Each time I return from China, I find myself puzzling over the same question: Why did the trip outperform my expectations again? Why did the frictions I braced myself for, mainly on account of my non-existent Mandarin, again fail to materialise?

Do not misunderstand me. I am no novice when it comes to China, nor am I ignorant of its rapid development. Please do not lump me in with some of my fellow millennials, loudly declaring on social media, after a couple of hotpot meals at Xiang Xiang and one Guilin trip, that they are in a “very Chinese time” of their lives. Bro, where were you all this while?

Outside South-east Asia, the Chinese mainland is where I have travelled most frequently over the past 15 years, aided in part by a stint working and living in Hong Kong. Yet that lingering apprehension remains. I have reached the point where I am surprised that I am still surprised. What exactly is at the root of the disconnect?

The thought reared its head again recently in the northern port city of Dalian, where I was attending the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos”.

Beyond seeing at close quarters the sheer scale and entrenchment of Chinese science and tech research talent, which I noted in a previous column, I was struck by my own sense of ease.

I know the story: modern China, high-tech, efficient. Yet I remain programmed to expect friction. As a non-Mandarin speaker who really should have persisted beyond a six-month business Mandarin course many years ago, I assumed I would be left adrift.

How would I navigate the city on my own? Away from the forum, where the minders naturally speak crisp English, how would I manage if I wanted to dine elsewhere? On the streets, would I be an exotic curiosity, a brown face in a sea of local ones?

Perhaps the problem is really my short-term memory, because none of these concerns proved to be issues on my previous few trips either. This is not the China I travelled through in 2011 as an exchange student in Hong Kong, hopping between Chinese cities from Xi’an to Harbin with offline maps saved on my phone.

Chicken-and-duck talk

There was mobile internet, but between ruinous roaming charges and the many Western apps that simply did not work there, it was little help.

If you got lost as a solo, non-Mandarin-speaking traveller, you braced yourself for some chicken-and-duck talk to find the way. Or you posed for photographs with strangers who had rarely seen a dark-skinned person up close and wanted a picture with “Obama” (a compliment, actually!).

That was then; China today is a different proposition altogether. The true surprise is just how frictionless the experience has become. One big reason is that the magic supercomputer in our hands, the one we rely on to deal with life’s problems, is no longer hamstrung by the Chinese internet firewall. Roaming on a Singapore telco bypasses it entirely, and with cheap, often free, overseas data now standard, you are never cut off. Every small problem of the lost traveller is solved. Cannot read a sign? Gemini, tell me what that says.

The same goes for payments. Regular visitors to China must excuse my belated rhapsodising, but this is where the change is starkest. It was remarkable to spend days without touching physical cash, not that I had brought any with me anyway.

I am told the English version of the digital payment wallet within WeChat is inferior to the Chinese original, but it is still intuitive, requiring fewer steps than some of our equivalents, and accepted everywhere, from a sit-down izakaya to a tiny streetside jianbing stall.

Meanwhile, on the morning I wrote this column in Singapore, I had to remember to get cash out because my regular teh tarik guy at the hawker centre still resists PayNow.

I also have to rave about Didi’s English-language app, which let me zip around the city just as one would on a ride-hailing app here, but at a fraction of the price.

I am told that many of these developments – making China’s app-based life, arguably the most advanced in the world, accessible to foreigners and non-Mandarin speakers – came only in the last few years, especially after the pandemic. Tencent’s tie-up with DBS Bank for near-instant transfers from one’s bank account here to WeChat, for instance, went live only this year. All the better, of course. I am not complaining.

Healthy wariness remains

So this is what I keep telling myself – stop selling China short. As a Singaporean, I carry a healthy wariness of larger powers, near and far. That is the instinct a citizen of a small country ought to have. But there is no reason for it to curdle into a pre-emptive anxiety about travelling through China. Those are two quite different things.

It is also a reminder not to be incredulous about the leap towards modernity China has made. The last thing I want is the mentality of the American MAGA-ists who treat China’s rise as a grievance rather than a reality to be understood. That is America’s reckoning to have, not a lens for the rest of us. Those of us in this region can see, accept and experience the country – the good and the bad – for ourselves.

I know, of course, that this frictionless urban reality is not the whole story about today's China. The country is not just the polish of its coastal cities or the gliding smoothness of its high-speed rail network, on which public transport otakus like me perform the famous “coin test” – balancing a coin on its side on the windowsill to marvel as it stays upright at 350kmh. Much as I delight in all this, there is a vaster, poorer hinterland beyond the gleam, one the Dalians, Shenzhens and Shanghais never show you.

Lately, my interest in this other, less prosperous China has been piqued by social media. For months, I have been enthralled by the videos of Vincy Lau, a British-based content creator with Hong Kong roots who has been travelling through the Chinese countryside. Her videos on Instagram and YouTube, complete with subtitles, offer a window into parts unknown – regions that might otherwise provoke that old, familiar unease.

Going down side trails

When we spoke over the phone recently, she told me that the core of experiencing the country is an overriding curiosity to see it for yourself. The reward, she said, is a kind of hospitality you would never encounter if you stayed on the predictable path.

She recounted meeting an Yi woman on a bus who promptly invited her to a mountain village wedding the next day, and described farmers near a Tibetan village yelling “Chi fan, chi fan!” – come and eat, come and eat – at her passing car, urging her to join their roadside meal.

Accepting such invitations takes a willingness to push past apprehension. You overcome the initial hesitation, and you are rewarded with a vantage point you never knew was there. As an avid hiker, I am reminded of walking a familiar route and spotting an unpromising side trail. It is easy to be dismissive and stick to the paved path. But the reward for straying, even if it brings a fleeting moment of doubt, is that you might just stumble upon the best view of the day.

The next time I head to China, I will leave my expectations of friction at home. It is time to see where the side trails lead.