Selina Xu

My 26th birthday in a snapshot: my body straddles time zones; my suitcase bulges with everything my parents think I need in America; my mom tears up while singing to me at karaoke; I snack on Pizza Hut chicken wings, my nine-year-old favorite; on the bed we sit cross-legged in PJs talking about life and love and dreams; I blow out the candle on the cake, heart full, mind at peace, nose sniffling.

Dunhuang

How does one grapple with two thousand years? How to fit that width in the span of a mind?

Was it dehydration, baking in the heat under a white sun, desert stretching for miles all around? My vision swam. The air thrummed, hot but windy. No poetry captures the heaviness of history, settling over me like a cloak.

The mounds stood before me, battered by centuries of sun, wind, and rain. What was once a key gate to the Silk Road — the famous Yumen Pass — now looked like unremarkable stones and natural boulders, or some cluster of modern art sculptures.

I could only try to imagine where the city once stood, with 100,000 troops: a fortified fortress against the Xiong Nu invaders in the north; the earliest border of the Chinese empire in this part of the world; and where countless caravans once began their long journeys along the Silk Road, leaving known civilization and braving the Gobi desert for India, Parthia, and the Roman Empire.

My imagination strained against the reins of time. I thought I knew heat, growing up in Singapore. But the temperature of the desert was hard to describe — the heat waves pulsed against all my exposed skin, roasting me without pause. I took off my slippers to sink my feet into the sand and each second needed forbearance. How my predecessors from centuries ago built a city and defended the passes, sheathed in armor and swathed in layers of clothing in these conditions seemed like a miracle in themselves.

Famous names and fables haunt this far-flung patch, from Zhang Qian (whose missions to Central Asia in the 2nd century BCE created the Silk Road) to the poet Wang Wei (his famous lines: “劝君更尽一杯酒，西出阳关无故人” have another cup of wine / past these gates there’ll be no old friends).

Then there’s the Mogao Caves. They’re marvelous, thrilling, alluring, humbling. I’ve never seen anything that can quite compare. Close to two millennia of art — murals, frescoes, sculptures — carved into the cliff face across thousands of grottoes, threading through dynasties, showing how people lived and worshipped. In each cave are a million little lavish details: noble women with jade flowers on their faces, maps of mountains dotted with monasteries, Prince Sattva sacrificing himself to feed a starving tiger, Buddhas glinting in the dark.

Cities, dynasties, empires, and all their regalia — everything is reduced to sand and stone under the relentless wheel of time. What does history leave us with? Stories that quiver in the hot air around me, poems that pay tribute to those who ventured into these uninhabitable deserts, these caves. Art lives on.