suggesting that the consulate be converted to a hotpot restaurant (hotpot being one of the most famous dishes in Chengdu and greater Sichuan). That foreboding fortress of my childhood is now a joke.

One part of me wants to blame the CCP for the removal of meiling. Another part wants to blame the US government for starting this debacle. China clearly fabricated their accusations of domestic meddling against meiling as an excuse for retaliation. On the other hand, how much truth is behind the American claim that intellectual property theft was linked to the Houston consulate? I am aware that earlier this week two Chinese hackers were convicted by the Department of Justice of working with the central government to steal data on the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. In another incident on July 23, the US found that a researcher at the University of California, Davis lied about her ties to the Chinese military on her visa application and issued a warrant for her arrest. The researcher, Tang Juan, is currently seeking refuge in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. These cases plus many more demonstrate that the Chinese government is trying to siphon information in key technologies to themselves. But is forcibly closing another country’s consulate in response necessary? And were any of these incidents linked to the Houston consulate?

What is fact and what is fiction? I don’t know.

I wasn’t prepared to face that question so soon. In my high school Spanish literature class, I remember reading authors who covertly poised that question in their works in Middle Age Spain for fear of censorship. I wrote essays analyzing that theme: lo dado no es la verdad. I did not think that I would be as bewildered as Lazarillo de Tormes.

The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t like living in a world where the line between fact and fiction is so murky, where caprice is the puppeteer, and where fear reigns. Hopefully my current research project in natural language processing (NLP) will bring me a step closer to that ideal.

For now though, all I want is meiling to be what it once was — a symbol of harmony and respect between China and the US. I knew that tensions were escalating between the two and that I, an ABC (American-born Chinese), would inevitably be caught in the crossfire. The implications of the clashes between the two countries didn’t hit me though until it hit much too close to home.

The only way I can put into words how I feel right now is through the words of a poet who lived a millennium ago (Google translate left to the reader):

问君能有几多愁？恰似一江春水向东流。