When Beijing appeared on the other side of the East River, you turned off your phone. Your friends had hoped for Paris, or Rome, or Santorini, so in the soft fog of their collective disappointment you knew you would be afraid to voice how you really felt, which was that never before had the neighboring city felt so simultaneously like and unlike home.

The city-migration, as always, had happened overnight, with no advance warning. By the time you left your tiny studio apartment, crowds had already calcified on the streets. You squeezed onto a train down to the water and jostled for a view, but got stuck behind a man with a toddler sitting on his shoulders, who kept spitting government propaganda about Sino-US relations to anyone who would listen, sweeping warnings about how this new proximity between two major cities would be the beginning of the end of the world, while his daughter drummed on his shoulders and tried to get him to pay attention to her: I’m a bird, daddy, look, I’m a bird.

Excuse me, you said, excuse me, please, until at last you pushed forward enough to get a glimpse of the water.

The East River and the Chaobai River had merged into one body. Ferries and cargo ships and personal boats had been grounded for the day. On your side of the river: delis and pizzerias and taquerias, queer couples holding hands in public, Gothic churches next to Art Deco skyscrapers, high school students smoking weed on fire escapes, tennis courts repartitioned into pickleball courts, too many damn pigeons. On the other side of the river: ten-lane highways, noodles and dumplings and jianbing and youtiao, students hurrying home arm-in-arm in tracksuit school uniforms, tiny side alleys leading to crumbling old hutongs, middle-aged ayis dancing in public squares, old men playing cards on stoops, also too many damn pigeons.

You turned your phone back on. Posts and messages from your friends began to trickle in. Several people were circulating an edited map of the five boroughs, with Brooklyn and Queens scribbled out and Beijing written in Comic Sans. Knew I should’ve taken Mandarin in college, one girl had texted in your run club group chat, to which someone else had responded, no hablo chino, with a skull emoji.

Your WeChat ballooned with messages from your family. Aunts and uncles who’d snuck you treats when you were a child, new cousins you had yet to meet. Photos of their view from the other side of the river, with your name, over and over, tagged in each post. Are you there? they say. What’s the situation over there?

And there was one message from your father, whom you still sent money to every month but hadn’t seen in person for the better part of a decade. Five words, in Chinese: Can you cross the bridge?

You kept pushing forward. Cars had been rerouted away from the roads around the bridge, but foot traffic was still trickling through. As you got closer to the mouth of the bridge, the crowds thickened and curdled.

A frazzled NYPD officer stood at the mouth of the bridge, a blond man who looked younger than you, fielding questions from the frothing crowd.

Is anyone allowed to cross? you said.

Chinese citizen? the officer said, perhaps clocking your accent, the immigrant shape of your vowels.

You nodded.

He said, We’ll notify you when we’ve solidified border protocols.

You said, I’ll be really quick. I’ll come right back, I promise. It’s just walking distance from here.

The travel bans are still in effect, said the officer, even if border security hasn’t arrived yet. You don’t want to do anything rash. They’re on their way.

But—

The officer turned away. Go home.

You’d come to New York for college, all those years ago. It hadn’t felt like such a seismic shift at the time. Just a migration from one era of life into another, the same way all your friends from high school had done at eighteen. You hadn’t realized at the time quite how much bigger one migration could be than another. You’d spent the better part of a decade missing out on one life event after another: your brother’s wedding, your mother’s funeral. At first, you’d stayed because your student visa required it, and then you’d stayed because your green card application required it, and then at last you’d started saving up for a trip home to see your father again, compelled by the persistent mental image of him living alone an Earth-length away from his only child. But then, before you’d booked your plane tickets, the newest round of travel bans had come down and shut everything off clean.

The officer began answering a question from someone behind you, and when he wasn’t looking, you slipped past him and sprinted up the steps, two at a time, onto the bridge.

Stop, shouted the officer, but other people were already swarming him with questions and demands, and he would have to extract himself from his post if he wanted to follow you.

You plunged across the bridge, sweating under your newly shared sky, and as you approached the other side you thought perhaps you heard, somewhere in the far distance, someone calling your name.

© 2025 Hannah Yang