What my trip to China taught me about friendship and mooncakes

A story of resilience, legacy, love and, of course, mooncakes.
Updated 03 Feb, 2025

Earlier this week, the world marked the start of the Chinese Year of the Snake. As I receive heartfelt wishes for the new lunar year in my ‘2024 China Visit’ WhatsApp group, my mind returns to another celebration in China, which I had the good fortune of experiencing and observing myself. Suddenly, I had to check if there were still any mooncakes left in the fridge.

As I gaze at the last of the mooncakes I brought with me from China, I am also reminded of how it was first served to me there. The little cupcake-sized delicacy had been neatly cut into four quarters to consume just a little at a time and not gobble the entire cake at once. I was offered and presented mooncake boxes as gifts on several occasions while in China, it being the mid-autumn or Mooncake Festival season there around the time of my visit.

Speaking of gifts, I am also reminded of the day I was myself preparing small souvenir bags with little brooches made of dolls dressed in Pakistan flag colours to present to friends in China. Just in time I saw the little ‘Made in China’ tag on the cardboard each little doll was pinned to. I quickly cropped that part of the cardboard before repacking the dolls in their neat little red goody bags. 

All my life, I have heard the terms “Pakistan-China dosti zindabad” and “Long live China-Pakistan friendship”. When I was little, my parents used to tell me different stories about the Chinese. My mother would tell me about their hard work and resilience. My father would tell me about their strong commitments and strength of character.

I got to see all of these qualities and more when I became part of a small group of eight journalists invited by the Chinese Consulate in Karachi to visit China “to deepen our understanding of China’s economic and social development … and strengthen friendly exchanges with the Chinese media”. During our 10-day stay in the country, we visited many famous landmarks such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, as well as the Museum of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai.

The Chinese themselves love to visit these places, as we gathered from the long queues there. At the Great Wall, we met a woman who was over 100 years old. While we took a cable car to the top, she climbed the stairs herself.

Earlier, while exploring the grounds we noticed with a great sense of pride an inscription on a big white plaque that read first in Urdu, then Chinese, followed by English:

“A portion of the Great Wall from the North Tower 6-7 was restored through a friendly donation by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as a token of eternal friendship between Pakistan and China. His Excellency Mr M Akram Zaki, Ambassador of Pakistan to China, unveiled this plaque on 20-3-1989.”

Our Chinese hosts smiled as we read the inscription and posed for pictures with it. It was a proud moment for us Pakistanis, one we previously were not aware of.

Back to the heights, in China, we also got to see exceptionally tall buildings perhaps just slightly shorter than the hills and mountains of the Great Wall. Being lucky enough to have visited some of the largest cities in the world, I can safely say that I have never seen such architectural magnificence the likes of which I saw in Beijing and Shanghai. Not only are the buildings very tall, they are also spectacular. It is amazing then that during the 1960s, Chinese delegations used to come to Karachi to see our Habib Bank Plaza building in Karachi and marvel at its height. 

 Beijing’s high-rise buildings.
Beijing’s high-rise buildings.

The Chinese don’t seem to have any concept of rest. And they expect the same of everyone else because they know no better. A busy itinerary was set for us by our hosts. We were taken around on various visits from the day we landed in Beijing, that is, as soon as we had checked into our hotel and gotten accustomed with the new Nihao Sim that we were given by our hosts. In China, unless you use a VPN, you cannot access WhatsApp, Gmail, Google, Facebook, YouTube and the like. For communications, WeChat reigns supreme. So, equipped with WeChat, we were on the coaster bus and out and about soon after breakfast, set to return to our hotel after dinner.

I know you are likely wondering what we ate in China. A bit must be said here about our hosts who made sure that we were only served halal food. We had five hosts who came to receive us at the Beijing airport. They were all bright young journalists from China Economic Net (CEN) — Wang Kai (Katie), Xiong Weisheng (Wilson) and Liao Yifan (Doudou) — and two young photographers whose names we could never understand therefore we nicknamed one Romeo and the other Juliet despite both of them being young men.

Chinese ‘aloo gosht’.
Chinese ‘aloo gosht’.

Romeo and Juliet were always working in a pair — if one took pictures, the other would be making videos. They were both bulky, something rare for Chinese people, and both dressed alike, too, in T-shirts and cargo shorts. Neither spoke English. But what they lacked in language they made up for through their helpful nature. The pair were like our shadows, always around to extend any kind of help. They wouldn’t let us carry heavy bags. They would be offering us bottled water after every little while. They were there for anything and everything. After a couple of days, to our amusement, we also found Katie, Wilson and Doudou referring to them as Romeo and Juliet.

The Chinese like to have an English name as well as their given names. During dinner with Pakistan’s ambassador to China, Khalil Hashmi at Pakistan House in Beijing, I happened to glance at the name card in front of Wilson which read ‘Weisheng’ and pointed out to him that they had his name all wrong.He smiled and said, “No it’s correct”. Then pronouncing Weisheng, he said: “See, sounds like ‘Wilson’ doesn’t it?”

Despite the busy schedule, our young hosts and their sweet-smiling boss, CEN’s Director of the International Cooperation Centre Yin Cui, who we would meet off and on, made us feel so welcome that it felt as if we were visiting family. When I was having trouble registering the local sim from my phone, there was Doudou who took out her own phone sim and registered mine from her phone while copying the details from my passport. Then when she had to run, Wilson downloaded WeChat for me and also added me as a friend.

When one member of our group had an anxiety attack on our first night in China and was found roaming outside the hotel at 2am in a bewildered state by Wilson, he rushed him to hospital where he was checked thoroughly before being brought back. Had he himself not mentioned it the next day, we would not even have known about it because Wilson never uttered a word. Wilson also served as the Chinese currency cashier for another member of our team who had only brought dollars with him. But then Wilson, still in his 20s, could also be naughty as after finding the same Pakistani journalist on LinkedIn, he found his brother and sent him a picture of the group member to claim that he had kidnapped him for ransom. Then the joke was on Wilson when the brother told him to keep him. 

Katie, the one leading our young hosts’ team, would find restaurants serving halal food wherever we went. The food, steaming hot, would already be on the table, well, on the Lazy Susan, when we reached the restaurants. There would always be barbecue, seafood, salads and potato and meat curry with some pasta, sometimes along with sweet yoghurt. There was also always steaming hot water in a teapot and green tea at hand. The Chinese are in the habit of sipping hot water before every meal. They also like eating in small quarter plates that can be refilled with whatever you need from the Lazy Susan.

 Bikes for rent on the pavement.
Bikes for rent on the pavement.

The wheels keep turning in China. Men and women both can be seen riding motorbikes, usually E-bikes. And the pavements are lined with blue, turquoise, yellow and mustard bicycles, depending on their company colour, which can be rented for use and left on the pavement at one’s destination for someone else to do the same. They are locked, by the way, and can be unlocked by scanning the QR code visible on a small screen on them. An entire month’s rent for any company’s bike is 15 Yuan (about Rs581) and for half an hour it is 1.5 Yuan (about Rs58). 

 The QR code on a bike.
The QR code on a bike.

There is also no shortage of buses and subway trains for commuting in China. But it came as a surprise that many Chinese people are not aware of the term bullet trains. They have trains that are even faster than bullet trains but they simply call them high-speed trains. When one of us mentioned that we were taking the bullet train to Shanghai, they looked very confused and asked what that meant. 

On said train, you are not allowed to carry liquids exceeding 100ml. When one senior Pakistani journalist’s expensive cologne bottle (worth around Rs40,000) was confiscated at the Beijing station because he had decided to ignore the advice about carrying liquids on the train, he was most distraught and kept complaining for the entire four-and-a-half-hour journey from Beijing to Shanghai. 

This time we decided to not pay him any heed. Most of us, anyway, were sad about another matter — the separation of Romeo from Juliet and us! We were informed by Katie that Romeo was to stay back in Beijing because he had to cover a trade exhibition there. But before he went, he booked our train seats and was also there to see us off at the station. Knowing we were not to see him again we bid him farewell with hearty handshakes and big hugs.

We were informed in Shanghai, by Michelle, another young CEN journalist, who was handling things for us there, that halal breakfast would be served to us on the 40th floor of our hotel. I wondered how many floors the hotel had — the answer was over 80. Reaching the hotel on my first evening in Shanghai, I was tired and a bit confused about my room number when I spotted some Chinese folk chatting near the lifts. They explained to me that the first numbers on my key card meant my floor and the digits next to it indicated my room number. Then it was their turn to ask me where I was from. On hearing my reply, the women hugged me and the men shook my hand with so much affection that it made me slightly teary-eyed. No wonder Indians in China often say they are Pakistanis.

After several days, first in Beijing and then Shanghai, we returned to Beijing to catch our flight to Pakistan the next morning. Juliet gathered our luggage from the train station and went to the hotel ahead of us to check us in, while we stopped at a halal place for dinner.

It was our final night in China. The next morning, it was time to say goodbye. Sweet Yin Cui brought big boxes of mooncakes for all of us as parting gifts. My suitcase was already full of mooncakes presented to us on so many other occasions along with the other souvenirs and I simply could not find space for another big box of mooncakes though I did take it, out of politeness, hoping to discard it at the airport (I could not do it in the presence of our hosts). 

Moments before boarding our bus, Romeo arrived, out of breath. Finding the senior journalist he was looking for, he handed him that cologne bottle that had been taken from him at the train station a few days ago. Romeo had noticed what had happened and come back to collect it as he was not going to Shanghai with us. And he kept it with him all this while. No words were spoken because Romeo didn’t speak English. But there was understanding. The journalist held Romeo in an embrace for so long that we almost renamed him ‘Juliet’.

I picked up my box of extra mooncakes and glanced at my backpack. I was sure I could make space for them in there. I was already leaving my heart in China…there was no point in leaving anything else behind.