Breakfast in Xiaoshan: On Visions, Longing, and Basslines

Reposted from my LinkedIn articles, first published February 23, 2026.

This Valentine’s Day, my wife and I went back to Xiaoshan.

Not the Hangzhou of postcards or conference brochures, but the district where she grew up in the 1980s. We walked past her childhood home. We took photographs in streets that have changed dramatically and not at all. We drank coffee in one of the immaculate, carefully curated cafés that now sit where older, more functional buildings once stood. Then we had breakfast at a street stall she used to eat at as a child.

A real Xiaoshan breakfast. Hot. Quick. Ordinary. Not performative.

Standing there, between redevelopment and memory, a bassline drifted into my head — the opening of “Visions of China” by Japan.

I hadn’t thought about that track in years.

When Tin Drum was released in 1981, China was largely an idea for young British musicians and audiences. It was opening, but still distant. For those of us orbiting art, music and atmosphere, China represented a horizon — somewhere beyond the greyness of post-industrial Britain. Elsewhere. Renewal. The sense that history might be unfolding differently in another place.

Listening back now, the artifice is visible. The stylised gestures. The orientalist gloss. The absence of dialogue. “Visions of China” feels less like a song about China and more like a song about Britain imagining a future it could not yet locate at home.

And yet the bassline still holds.

Mick Karn’s fretless playing remains exploratory and confident. The groove works. The atmosphere works. What feels thinner now are the symbolic layers — the projection of “China” as an aesthetic mood.

Standing in Xiaoshan, that raised an uncomfortable question. What is my own “vision of China”?

I first encountered Daoism at seventeen. Even in simplified form, it resonated immediately. The idea of non-coercive order. Of yielding rather than forcing. Of systems that organise themselves rather than dominate. It aligned instinctively with my philosophical anarchism. It did not feel exotic. It felt recognisable.

Since then: two decades of Taiji practice. Regular travel to China since 2005. Study. Reading. Uneven, ongoing language learning. And now, living here.

I cannot imagine a version of myself that never encountered China. I cannot imagine a trajectory that did not eventually lead back to China. It feels less like a recent decision and more like a long arc. And yet I do not speak the language fluently. I move within academic and creative networks. I inhabit a mediated slice of China. I experience it through translation. I do not access it in the way my wife does — through childhood, dialect, embedded memory.

So what am I doing here? Is this an expansion? Is it escape? The honest answer is that it is both expansion and escape.

Before moving, I felt professionally cornered. The institutional environment I was in had hardened. Demands escalated without space for manoeuvre. Regionally, I had reached a plateau. It felt like stagnation. China represented movement. Recomposition. Possibility.

But it would be too simple to frame this as opportunism. The philosophical pull predates the professional shift. Daoism was never decorative. It shaped how I respond to rigidity and hierarchy. When structures harden, I tend to look for flow rather than confrontation. That does not make my relationship to China uncomplicated.

The difference between appropriation and relationship may lie in time, reciprocity and transformation. Japan’s Tin Drum invoked China symbolically, without dialogue. It aestheticised distance. My relationship is also mediated, but it is not purely symbolic. It involves friction. Bureaucracy. Cultural misunderstanding. Daily ordinariness. Fantasy rarely requires paperwork.

In Xiaoshan, what moved me was not mystical otherness but continuity. My wife’s breakfast stall still operating. The same flavours. The same routines. A city layered over itself. The China of “Visions of China” was cinematic. The China of Xiaoshan breakfast is lived.

Perhaps that is the shift. China is no longer a horizon in my imagination. It is the terrain underfoot. That does not dissolve asymmetry. It does not grant insider status. But it moves the relationship from projection to participation. Longing does not automatically equal appropriation. All migration contains desire. The ethical question is whether desire freezes the other into symbol, or whether it accepts complexity and change.

Standing in Xiaoshan, the bassline from 1981 felt less like romantic fantasy and more like a historical artefact — a record of how Britain once imagined its future through distant imagery.

Now I am no longer imagining China. I am entangled in it — imperfectly, partially, but materially.

The vision has become an encounter.

And the breakfast was very good.