Nihao in Afrotopia by Ruella Che
This essay was listed as a notable mention in Best American Essays 2025 and was originally published in Epiphany issue 33: Fall/Winter 2024. Check out other pieces from the issue, or buy a digital copy.
Every day for eight years the adults would drive me through the Arcades roundabout in Lusaka, Zambia, shuttling me between the gated campus of my international school and my gated house. I would sit in the backseat of our ancient, sometimes functioning silver Toyota Prado, a car perpetually caked with dirt-road grime and dried mud-brown raindrops. More often than not, the windows were left rolled up. On the occasions that air was allowed to breeze through an opening, I would find myself gripping my phone tightly, the echo of Mum’s friends’ voices ringing in my ear about how lao hei—the “old blacks”—were only smart when they were stealing but not when they were working. Beyond the tempered glass, kids in loose, dirt-crusted clothes roamed a little green patch at the center of the roundabout, knocking at car windows and asking passersby for spare change. Sometimes when they saw us they would bare white-toothed smiles and shout “China! China!” I could never tell whether they were enthusiastic or mocking. At some point, they must have been the same age as me. I had been conditioned to ignore them.
Gazing through the window, I often thought of Lusaka as a big, fat mess of a city. Although the iconic Findeco House stood tall as the city’s only skyscraper, this shiny, many-windowed Popsicle was obviously out of place. The rest of the city was an organized chaos always at the mercy of creative destruction: one craft market was renovated while another was demolished to build a fancy shopping mall; one ntemba stand closed up only to be replaced by another. An upcoming franchise hotel near the roundabout once advertised a sign that proclaimed “Coming to you in 2010!” which was eventually peeled off and replaced by “2011” and, later, “2012.”
Amid the chaos, I liked to watch the city move past me from the safety of the Prado: the street-side vegetable markets with roasted corn cobs; the minibuses opening their doors to receive passengers before their wheels stopped moving; the men in colored traffic vests walking onto busy streets and delivering cheap snacks and telephone credit slips right to your car window. They all had to keep moving, keep contesting the undulations of the urban fabric, and keep finding a place to earn their keep, even if it meant that they had to shove their faces in front of yours through the window glass and shout, “This one twenty kwacha only, very fresh, Madam!”
I often wondered what lay behind those faces, beneath those everyday tactics of pushing their way through with such confidence. Compared to them, I must’ve been so passive. I never had to fight for a place in the city. Instead, the seat in that grimy Prado was handed to me on a generational silver platter, one that has always been a little too clunky, claiming too many half-homes and weighing heavy with contradiction. Sometimes I imagine that the mirrorlike reflections on its shiny metal exterior gleam crookedly, refracting only stretched strands of truth about the people it encounters, distorting the faces shoved at the car window and pulling them long. These were the faces that had once zoomed past me every day, faces bearing stories that ache to be told.
Among the warped faces, I would vaguely make out an old picture that captured the rare occasion of my family donning photo smiles on a safari holiday, posing in front of that same pockmarked Prado. A photograph bearing stories that ache, too, to be told. It tickles a voice inside my head, small but compelling, urging me to begin finding my place by feather-dusting memories of my Zambian adolescence from the distance of my Singaporean air-conditioned room.
Today, as I crouch over my laptop in an apartment rented in my own name and paid for with my own money, in an island nation whose night skies are perpetually polluted by skyscrapers and artificial light, I begin my feather-dusting with the Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr’s Afrotopia. Sarr urges that only after creating one’s own metaphors from the seeds of Africa’s past and present and using them to sow utopian futures, after rethinking Africa’s own lived experiences, cultural/spiritual needs, and conceptions of progress, can we truly begin to create better realities. One must understand his home before he can understand how to make it more of a home. A way to start that process, as many young African writers have done, is to embark on “the search of oneself, hybridity, individuation, and inner freedom” in their own experience of Africa.
Yet with the striking red of my Singaporean passport, who am I to talk of Africa? I can only start small with my search: our rented house on Lufubu Road, my family’s least impermanent residence in Lusaka and my home of five years. In it were the cream-colored rooms, the dusty yard, and the construction materials piled at the corner by the wall because Dad couldn’t afford a real office. On a particularly hopeful day, Mum had hung a rainbow hammock and a wooden swing from the one tree big enough to hold them, hoping to create a nice little outdoor spot. The unmanaged brown dust in the yard meant that they became soiled within a matter of days, so much so that an attempt to clean them would not have been worthwhile. When rain came, the hammock would drip sand-colored water.
The hammock stayed there until we moved out of that house; Mum never got around to taking it down.
“Your Dad grew up poor,” Mum would remind us. “That’s why he doesn’t care about these things. If I weren’t here the house would be filthy.” I grew up watching the little compromises my mother made, trying at first to scrub our shoes immediately whenever the yellow-brown dust of the outside world stained them, then realizing that it wasn’t worth doing several times a day; staying in because there was often only one semi-functioning car to go around and Dad needed it for work; and the hammock, a little flag of hope for a happier life to be found within the walls of our four cement-brick yard.
It was here, behind the bedroom window that attracted rainbow-tinted six-inch lizards, that I had excitedly texted school friends about who had a crush on who, immersed myself in the contents of cheesy young adult novels, and tortured my family’s ears with my rosin-caked violin.
That “happier life” remained beyond our grasp, but I would like to think that roots had nonetheless been growing in a little corner of that dusty yard, memories good and bad alike spreading in the rust-colored dirt. Even as the rainy season left a scatter of dead inswas—flying termites—on the wooden floors in the morning, and the mismatched furniture made Mum disinclined to allow visitors, there was something about those metal cabinets, the perpetually empty swing, and my wooden bookshelf–bunk bed combo with the planks that would keep misaligning underneath my mattress—something about these details felt right, because what else did I know?
I could say that this house was my home. So were the other spots that we hopped through as we relentlessly retraced our patterns across the fabric of the city. We would jump into the car and blip like magic to the next spot: the house, the international school, the expat-oriented malls, the gated Chinese restaurants. It had to be home, because Dad worked so hard just so that we could zip through the city in our Prado, to these fenced-off spaces carved for our middle-class belonging, so that we could remind ourselves of that Chinese dream of hard work bringing upward mobility. It was not just that Dad was lucky to jump on the wagon of free university education in 1980s China, the story goes. No, he studied hard day and night from humble beginnings, leaving his little Chinese countryside town to earn a spot in a top university in Shanghai, where he met my mother, to become the engineer who moved first to Singapore to work for someone else and then to Africa to start his own (struggling) construction company, dreaming of giving his family the luxury he never had. We lived a privileged life in Lusaka, truly, with our unique mix of luxuries and discomforts, luxuries that my father’s own adolescence did not contain. And since all I knew of everyday adolescence was the one I had lived in Lusaka, it had to—has to—be home.
Yet the yellow of my skin suggests otherwise. Through the closed car window, we often received repetitive, piercing shouts of “Nihao! Nihao!” from passersby, or a nasal jibe of “Ching chong, China!” etching its way onto our young brains. My older sister’s reaction was often the most indignant. Her response was almost always a prepared arch of a hissing cat’s back, a smart retort hanging on the lips but never quite coming out. It would be an attempt to speak out on the instinct that some form of prejudice had been wrongly applied to us, a feeling that we didn't quite understand how to substantiate behind the tempered windows of our Prado and the broken glass shards that topped the walls surrounding our yard.
Mum often beamed with pride when she told her Chinese friends that she would shout back “Zambia! Zambia!” in these moments, and the name-callers would be visibly taken aback before giggling in response as our car passed them by.
It was strange to hear these Chinese friends tell their kids not to play unsupervised in the yard because there were Black people outside, Black people who were often gardeners or drivers working for them. Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense. Even if Mum and Dad, with their educated, somewhat Singapore-trained English abilities, cringed with me at the sight of these interactions, and even if they never said such blatantly discriminatory things, a similar tinge of distrust was apparent between them and the Black workers they interacted with.
We could boil it down to a lack of commonality—that, race aside, there was no binding glue to form a community with the locals. But “locals” wasn’t a singular concept. We also encountered Zambian teachers and parents in our international school, or Zambian businessmen, of widely varying levels of socioeconomic standing. Perhaps I do not remember correctly, but my parents had not made Black friends within a decade of living there, had they? They preferred those who also struggled to end their words on consonants, who rolled their own dumpling skins, who on Lunar New Year’s Eve watched the China Central Television countdown on the TV after rushing home from work. They were not the only ones; other expats, regardless of their origin, had the habit of flocking together among themselves too.
Bearing witness to prejudiced comments by those who share my skin color has often left a bitter taste in the mouth, but I admit that sometimes, as I sat sealed inside the Prado, I could see why they saw things this way. It wasn’t just the problem of not being Black. It was also the problem of being Chinese. A mutual frustration simmered on both sides. The divide was always clear to me growing up, a thorny truth bubbling in the melting pot and rising further with the increase in Chinese immigration through the years. It has become normal to Dad and his Chinese friends that getting a driver’s license in Zambia requires bribing. With our skin, they say, one little mistake in a driver’s test means an instant “fail.” That way, they get more money out of you. “They think all the Chinese people here are so rich,” Dad would say. “They think our money falls from the sky.”
As much as I wish to extend empathy for the experiences of both “my people” and “the locals,” to rise above that divide, I sometimes wonder if my hope that my parents will venture more outside their cultural comfort zone is a dead end. Not with their frustrating experiences, which they found easy to tie to race. Not when they didn’t grow up, as I did, in a learning environment where coexistence and camaraderie was almost never in question on account of race. I did, of course, get the occasional teacher who assumed that I couldn’t speak English, or the occasional kid who insisted that the only other East Asian in my class had to be my brother, but race was only one part of how I was seen and understood. With the benefit of my Singapore-grown English, which eventually morphed into some Zambian-American-British-who-knows-what blend of a neutralized accent, my most fluent tongue was our common one, which was lucky enough for me.
With that common tongue, I grew up eating Uma’s home-cooked bite-sized idli, taking turns dipping it into her little purple Tupperware of curry every break time; watching Hanna dye her thin yellow hair black because it felt more natural to her; and furrowing my eyebrows as Priyanka, who has local and British and Indian roots, wondered out loud when she would start to see people like her on TV. Diversity wasn’t a buzzword for us but a reality, and it instilled in me a possibility that, instead of creating arbitrary in-groups or out-groups to dictate our daily social lives, we can choose to assess a person not by facts they cannot control but by their character: to accept, adapt, and accommodate.
Perhaps my parents’ efforts to adapt were revealed in other ways. As a by-product of Singapore and Zambia sharing a history of British colonization, they had already adopted Christianity as their faith before moving there, and sometimes used this as a common ground for negotiating everyday conflicts. They savored the ready-made supermarket meals of soft, warm nshima cornmeal, kapenta fish, and spinach, especially on days when the power would go out and it was a pain to cook. There was also the too dry ShopRite strawberry jam Swiss roll topped with raw-sugar grains that Dad always used to buy, because he liked it, and because at the height of my growth spurts he always caught me munching on it. He would pop his head into my room when he reached home, hold it up to me, and say in English, “Your favolite Swiss loll!” He had adopted a non-distinction between his l’s and r’s, characteristic of a Zambian accent.
On occasion, we would walk through town to run some errands or go thrift shopping at the salaula—in local town, with its street-side stalls wrestling for space against car and pedestrian traffic, not the expat malls with their double-decker parking lots. As we prepared for the trip, Mum would grin as she copied what she had seen local women do: stuff a little emergency cash in her bra so that it wouldn’t be stolen.
Despite my family’s efforts, the truth is that our social circles—like my diverse international school—still denoted a certain socioeconomic standing in Lusaka. Among and beyond us, did there not exist another in-group and out-group dichotomy, bordered by our school’s fences? And didn’t most of us contribute to the brain drain, finding higher education elsewhere after graduating?
Who would want to give up their privilege so easily? I wouldn’t. I like the comfort of the Zambian Prado, the Singaporean air conditioner.
Zambia’s power cuts had been particularly ruthless during my last return, a month-long visit shortly before the global pandemic. I was still a university student then. We would sit at our candlelit bar-top dinner table, having our nightly meal accompanied by a symphony of mosquitoes. Dad didn’t think it worthwhile to invest in a power generator—it was too expensive. Instead, he would call our family ritual “the romantic candlelit dinner” in Chinese, his slowly loosening rabbit teeth jutting out through his lopsided smile.
I remember one dinner conversation that made me unforgettably aware of the guilt I felt at my entitlement and my fear of losing it. I had always wondered why Dad loved talking about his business plans so much, but one simple thing he said to me that day explained it: “You are my children, you will never be poor.”
As he continued on about the prices of land and the profits from projects he could sign on to, I asked how much his workers were being paid. I found myself staring emptily into the little orange flames as he matter-of-factly relayed the standard wage for a driver in Lusaka, and the even lower one for a domestic worker. “Of course”, he had said, when prompted, “I will give them a raise if they do their job well, they just so rarely do.”
Could utopian imaginaries like Sarr’s Afrotopia be enough to provide a good living for local workers, when foreigners come in for the profit, use the cheap services while disliking the locals’ “untrustworthy” behavior, and then retire to a foreign future elsewhere? On the other hand, could I, a direct beneficiary, chastise my father for using how the world works to his advantage, for working hard from humble roots to get here, so that he could provide for his children? How could I overlook his contributions to Zambia’s development, douse his pride when he pointed to buildings we zoomed past on our Prado and tell me, “Look, I built that”? Who determines whether we call it development and progress or exploitation and neocolonialism?
It is a difficult exercise to ask myself whether I am complicit in some form of neocolonialism, because to apply the term instantly gives the situation a distinctly pejorative political flavor, and places me in conversation with the violence that America and other Western nations have themselves enacted and continue to enact in the name of foreign intervention. In this case, it also plays to the cynicism that American politicians and the media may, quite hypocritically, harbor toward Chinese state interests and, by extension,toward Chinese people.
Geopolitics aside, however, I find it facetious, perhaps arrogant even, to place my dad’s work in his privately owned small business in the same arena as the big corporations founded by former Western colonial powers, which Sarr calls agents of “economic re-colonisation,” or the Chinese state-owned companies that he claims are engaged in providing “a bit of infrastructure in exchange for… colonizing [Africa’s] lands.” In Dad’s bid to make more from less within his own lifetime, is his work truly more exploitative than expat investors maximizing their gains with Singapore’s low tax rates; or low-income international students moving to America to receive higher education and start their own for-profit enterprises?
I hope that I’m not devolving into a debate arguing the scale of damage we may each do, or encouraging the zero-sum logic that to want for more is necessarily to cause others to have less. I do not wish to simply justify away the difficult nuances of my family’s position and attitudes toward local workers, and I wonder where my instinct to defend them comes from. Is it simply my conscience, trying to narrativize my guilt into some form of moral consistency? Or is it perhaps tied to my fear that you, my reader, will try to provide yourself with a simple answer to my questions when, increasingly, I’m beginning to believe that there may not be one?
Perhaps the guilt I feel is somewhat patronizing, too, if African governments like Zambia themselves consent to or encourage Chinese state or private investment in their infrastructure. Yet beyond state-level relations, I cannot so easily blame the day-to-day Chinese-African tensions I’ve observed on the pervasive influence of Western media either. Where does that leave us? And what use is there, truly, for my self-centered guilt? How do we move forward?
Dad had taught me how to drive during that visit. As I jolted the car forward on an empty road, he declared his desire to live out his life in Zambia, unlike the many transient expats we knew. He spoke emotively of Zambia’s expansive natural beauty—the trees and the sheer space and the exciting wilderness—and of the opportunity, which you would never find in land-scarce Singapore, to make money, and of his dreams of running a farm alongside his construction business. When I nudged him about retirement plans, he opined that Zambia could soon develop such good healthcare facilities that he wouldn’t need to leave at all, even as his body deteriorated. That perhaps one day Singaporeans would fly to Zambia to retire.
While not blind to his stubborn idealism, part of me echoes this desire to share Zambia in all its beauty and chaos, to coexist, to grow rooted in it. Perhaps the best we can do is hope that as long as we keep imagining better utopias and kinder realities, we’ll inch closer and closer to reaching them. Hadn’t Mum and Dad packed their lives up and moved here, to this land teeming with growth, dreaming, too, of a better life?
Why, then, was it the unquestioned goal of their children to leave, to find “better education” and a “better future” elsewhere?
During a visit to America, my sister drove me five hours from the Chicago airport to small-town Indiana. She had just finished four years at a liberal arts college there and was renting a little room in a big three-story house while searching for a job.
On the ride, I asked what home meant to her. She paused for a long while, staring blankly at the highway, before admitting that the first image that appeared in her head was the house on Lufubu Road.
“So is that home?” I asked.
She took a few more seconds, tapping her index finger on the steering wheel, before answering. “No,” she said. “It came to mind because I spent my most formative years there, but it can never be home. We’re not Black. We’ll always stick out.”
“Then what,” I prodded. Singapore?
“Not that either… And definitely not here.” She paused. “Yeah, I don’t know.”
I pressed on. “Do you see any sort of future there, in Lusaka?”
“Does anyone, really?” She turned her head briefly to frown at me. “Rich countries still exploit the natural resources of poor countries and destabilize them, keep them poor, just so that they can get richer off them. Zambia is just one of the unlucky ones. It’s a whole global system of oppression, and it’s fucked up.”
With that, she refocused her eyes on the highway.
I sighed in that moment, because I didn’t have a solution to that, and because I realized that her American higher education and her own sense of self had given her a different way of processing her upbringing, some but not all of which overlapped with mine. I didn’t think hers was untrue. It was practical, pessimistic, and quite definitely not naïve.
When we arrived, I unpacked onto a small corner of her clothes-strewn, dusty floor, so foreign to me yet so familiar to someone so familiar to me. A damp, musty scent wafted from the carpet and mixed with trails of cigarette smoke, which seeped in from neighboring rooms. “Keep your shoes on,” she had said, contrary to our childhood habit of leaving them at the door. “I wouldn’t trust the carpets here.”
We called our parents to let them know that I had arrived. They dialed in from Lusaka’s Sugar Bush Farm, and on the shared laptop screen we watched our little brothers laughing and circling the playground in the background of the video call.
The image triggered a memory for my sister, one that I didn’t immediately recall. We, too, had once giggled down the bright blue slide of that same playground in our preteen years, under the stare of a Zambian boy not much younger than us, his eyes following our movements: up the ladder, down the slide, up the ladder, down the slide. His hand had reached for the ladder when his shy eyes met my sister’s: “Can we be friends? Will Chinese people be our friends?”
“Yes, of course,” she had responded. “Just like that, we are friends.”
And we took turns laughing down the slide.
This moment had always stayed with her, she told us. How strange it was to her that the boy felt that he had to ask—of course we could be friends. What struck me then was how automatic it was for her to see humanity in the same people whose futures she couldn’t envision. I didn’t say that out loud, however. Instead, I said something to the effect of how poignant it was that something as simple as a child’s curiosity had bridged an invisible barrier between both sides.
“Hmm, that’s nice,” Mum had said, nodding.
I sit here in my air-conditioned room, painfully aware of this privilege that I have, to clack my fingers upon a laptop keyboard and write as I do—perhaps this is my search for myself, my hybridity, and my inner freedom. Like Sarr carving his Afrotopia, I am carving my path with the act of exploring my history and my metaphors, in all its thorny truths and vulnerabilities to romanticization. I belong because Dad worked hard to give me the luxury of sitting in the backseat of the old Prado, because of my familiarity with mosquito-ridden candlelit dinners, and because amid all the contradictions and tensions, I try to empathize. And that’s not the full story—it can’t be so neat. I know I don’t deserve to belong in that Prado circling that city any more than those kids on the roundabout, whose stories I regret that I’m unable to tell. I know I will always receive stares on those streets, and that there is no way for my guilt to fully settle into non-contradiction. I also know that my sense of belonging, my “home” in Lusaka, is always going to be a little distorted, like the reflections on that clunky silver platter: I can never quite definitively stake a claim to Zambia, never quite fully conjoin the metaphors of my history with Zambia’s.
Yet Zambia is not a monolith in itself. My story varies from my sister’s, despite the similarities of age, race, and class, and despite being raised in the same family. Within Zambia’s history lies a vast plain that I have barely begun to step into, of which mine embodies but one blade of grass.
Quite simply, I do not think that there is any singular answer to most of my questions, any more than there is a singular narrative of Zambia. The most important question, then, is what to do with that fact, given that mine is a story that nonetheless remains tangential to the stories of local citizens who imagine their own Afrotopia and stake their claim. Is it even possible for me to imagine my future in a space where another world lives and envisions its own, without me? Is it fair to ask permission to be included in this vision, when I can just as well escape back to a Chinese-dominated Singapore, with its own set of racial tensions, and envision my own future without them?
And is that the future I want?
Shakily, I grasp the steering wheel in my hands, no longer in the Prado but in a smaller, more beginner-friendly, and equally mud-caked car. Instead of an empty road on the outskirts of Lusaka that Dad had brought me to, I am in the thick of a Cairo Road jam in the dry December heat. My mind is trying hard to picture the road ahead, partially obscured by cars before and beside me. I am vaguely aware that I’m looking for a shop in town, so I roll down the window and wave over a guy in a red Airtel vest to ask for permission—I mean, directions. His face begins to pull long. He seems confused about my reason for asking him, but grins and shoves a packet of Simba chips into my hands. I blink, accept the situation, and give him the fifty kwacha that he asks for. After thanking him, I turn to see my sister in the front passenger seat and my parents in the back. Mum and Dad hold a packet of cling-wrap nshima from the supermarket and a container with spring-onion pork noodles from the Chinese market, ready to shove a bite of each into my mouth. I oblige, trying to keep both bites from falling out. I have never thought of the possibility of combining them before, but they blend well. As my eyes shift back to the road ahead, watching the car in front of me inch forward while keeping an eye on my rearview mirrors, I shiver. I shiver under the blanket, and, in a half-conscious state, discover that my body lies in the cold of my air-conditioned Singapore room. My eyes open to the ceiling, and I find that my forehead is in knots. I realize that I’ve been waiting to return, on my own terms.
Ruella Che is an urban researcher and writer currently living in France. She is particularly interested in transnational stories that explore everyday life. Home for her is situated between Singapore and Lusaka, Zambia.
