I have been in China for three years now. At first, I thought I was simply "popping over for a closer look." It was close to home, and scholarships were far easier to come by than in Europe or the United States. But once I stepped inside the country, I realized that "a look" did not even begin to cover it.

Last autumn, I spent a semester in Macao Special Administrative Region. During the December holiday, I traveled to Shenzhen in south China, where the weather still wore the face of summer, so effortlessly pleasant that it made you want to stay forever. Unfortunately, I had already promised a friend I would join her in Yunnan Province, so I could only linger for three days. When I arrived in Yunnan, though, it felt unmistakably like autumn. "This is clearly autumn," I said to my friend. She smiled and replied, "It's winter right now."

In the world as I knew it, summer is green, autumn is yellow, winter is white and spring is pink. Yet here I was, discovering that winter in some places can be yellow, even green. In that moment, something shifted: I need not wait out the winter for summer to return—I can simply go to where summer already is.

As a Mongolian, I feel this all the more keenly. Winter back home is winter in its purest form, an unbroken white.

I have been to Tianjin, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, as well as Dali and Lijiang in Yunnan. Climate, landscape, cuisine, dialect and even the physical build of the people shift from region to region.

There's a Chinese saying that roughly means "to be content with one's native soil and reluctant to leave," referring to a deep-rooted love of one's hometown. Yet what I actually observe in China is an entirely different scene. Northerners head south for work; southerners head east to study. When summer turns scorching, people flee up north to escape the heat; when winter bites, they migrate down south to ride it out.

I cannot help but think: Mongolians move with their cattle and sheep, while the Chinese move with opportunity and the economy. Does that not make them, in a sense, even more nomadic than Mongolians?

It is a metaphor, of course. In truth, this is simply the modern way of life. Travel is now seamless, the economy has expanded and technology lets much of the world's work be done online. People naturally drift with the seasons and with opportunity.

In Mongolia, the capital is bitterly cold and dry in winter, and the air pollution can be severe. More and more families are choosing to escape the cold in Viet Nam or Thailand. But not every family has that luxury. Work, family obligations and countless other constraints make long absences impossible.

And what about me? I have little money to speak of, but in summer I go home to Mongolia to escape the heat, and in winter I stay in my dorm in Beijing. What I have come to understand is this: If you want to live between places, the most important thing is to have a place to ground yourself. Only with an anchor does moving become a way of life; without one, it is just drifting.

China is a country with deep foundations. Five thousand years of history rolls easily off the tongue, but on this land, every texture of daily life—the cuisine, the stories, the clothing and the architecture—has been shaped and refined across those five millennia. This is not heritage sealed behind glass for people to admire from a distance. It is something still breathing.

If you were to ask me what China looks like through these Mongolian eyes, I would say: Travel there, feel it and take it in. You will not regret it. Because here, you can slow down in Dali and embrace the rush in Shenzhen. You can step into summer in the middle of winter. BR

The author is a Beijing-based student from Mongolia

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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