Dear Felipe,
You are sitting in São Paulo, having just decided to learn Mandarin, and everyone around you finds this decision slightly odd. Portuguese, Spanish, English – those had their reasons. Many in Brazil already predict China’s growing influence but predicting it and doing something about it are different things, and from where you sit that distance looks like a mountain too high to move.
I am writing to you from Shanghai, eight years later.
You will first visit China in 2020, and that visit will eventually bring you back for your entire undergraduate degree, at Duke Kunshan University, an hour from where I am sitting now. Four years in Jiangsu will teach you more than any course could, and they will also teach you the limits of a campus. You will spend them looking outward, wondering what the country looks like from the inside of its own institutions rather than from a joint venture at its edge. That question is what eventually takes you to Beijing.
But first you will spend a summer at a trading desk in Shanghai, working on Brazilian meat coming into China. It is not what you imagine when you picture using Mandarin. It is spreadsheets, container volumes, port arrivals, and prices that move for reasons three countries away. Brazil arrives here as a number. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes, resolved into a single line on a screen.
Then you will go to Zhoukou, in Henan, to see where that line lands.
I want you to hold on to that. The heat. The production lines. Visits to Shaolin Temple on the weekend. Team lunches where colleagues tell you, with real pride, that Labubu came out of Henan. The distance between the office where the trade is priced and the county where it physically arrives and gets processed — a distance measured in more than kilometres. The same shipment is a decimal in Shanghai and a working day in Zhoukou, and both are completely true. China does not resolve this into one story. It carries both at once, without apology, and expects you to keep up.
In September I move to Beijing, to the Yenching Academy at Peking University. It is the thing I have been walking toward since your decision, though neither of us could have named it then. What I hope to find there is not merely more information about China — Shanghai has given me plenty, and it has mostly taught me how little I know. What I want is the institutional view. I have seen the corridor between Brazil and China from the trading desk and from the plant floor in Zhoukou. I have not yet seen it from the rooms where it is designed and discussed.
So: keep going. The characters get easier, then harder, then easier again. The tones will humble you for almost a decade. And the thing you cannot yet justify to anyone turns out to have been the correct instinct all along.
You will eventually learn the story of 愚公移山. I think of it often now, not as a story about mountains, but about persistence: that what cannot be finished in one lifetime can still be started in one. Brazil and China are further apart than any two places I know. I have spent eight years moving small amounts of earth. I intend to spend many more.
I will see you in Beijing.
Felipe
