I think China was always a sort of mythic place for me in the imagination.

My parents had given me and my three sisters Chinese names and when we were young,

I mean, constantly reminded us of the importance of the fact that we were from this place.

And they took a lot of pride in the country and its history.

And obviously, you know, from bilingual school to sadder school,

wanted us to also deeply appreciate that as well.

And yet when I first went as a student, you know, to sort of pursue this curiosity,

I just remember feeling so flummoxed and baffled and really feeling this profound sense of

sadness and dislocation almost just realizing how so much of what I had been told about the

country as a child, you know, was coming from an immigrant family who had left the country

before the communist took over. I mean, just the radical shifts that had occurred.

And I was in Beijing as a student and just remember I was dead of winter.

The city just looked like a monochrome smog and buildings everywhere being torn down who

tones of the kind that, you know, my grandmother had been raised in.

And I think for me, just like that first experience,

feeling like I had essentially landed on Mars and had no foothold made me like at that point,

my studies and language were maybe a little more cursory.

And at that point, I really wanted to just kind of dive in more deeply.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

If you're a news consumer, you've noticed in the news that one of the biggest foreign policy

issues in the news right now is the US-China relationship, particularly after Donald Trump.

There's always this talk every new administration comes in, they say the same thing,

...