After I interviewed my family, I stayed in China for a month to travel around by myself for the first time. I'd gone sightseeing in the past – to the Three Gorges, to Yellow Mountain, Mount Emei, Jiuzhaigou, Xi'an – but always with family who had planned everything, bought the tickets and figured out the routes. As an adult, I had travelled alone in several foreign countries in which I'd felt confident figuring things out independently, but I still felt a sense of unease in China, like a child who doesn't know how to take the train by herself – and this was the feeling I wanted to overcome.

I welcomed in the new year with a friend in Nanjing. Alone, I travelled through Hangzhou and Suzhou. These days, the logistical hurdles for a tourist visiting China are complex and ever-changing. For one, everyone uses Alipay. If you have Alipay, the whole world of modern China is spread out at your feet: train tickets, taxis, bike shares, late-night food delivery. But it's very difficult to register for Alipay as a mere tourist, and it's getting harder and harder to use cash. I had to get around this difficulty by using my mother's smartphone, which is linked to her Alipay account. Because it was her identity, with her name listed, and not mine, I couldn't use the account to buy train tickets, which have names printed. At the station, I had to line up at a separate window to get my paper tickets, instead of just scanning a code with my phone. I was acutely aware of how outside the system I was.

Once, a friend asked me: "How good are you at passing?" – that is, passing as Chinese-Chinese, not Chinese American. I wanted to pass, but like the many Asian Americans who, like me, have tried to go back to the motherland and find a place there, I could never "pass" for long.

The China I know the best is my grandparents' China. It's an old China, with rusty bicycles and motorcycle fumes, sweaty street vendors and dusty convenience stores where, as children, we took ice-cream from the coolers. Trains were slow, and everything could be haggled over. While travelling around by myself as an adult in the new China, I couldn't escape the feeling that much of what I was experiencing was a novelty. I paid for groceries via QR code. In Hangzhou, I ordered by pointing at the food other people were eating. I was reminded that, despite my family connection, China was a separate world to me, and I was a tourist like so many other expats in the country.