2026 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize – Honorable Mention, Adult Category
I, Pilgrim
“It’s an absolutely ridiculous way to travel. We don’t even send you a real itinerary, just an outline with hardly any information. You show so much trust in us by just showing up,” Shanthum said in his familiar, British upper-class accent, genuinely bewildered. I felt simultaneously seen and relieved that this little speech was happening at the end, not the beginning of the two weeks the 26 of us had just spent together in Beijing, Dunhuang, Xinning, Xi’an, Luoyang and Mount Wutai. In addition to Shanthum, an Indian Zen Buddhist lay teacher pushing 70 who took charge of the logistics, Stephen and Martine, former monastics turned secular Buddhists married for nearly 40 years, provided the tour’s spiritual and religious context. Rounding out the leadership was Jack, an atheist Beijinger, our main local go-between who was supported by additional local guides at each destination.
I had been in China ten years before under very different circumstances. For 8 months between 2014 and 2015, I was supported by a Fulbright fellowship to conduct research for my PhD in Yunnan, with some short stints in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. In preparation, I read up on my research topic, food security, set up appointments and interviews with researchers and government institutes and bolstered my childhood’s worth of Saturday Mandarin language schools in the Bay Area and a smattering of university-level courses with an immersive summer program.
This time around, everything would be planned and organized for me, including my travel companions. At airport pickup with Agnes and Albert, who, like me, had flown into Beijing from Western Europe, I gave little thought to the fact that they were well into their golden years. Only once alone did I think to ask: who has the time, interest and resources to go on an extended pilgrimage of Buddhist sites in China? The next day in the hotel lobby, the answer was reflected in the sea of gray hair and white faces milling around the orientation meeting. My heart sank.
Intellectually, I knew it would be fine. Attending this pilgrimage was not actually a leap of faith, more like a hop of a skipping stone. I already trusted Shanthum because he had led my pilgrimage in India the year previous. Admittedly joining that trip had been slightly more fraught: besides a similarly sparse itinerary was a 90’s era website which looked primed to scam people out of significant sums of money (reading, “Our journeys are exploratory, intelligent and transformative adventures – more a state of mind than a risky or arduous challenge,” against grainy, tiled wallpaper made me wonder if I would later be told the numbers in my bank account were merely a state of mind). What provided reassurance was that it would be co-led by monks and nuns from a meditation retreat I had attended the before year that.
Meanwhile, the closest I had come to meditating before attending the retreat was reading the occasional fluff piece touting its benefits. Though ministering to my mental health sounded intriguing, between trying to impress my professors and despairing over the state of my research, I realistically could not make the time. Only when I threw caution to the wind (one PhD and a seven-year postdoc later) to travel for a year did I start entertaining the idea. Serendipitously, I discovered a center in France, a mere stone’s throw from me in Munich. Its proximity, its modest price and the fact that I had encountered its founder on book covers at Barnes and Noble a couple of times, sealed my decision.
A second glance across the hotel lobby provided a much-needed corrective. Along with Shanthum, his wife and their college-aged daughter, the presence of both an Indian and a Sri Lankan added welcome color to the room. There was even someone who appeared to be my age, though his alarmingly long and tangled blond hair inspired little confidence we would become bosom buddies. If faith is your heart telling your head to ignore all available evidence and just believe all will be okay, this was the converse, my head telling my heart to turn off the alarm bells. I turned to talk to the person next to me.
The Pilgrim Club
“A few years back, I did some renovation of the west wing here,” David said. “It was in the middle of the pandemic. Walking around with no one else in sight was incredible.” After orientation, we set off on a tour of Beijing. The Forbidden City was swarming, with many sacrificing themselves to the summer heat to take candid pictures in full-on period costumes.
Every conversation with David begins this way, with some astounding piece of personal history that makes me question both who on earth this person is and my own life decisions. When discussing our mutual love for romantic comedies, David casually mentioned, “When I was living in New York, a buddy of mine working on a movie set told me, `I’ve found your soul mate. You’ll thank me later.’ That’s how I got set up on a blind date with Meg Ryan” (David ended up not following through because he was too busy falling in love with his future wife). After admiring a piece of wallpaper at the Lama Temple (“Gorgeous, just look at this craftsmanship”), he let it be known he had once headed a wallpaper museum.
Silver hair, impish eyes framed by glasses that accentuated his good looks and perpetually dressed in what can only be described as business jungle (button downs and trousers made from the latest advancements in sports technology), David embodied the easy confidence of someone who not only grew up with money, but old money. Building on the financial and social resources such a heritage endows, he constructed a world-class career in the preservation and restoration of historical buildings.
I wanted to ask David follow-up questions, but Jack was starting his discourse on the enormous granite boulders before us. “Originally there were ten stone drums. They were first unearthed during the Tang dynasty in the 700s AD but then lost again when the Tang lost power,” Jack explained. His English, while slightly stilted, was excellent. “These inscriptions were made during the Spring and Autumn period. We are not sure exactly when but maybe around 400 BC.”
Each stone is engraved with writing, more drawing-like than the Chinese script I am used to. “They are poems. They describe the hunting and fishing activities of the emperor. They are the oldest known writing of Chinese on stone, written before Qin Shihuang standardized the characters.” I try to make out a character anyway. “During the Song dynasty, the emperor learned about the poems from rubbings taken from the stones. He ordered a search for the original drums, but they only found nine.” Of course I can’t, but I can see that many are missing. “The Song tried to preserve the engravings by gilding them in gold. When the Jin conquered the Song, they removed the gold, damaging the characters. Then they were lost again until the Yuan dynasty.”
Looking at these massive rocks, it seemed highly improbable that anyone could lose track of them not once, not twice but three times and for hundreds of years. What seemed more likely was that people simply forgot to care. There was some precedence for this. Cleopatra had no inkling of the existence of the Sphynx, because already a thousand years old when she was born, it had been lost to the sand. Meanwhile, inspired by the Egyptians but bemoaning the inscrutability of their pyramids, Mount Rushmore’s creator planned to address the problem by carving a large entablature next to the faces explaining who they were of, why they were so worthy of the honor, and how they represented the majesty of America. What might have become the nation’s first permanent billboard was ultimately scrapped when structural issues in the rock arose.
Shelley’s Ozymandias would have us laugh at the hubris of men, it is almost always men, who seek to explain themselves through large objects. Whether building a stairway to heaven on the backs of slaves or carving a shrine to democracy by defacing sites sacred to their enemies, the medium of the message often says more than the message itself. Sometimes this is literal. The ancient Egyptians were also avid recyclers — the buildings of disgraced rulers were regularly used as the foundation for new ones so that thousands of years later, what archaeologists found was exactly what their successors sought to hide.
But doesn’t some version of this contradiction lie at the heart of Shelley’s rumination? The desert may indeed reclaim the statues of Ramses II, but he will be entombed in our collective memory so long as we read Ozymandias. From this perspective, the stones seemed less like a precious window into a historical past and more like a metaphor for the social distinction between mass and weight. While the size of these drums has changed little over time, the measure of their meaning fluctuates depending on the prevailing cultural gravity.
Not like I had the bandwidth for such thoughts during the pilgrimage. Overwhelmingly, I devoted myself to maneuvering the seemingly endless configurations of social interactions. Besides the age gap was the spiritual one. “Who is here because they are Buddhist and who is here because they are just interested?” Jack asked during airport pickup. Being just interested meant that conversations could feel like taking a crash course in Buddhism in the West, one that began in India and continued onto China. From being asked about ‘my practice’ and whether I had a sangha to staring blankly as people bandied around names like Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, superstars among this set as opposed to uncannily well-named food company mascots, this was not the Buddhism I grew up with.
Buddhism was like everything else my sister and I were made to do as kids — an activity that we gave lip service to because we had no other choice. It was driving with our parents to the Taiwanese temple and feeling the unnerving calm and smell of incense pervade the utilitarian front office littered with the shoes of everyone else already there. It was being allowed to sit in the car, doors open, sun shining, Creed drowning out the sounds of chanting through my Sony Discman headphones. It was wondering if I would get in trouble if I walked across the street to get KFC instead of eating the much-loathed free temple food while knowing I had neither the money nor nerve to do so in the first place.
It was visiting the other temple closer to home, the one that felt like stepping into someone’s vision of ancient China, with its latticed windows, open courtyards and brightly painted trapezoidal roofs. There would be a reading of your future if you first kneeled, took two kidney bean-shaped pieces of wood and dropped them repeatedly until they took on a yin and yang configuration, one up and one down. This allowed you to choose a long wooden stick from a basket. The stick had a number that let you open the corresponding drawer in a cabinet that may have previously been a library book catalogue. You then picked out the thin rice paper that told you what was to come. The monk would often have to interpret, and the interpretation was taken Very Seriously.
It was being informed by the sharp rising tone in my mother’s voice that it was absolutely not okay and possibly treasonous to let the yellow laminated plastic card touch the ground because the 經 were written on it and to be treated with god-like reverence. It was only much later that you realize that 經 are sutras because like everything else growing up, you only understand when you have the English word, even when the English word is actually Sanskrit.
This Buddhism, as practiced by my fellow pilgrims, was something else entirely. The Buddha was not a God who, three incense sticks in hand, I had been taught to bow to, but a historical person with a message about the existence of suffering and the possibility of releasing it. People actually discussed and analyzed the sutras, instead of just chanting their words. Every couple days, Shanthum organized ‘Strucks’, essentially a show and tell for feelings and reflections. If at times awkward and stiff, people nevertheless expressed themselves sincerely and others listened with generosity. Even Jack, atheist, semi-retired, Jack was moved. “As a Chinese person, I am not used to sharing my feelings with strangers. But I feel that I can with you all,” he said one week in. This Buddhism was intellectual and emotional, as opposed to ritualistic and devotional. It also slowly but surely, lay a foundation for community as people’s thoughts and feelings spilled out of Strucks and into our interactions with one another.
“God this is so silly,” Shelle (not to be confused with Shelly) confided in me, “but I think Martine thinks I’m slowing down the group.” While I highly doubted Martine had any such thoughts, it was unexpectedly soothing to hear someone else express their need for her approval. I had my own neuroses about Martine. Ever the teacher’s pet, I wanted her to think I was smart. Unfortunately, being uncommonly ignorant of the religion she had spent ten years taking vows in, I had no idea what to talk to her about. Given the choice of being perceived as mute or stupid, there was no contest.
My social skills functioned mostly normally towards the other pilgrims. Though still peppered with awkwardness and insecurity, it was unusually stuffed with moments of kismet and connection. My first conversation with Shelle was like staring into a time kaleidoscope. She was born in San Jose and had lived in Mountain View while I was born in Mountain View and had lived in San Jose. We not only studied the same major at Berkeley but had similar experiences of feeling adrift there, 30 years apart. Later, I learned that she had started her extraordinary career exactly at the age that I was, 37, which I secretly hoped portended good things for my future (hopefully before 73). She had never had children and while my stance is still uncertain, she was the first older person I could talk about it with. Everyone else I knew in that demographic had disqualified themselves either through their parenthood or their familial connection to me.
Meanwhile, Niles, he of the long, blond, tangled hair, turned into a fast friend. Is there a German word which describes the phenomena of having only what you don’t think will happen, happen? Like me, he was also a foreigner living in Germany. Unlike me, he had just received German citizenship and was working through a master’s degree in creative writing. In short, Niles already had what I was applying for and was doing what I could barely articulate wanting to do. We developed a habit of meeting at night in the hotel lobby to have a drink and write. While strictly platonic, deviating from the official tour activities felt illicit, a feeling that was only underscored while sneaking back into my hotel room to avoid waking up my roommate Agnes.
These repeated interactions with my fellow pilgrims also made me better appreciate how behavior I thought was self-explanatory was specific to Chinese culture. This was especially apparent during mealtimes. Yes, they were mostly older and white, but also well-heeled, well-educated and well-traveled. I didn’t expect them to pick up tofu with chopsticks but somehow, I thought they would know the proper etiquette for using a lazy Susan. Invariably however, one person would serve themselves as another turned the wheel. Clashing crockery, nearly spilled teacups and noodles pulled practically full circle were a constant presence during mealtime. Meanwhile, the collective dismay over receiving fruit instead of dessert made me wonder whether I had correctly clocked people’s ages.
When the whole fish came, as it did at nearly every meal, watching these accomplished, worldly individuals squirm broadcasted how deeply rooted the processed foods industry had spread. Shelly was especially sensitive. Turning pale the first time, she blurted out, “Oh god, this fish is staring at me,” while everyone else looked on, equally dumbfounded. I silently spun the fish over, severed and flipped its head over to halt its torture campaign on Shelly and fileted it for good measure. “Where did you learn to do that?” Paul asked in open admiration. “Actually, I’ve only really ever seen waiters do it, but I thought I’d give it a try”, I replied, trying to hide my dismay. I never expected needing to play the role of grown-up on this pilgrimage.
Pilgrims’ Progress
“And across this cave,” our new local guide gestures to the sweep of panels above our heads, “is the story of a woman’s suffering.” The word cave seemed somewhat of a misnomer given that we had just squeezed through a metal door complete with knob. And yet this space, like all the others we had seen, had indeed been dug out from sheer rock at least a thousand years ago. It was additionally planed, plastered and adorned with intricate paintings and murals over the course of those years. The metal door was presumably a more recent addition.
“In this panel here, you see the woman with her husband. She was born to a wealthy family and when she married her husband, a servant, her parents disowned her.” Something unexpectedly clicks in my mind. This story sounded like it was going somewhere I had been before. “And here, she is pregnant and wants to give birth to her baby at her parent’s house, as was custom then. Her husband is afraid her parents will torture him given their opposition to their union. But she argues all will be forgiven once they see the child and he agrees to take her.” Everybody tilts to the right. “You can see she gives birth on the way. There’s no reason to go to her parent’s house anymore, so they go home.”
As I glance at the next panel, I am privately delighted to be on the right track. “For the birth of their second child, she again wants to go to her parent’s house, her husband is again reluctant, but he again relents. She again gives birth on the way but this time, the husband gets bitten by a snake and dies.” The sea of silver turns in solemn unison as the panels stretch into the next wall. “She decides to go on but must cross a river to get to her parents’ house. She tells her first born, now a toddler, to wait until she gives the signal that it is safe to cross. But crossing with her newborn, a vulture comes down and snatches the infant away.” The cave gets even quieter as we contemplate the terrible scene. “When the mother flails her arms in despair, her toddler interprets it as a signal to cross and gets swept away by the river.” It was undeniable now, I had heard this story before, in India. The next panel showed a black smudge of the wreckage that I knew was coming. “Completely broken, she makes it to her parents’ house alone only to find out that the strong storm, the same one that overfilled the river that swept away her firstborn, caused her parent’s home to collapse, killing all inside.”
Her is misery complete, I think. Now is the part when, heavily traumatized, she meets the Buddha and transcends her misfortune. After days and days of information where everything was new and disorienting, here, finally, something familiar, if horrifying.
The same questions run through my head with every new tour guide: is there more information they aren’t telling? How would I know anyway? This tour guide especially inspired these questions. Like all the others working at the Mogao grottos, she was wearing what looked like a cross between a flight attendant’s uniform and a dress from a North Korean military parade. Unlike them however, she accessorized herself with large black sunglasses and bold lipstick. Her English is so uncannily inflected with the bored nasal fry characteristic of LA that I wonder not if, but how much time she has spent there. This vocal tic, perhaps unfairly, had reinforced my initial impression of her relative disinterest in dishing to a group of old, white foreigners. But at least here, the alignment of my private knowledge with her public rendering puts these questions to rest. Then, to my confusion, the panels continue and the story goes on.
“Now you can see that she is kidnapped by a thief and forced to become his wife.” This is new to me. This poor woman didn’t even get the grace to grieve in peace? “After the thief is jailed, she meets another man who is at first nice to her and then abuses her.” An uncontrollable snort breaks loose in the group; we are now in the realm of farce. The panels go on. They seem to say, a woman’s suffering is unending. They seem to say, time is not the only thing that can turn tragedy into comedy. Adding more tragedy will also do the trick.
Perhaps this deluge of calamity would not have seemed as excessive to the creators of these panels. Though it has always been a blip of an oasis, Dunhuang has nevertheless been a major crossroads where those passing through wove invisible webs of trade, religion and art. Inspired by a monk’s dream of a thousand buddhas in 366 CE, the Mogao grottos is the physical manifestation of all these forces. Over the next thousand years, local patrons, monastics and artists came together again and again to create talismans against the vagaries of the unforgiving desert and the incursions from foreign invaders.
To my delight, I was familiar with one of these travelers, though only as a sideshow to a childhood favorite. Sun Wukong, the monkey king, had superpowers that rivaled Superman and Batman combined. Between him and Tang Sanzang, who confusingly took on the roles of both damsel in distress and overbearing guardian, it was a no-brainer. If I thought anything about the journey’s ultimate goal, to travel from China to India to retrieve the original Buddhist sutras, it was in terms of narrative tautology: Odysseus sails home to Ithaca, Captain Nemo dives 20,000 leagues under the sea and Sun Wukong and his gang walk to India for Buddhist scripture.
I barely registered that there was an actual historical personage, Tang Xuanzang, on whom Tang Sanzang was based, until I found myself facing his statue at the entrance of the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an. In his mini lecture on the monk, Stephen explained, “He made the trip because he found the existing Buddhist texts in China to be poorly translated and contradictory. He was determined to seek out the original Sanskrit in India to resolve this confusion.”
His travel conditions, to put it mildly, could not have been more different from ours. He traveled not only alone and by horse in a time of closed borders, but despite the emperor forbidding him specifically to leave. In a journey that rested on small wonders, the most miraculous was not the border guard recognizing him but, as a devout Buddhist, letting him pass anyway. It was not having accidentally spilled his water, wandering the desert for days before his horse led him to water. It was not the timely storm which convinced bandits who wanted to sacrifice him that this was not what their local deity actually wanted. The wonder is that, after making it to India, traveling the country for 14 years, filling his cup with what knowledge he sought and most of all, and making deep and lasting connections with the people there, he went back to China to share what he had found without knowing how he would be received.
After, we went to another temple, less ostentatious and well-visited than the Wild Goose Pagoda, where Tang Xuanzang was buried. A hot day, Jack used his gentle powers of persuasion to get us permission to do Strucks inside one of the cool temple halls where we processed our experiences that day.
Earlier on the bus, Shanthum disclosed that Priya, a fellow pilgrim who had joined the group only the day before, was on her way back to Singapore. As the 25 of us had already gotten a week’s head start together, she could have easily gone unnoticed. But between her jewel toned clothes, her big personality and her existing friendship with Raheem, who had been with us from the beginning, she had made her presence felt immediately. How could she already be leaving? “It’s a terrible tragedy,” Shanthum said, “but her son has just committed suicide. Raheem has gone with her for support.” This was obviously not what anybody was expecting to hear.
We went on with the regularly scheduled programming but all of us were affected. “When we went to take her to the airport, I thought maybe she is crying, maybe she is angry, I did not expect that she say, thank you. I was so surprised,” Jackie Bai, our local guide, an elegant woman with many years experience, recounted during Strucks. “She told us that although short, she really enjoy her time in China and she sincerely wants to come back. I was so touched. I could not imagine she show so much strength.” Priya had shared some of her son’s struggles with depression and difficulties adjusting to college with Shanthum and his family. Others brought up their own experiences with suicide’s fallout, including of a son and an 11-year-old granddaughter. But this was no therapy session. We did not plumb the deeper recesses of these experiences or engage in speculation about Priya’s case, neither there nor afterwards. This was something different, an acknowledgement of pain, one without resolution but also without pat answers.
The sense of wanting to find the real reason, the ultimate source for why things happen permeated the pilgrimage. Perhaps, if you travel far enough, find a nugget of truth pure enough, all confusion will be resolved, and with it, suffering. After all, isn’t that why it is called a pilgrimage, instead of a vacation or a trek? A pilgrimage suggests a spiritual journey, a desire for personal transformation because you’ve found something wanting about the existing theorems upon which you have built your life.
Spoiler: I, for one, did not become radically enlightened after this trip. Whatever effects it might have had on me are to be seen and the imagined ghosts of what I have may have missed or forgotten on the pilgrimage visit me regularly (“Did I get the full picture?” “Is that really how it happened?” “Did I encounter the ultimate truth and just fail to recognize it?”).
Some deal with the transience of travel by taking what they have found with them, literally. At the Mogao grottos, the tour guide showed us the blank space where an American archaeologist carved out panels that are now in Harvard’s safekeeping. Meanwhile, though 50,000 scrolls of priceless ancient texts were first discovered in the Library Cave, only 10,000 remain, the rest having been plundered, swindled and disappeared into other hands. Possessing knowledge is clearly not equivalent to possessing wisdom.
A Zen practice Martine guided us through many times during the pilgrimage offered a different approach. In it, we meditated on the question, “What is this?” The point was not to ask for instance, “What is this thought?” or “What is this sight?” but to ask, “What is it that thinks?” “What is it that is seeing?” It urged us to pay less attention to purely seeking answers and pay more attention to questions. Without questions, there are assumptions, habit, inertia. Questions provide the premise on which we then build the rest of our lives. Tang Xuanzang provides perhaps the strongest case for the value of seeking, independent of what was being sought. Though returning from India with original Buddhist texts was a monumental accomplishment, he also left one of the only surviving records of what he saw on the way and where he saw them. In the 19th century, his records were instrumental to rediscovering sites of incalculable historical value, including those of the Buddha’s life, death, and birth.
Ultimately, the import such places is not merely that they were thousands of years old, but that for thousands of years, they have raised questions that have compelled people to provide their own answers. These answers provoke new questions, each a product of their time and place, until questions and answers layer, obscure and reveal all at once, creating a tapestry that no one person could have planned beforehand.
The pilgrimage provided a capsule-sized version of this phenomenon. The coming together of this group of senior citizens in Northern China in the summer of 2025 brought forward answers to questions I would have never thought to ask: “Is this goat, deer and ox cart a reference to the Lotus sutra?” — Yes. “What binder did they use for the paint?” — Animal glues. “Will I come to regret the two weeks I spent with a bunch of 70-year-olds?” — Getting to know them gave me a glimpse of how different people are answering the deepest questions in life (“How did I get here?” “What does living a good life mean?”).
The idea of a single source of truth, be it the final word in Buddhist doctrine or the deeper reason for unimaginable tragedy, still enthralls me. But more and more, my mind wonders less whether we are just playing a very long game of telephone or faithfully tending to the eternal flame of wisdom, and considers that maybe instead we are engaging in conversation slowly, imperceptibly, haltingly, to create new meanings, together.
Cindy Cheng is a Taiwanese-American writer with training as a political economist. Originally from the Bay Area, she has spent the last decade living in Munich, Germany but has also previously made homes in Grenoble, France, Washington, DC, Durham, North Carolina, and Kunming, China. Her writing until now has been academic (those interested in international political economy research can check out http://cindyyawencheng.com) but she has been enjoying deepening her engagement with the creative writing space as part of her recent travel furlough.
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