Guangzhou, China
The Early Years
Living Between Skyscrapers and Strollers: My Early Years in Guangzhou as a Diplomat’s Daughter
Technically, I don’t remember my first flight.
I was a baby, tucked into my mother’s arms, as we crossed time zones and continents to land in a city whose name I couldn’t yet pronounce: Guangzhou.
By the time I could walk, Guangzhou’s skyline and sticky subtropical air were already imprinted on me. My baby photos don’t have the usual backdrop of a familiar hometown; instead, they show a constantly growing city in southern China—apartment balconies full of laundry, hazy skies, neon signs, and crowded streets below.
I was a diplomat’s daughter, though I didn’t know what that meant yet. To me, it just meant that home was an apartment somewhere high above a busy road, and that my father wore a suit a lot and disappeared behind guarded embassy gates every morning.
This is the story of my earliest years, from baby to toddler, in Guangzhou.
A City Growing Up as I Did
Guangzhou wasn’t gentle about announcing itself. Even as a toddler, I could sense the energy: the honk of car horns, the rumble of buses, the musical rise and fall of Cantonese and Mandarin echoing all around us.
From my stroller, the world was a blur of:
- Bright red and gold shop signs
- Baskets of lychees and dragonfruit in street markets
- The smell of frying noodles, steamed buns, and roasted chestnuts
- Grandmas in patterned pajamas doing morning exercises in the park
My parents tell me that when we arrived, construction cranes dotted the skyline like metal trees. New buildings appeared almost overnight. In a way, the city and I were doing the same thing: learning to stand, stretching upward, trying to find balance in a world changing faster than we could understand.
Life in the Diplomatic Bubble
Our apartment was part of a world that hovered slightly above Guangzhou without ever fully touching it. We lived in a building where many foreign families stayed—expats, diplomats, people “posted” there the way some people get assigned to a school.
Inside our home, the language was familiar. English (and maybe your own home language) filled the rooms along with the smells of the food your parents grew up with. The TV showed cartoons from far away. The fridge held comfort foods your relatives might have sent in care packages or your parents picked up from a special import store.
Outside our door, another world waited.
Sometimes we’d walk to a local park, and the first step onto the sidewalk felt like crossing a border: the shift from the cool, tiled hallway to humid heat, the hum of voices in languages I didn’t yet understand, the rush of bicycles pasted with makeshift seats and cargo.
As a baby and toddler, I lived between these two realities without understanding either: the sheltered diplomatic life and the raw, everyday city just outside our gate.
The Language of Sounds Before Words
Before I learned any words for things, Guangzhou gave me sounds.
The elevator’s ding.
The street vendors’ calls.
The hiss of a wok over an open flame.
The loud chatter of morning markets.
My parents say I used to mimic the street noises from my crib: babbling rhythms that sounded like conversation. I didn’t know what anyone was saying, but the music of Cantonese and Mandarin wrapped around my earliest days like a second lullaby.
Soon, my parents learned a few basic phrases—hello, thank you, how much, this one, that one—and so did I. Maybe clumsy “ni hao” and “xie xie” were some of my first words spoken outside my own home language.
Even as a toddler, you learn that communication is more than vocabulary. It’s smiles, pointing, nodding, handing over a few coins and waiting to see what you get back. It’s the fruit seller grinning at you and slipping an extra orange into the bag just because you said “thank you” in their language.
Markets, Parks, and Tiny Rituals
When you’re very young, your world is organized around routines. In Guangzhou, ours were shaped by the city.
There was the morning walk, when the air was already thick and warm and the sidewalks were busy. I remember:
- Wet markets with tiled floors, the smell of fish and vegetables, bright buckets of chilies, stacks of greens taller than I was.
- Parks where retirees practiced tai chi in graceful slow motion, and where my parents pushed my stroller around ponds with stone bridges and willow trees.
- Street corners where you could always find someone cooking something—dumplings steaming, noodles tossed in giant pans, skewers sizzling over charcoal.
For a baby-turned-toddler, Guangzhou was a sensory classroom: colors louder than cartoons, smells more intense than anything from a jar, the sticky feeling of sweat on your neck even in the morning.
Our tiny rituals anchored me:
- The fruit stall where we always bought bananas and lychees
- The lady who sold baozi in the same spot every day, whose face I recognized before I knew what countries were
- The daily elevator ride from apartment to street-level, which felt like moving between two very different worlds
Holidays I Didn’t Yet Understand
Diplomatic life means you celebrate your own traditions—but in Guangzhou, we were surrounded by layers of others.
I don’t remember the explanations, but I remember the impressions:
- Chinese New Year: Red lanterns hanging from buildings, red paper couplets pasted beside doors, firecrackers popping in the distance like faraway thunder. My parents bundled me up to see lion dances: big, colorful heads bobbing to the pounding of drums. I probably cried the first time—those costumes are huge when you’re small—but later I’d laugh and clap, mesmerized.
- Mid-Autumn Festival: Round mooncakes in pretty tins, a bright full moon hanging heavy in the sky, balconies dotted with neighbors sitting outside in the warm night.
Inside our apartment, we hosted our own cultural mix: maybe national day receptions, small gatherings of other diplomats and expats. I’d be passed from one pair of arms to another, cooed over in a half-dozen accents. In those rooms, you could hear the world—Spanish, English, Arabic, French, Mandarin—wrapped around you like a soft blanket.
Being the Child Who Was “From Somewhere Else”
Adults were always asking my parents where we were from.
Sometimes they’d lean down, smile at me, and ask in broken English or through gestures, “She born here? Chinese baby?” My parents would explain that I wasn’t Chinese, that we were posted there for a few years, that we’d eventually move on.
I didn’t understand any of that as a toddler. But I did begin to feel the subtle truth: that we were guests. That this city, which for me was simply home, was for my parents a chapter—important, intense, but temporary.
For me, Guangzhou was not an exotic experience. It was just the place where:
- I learned to walk on tiled floors and sidewalks cracked by tree roots
- I said my first mixed-up phrases in multiple languages
- I watched traffic from the balcony and fell asleep to the constant hum of a city that never really went quiet
Only later did I realize how unusual that was.
The First Goodbye I Don’t Remember But Still Carry
Diplomatic life means you don’t stay anywhere forever. At some point, the packing boxes arrive like a countdown clock.
I was still young when we left Guangzhou—too young to recall the last day clearly, but old enough for my body to register that something big was changing. Children always know when a house is being emptied.
Maybe I cried for a favorite toy, or for the ayi who helped take care of me, or for a routine I couldn’t name. Maybe I just clung tighter to my parents at the airport, confused by the heavy sadness in the air as they said goodbye to friends they might never see again.
What I know now is that Guangzhou was my first major goodbye, even if I can’t replay it fully in my mind. It was the place that quietly taught me:
- That homes can be temporary
- That love for a place doesn’t require understanding everything about it
- That you can leave a city, but it doesn’t fully leave you
What Guangzhou Left with Me
I grew from baby to toddler in Guangzhou, and even if my memories are more like fragments than full stories, they shaped me.
From Guangzhou, I carry:
- A comfort with unfamiliar languages buzzing around me
- An instinct to look for street food stalls as the heart of a city
- A feeling that high-rise buildings and crowded markets are just as “normal” as quiet suburbs
- The understanding that my story started not in one fixed hometown, but in motion—between places, between cultures, between worlds
Being a diplomat’s daughter means that your first sense of “home” can be in a place your passport doesn’t claim. For me, that place was Guangzhou: humid, noisy, endlessly alive.
If you ask me now where I’m from, Guangzhou is one of the first names that floats up—not because I remember everything, but because it’s where my life as a child of many countries truly began.
It’s the city beneath my early footsteps, the soundtrack to my first words, the backdrop of the very first chapter in a life that would keep moving. And even if I don’t remember every detail, a part of me will always be that little child in a stroller, rolling through the markets of Guangzhou, wide-eyed and absorbing the world.