Unpacked Minis, Five Questions: After a Dozen Visits, This Chinese City Still Feels New to Me

Guangzhou, China is always evolving. Just like author and journalist Bonnie Tsui, who has visited the city for decades. In the 2025 Culture Issue of Afar she writes about how a recent trip transformed three generations of relationships in her family.

On this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions she shares tips for first-time visitors, why you should visit Guangzhou for the food, and the ways one city can bridge past and present, family and identity.

Transcript

Katherine LaGrave, host: Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story.

I’m Katherine LaGrave, deputy editor at Afar. I’m pretty lucky. I get to brainstorm, assign, and edit features for our print magazine. And I get to work with writers who have an ear for incredible travel stories.

Bonnie Tsui is one of those writers. I’m not sure I’m allowed to swear on here, but Bonnie is a badass: A New York native, Bonnie grew up a competitive swimmer, rowed crew at Harvard, and just released her latest book, On Muscle. Today, Bonnie lives, surfs, and swims in the Bay Area, and her “you can do anything you put your mind to” attitude is infectious. So infectious that the last time I saw her, she convinced me I could swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco. But that’s another story for another time. For our 2025 Culture issue, Bonnie took her infectious energy to Guangzhou, China, where her father lives. Bonnie has visited Guangzhou many times, but when I sat down with her to learn about her trip, she told me something surprising—that Guangzhou feels new every time.

We’re here to talk about your story. Like, just tell me a little bit about how the story came about. I know these were existing travel plans, but a little background about how the story came about in your mind.

Bonnie Tsui: So my father lives in Guangzhou in China, and he’s been there for the last, ooh, 25-plus years or so. I was born in New York, and my parents at that time lived together in New York, and he was very present in my childhood. He’s an artist, and so we kind of grew up in his studio. And then, when my parents separated and he eventually moved back to Hong Kong, where he is from, and then on to mainland China. I just never really saw him much again, and I think that that has been this kind of signal thing in my life—where I had a parent who was very much involved in my creative life from a young age, right? And then that kind of disappeared.

And so when you’re a teenager kind of grappling with that—an early teenager—you’re kind of not sure what to make of it because this person who’s always been this rock in your life is suddenly not there anymore. And so I think I’ve spent really the last many, many decades of my adult life kind of trying to chase this relationship with him in a way that’s, I think, trying to get back a little closer to what we had back when I was a kid. And it’s like a sense of intimacy, because he has always been so formative in my creative life. And so I think I’ve always wanted to, yeah, carry that into my adult life and then into my relationship with my kids.

You know, and China’s complicated. And so this one slice of China—this historic city that is so tied to the Chinese diaspora and specifically to Chinese in America—you know, I’ve written about American Chinatowns. I’ve written a book about American Chinatowns. So it’s like this kind of intellectual curiosity, but also very personal because that’s where my family’s from. And then, like, kind of collapsing down to the really personal—like my nuclear family, right?

Just, um, us—Teddy and I—taking this trip, and then my other nuclear family with my dad, like, to go and see him again and kind of match them together and see what happened. I don’t know. I think it was just trying to hold all the threads at once, and also for myself to try to find some—make some sense of it for me, like, going forward as a human in the world and what I want my relationship with my dad to be, and what I want my relationship with my son to be, and what I want their relationship to be.

Katherine: I love that, and I love how in your story there’s sort of a dual reconsideration of this relationship and also of a place that you’ve been traveling to for, as you said, for more than 20 years.

Bonnie: Yeah.

Katherine: For a traveler who hasn’t been there, how would you describe the city?

Bonnie: Oh my gosh, it’s so modern. It’s so big. It’s so sprawling. There’s so much shopping to be done. There are all these mega malls that are just, like, the best. I think Cantonese people have always prided themselves on,like, food, right? And so there’s always a new restaurant. There’s always, like, some new place to try. And the city is a buying and selling kind of place, right? So it’s a mercantile town, and it has been for many, many hundreds of years.

And so I think it’s interesting because you can get a lot of things made there. People don’t really think of Guangzhou as cosmopolitan as Shanghai, right? In terms of fashion, in terms of trends. And yet, a lot of things—at least up until very recently—that’s where things were made.

And so it’s kind of coming up as its own. I think it’s still trying to figure out what it is. And then lately, you know, as I write in the story, there’s been this push to embrace art and embrace culture and have it be this hub of history, because it is the first place in China that really opened up to the world, and so, to the outside world.

And so I think China nationally is trying to embrace that and promote it as such.

Katherine: Yeah. And I love the story when you talked about—there’s a big food scene—and I was wondering if you would talk about the influence of food in the city as you’ve experienced it, and also the best thing you ate, which is a hard question.

Bonnie: It’s so hard. Well, I think what’s special about this trip, and what’s really—maybe people don’t know about Cantonese food—is the dessert scene is really robust and amazing. You know, there are all these savory, uh, Cantonese dishes that are pretty famous in America, right?

And so that’s like wonton noodle soup or, you know, barbecue spareribs or dim sum, right? And people don’t really think about the sweets category of things. And it’s true that a lot of things—you wouldn’t necessarily know where to get them outside of these traditional Cantonese dessert shops. And it was really fun because my son Teddy was on the trip with me, and so he shares this sweet tooth with my dad. And my dad is very healthy and he doesn’t quite permit himself to enjoy these things that he adores unless the excuse of a visitor is present.

And so he said, “Of course we have to take Teddy to this dessert café.” It’s this dessert house that’s been around since the ’30s, the 1930s, and it’s really amazing. I mean, the menu is just astounding. They also have this astounding variety of sweet dessert soups. Like ginger crushed milk, I guess, is how you would define that. Or, you know, sort of things that are made with buffalo milk, and things that are made with an egg custard or, you know, mango puddings. One of the most special ones, I think, is this black sesame soup. It’s served hot or cold, but the sesame is ground so finely. It’s like this dark-as-night paste that’s so silky and it’s sweet. And then there are these little mochi-type dumplings that are floating around in there. And sometimes they’re filled with, like, a sweet peanut filling or a sweet sesame filling.

And it’s so good. I mean, my mouth is watering as we’re talking about this.

Katherine: Mine too.

Bonnie: It’s just so, so good. And it’s, um, you know there are flavors that are familiar to, um, you know, a palate that’s familiar with Chinese cooking, but it’s a very distinct thing, right? And it’s just really fun to, like, go and order a bunch of things and try them all.

And Teddy was so enamored with it. He asked, you know, we went and then he’s just like, “Can we come back tomorrow? I just love it here so much.”

Katherine: And then when you said, spoiler alert, you do go back the next day . . .

Bonnie: Of course we did. Why wouldn’t we?

Katherine: I want to zoom out a little bit and get practical. You’ve been traveling to China for decades, so what advice would you give to someone traveling to China for the first time? What’s your number one tip?

Bonnie: The thing about traveling to China is that you have to pay for everything with your phone. [ Laughs] It’s crazy. So you have to download an app, like some kind of e-wallet, and Alipay is one of the biggest ones, right? So you have to—you need to figure that out, actually, before you go there.

Look it up. It is, it will make your trip 10 million times easier if you familiarize yourself with what you have to do when you get there. And in fact, when you arrive at the airport there, now there’s pretty good signage that is telling you about Alipay and that you can use your phone. And there’s a QR code that you can use to link to your passport and your, you know, method of payment.

Because you really can’t buy anything unless you download some kind of app. There’s another one that’s a similar kind of thing. But then you’ll feel like an autonomous agent there and you’ll feel independent and not reliant on the kindness of strangers who may not speak English to help you.

That is my number, number, number one for sure.

Katherine: I love that. OK, so if you’re going to write a postcard—I’m going to ask you to imagine—if you’re going to write a postcard from Guangzhou, what would it look like on the front? So what’s the image? What’s the postcard that you’re buying off the rack? And then what are you writing?

Bonnie: I will tell you about a specific postcard that I found, because they were so beautiful. These slide film postcards that I found on Shamian Island, and that’s like, the old French and English concession—colonial concession—where merchants in the 19th century could do business with China.

And so everything—the architecture there—is very European. It’s really interesting. It’s like this relic. But there’s a lot of art and there’s a lot of really cool historical buildings. And the park is beautiful. But there was this little, like, curated souvenir shop area, and they had these really beautiful postcards.

And I loved how the scenes could be really modern—like, you know, Canton Tower, Guangzhou Tower, which is like, used to be the tallest, for a few years used to be the tallest tower in the world—and lit up at night. I would either choose that, because it’s so iconic, or I would choose one of those beautiful scenes of, like, the Pearl River, which is, again, so famous and runs through the city.

And I would write—maybe I would buy both of those. OK, I’m breaking the rule.

Katherine: No, that’s OK.

Bonnie: But one is from modern China, and one is from this, kind of, maybe it’s a little nostalgic, but I think it’s, it has its place in Chinese history, which is this meeting of East and West.

And because I am a meeting of East and West in many ways—and so is my kid, and my dad too, ’cause he immigrated to New York from Hong Kong in the late ’60s—and we’re all that. And so I think it would be, you know, something from, postcard from the new old China. I don’t know—something like that.

And then: “Come eat.” I would say that.

Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Bonnie’s story and to her social media handles. Join me in two weeks for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award-winning features writers. I’ll be speaking with Afar contributing writer Lisa Abend, who last year traveled to Sicily to see how the island has changed since it began selling houses for one euro.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform.

It helps other travelers find it. This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LeGrave.