Which City on Earth Do I Love Most?

“Which city on Earth do I love most?” I put down my phone, gently close my eyes, and ask myself. If it’s a question of love, I have to go with my first instinct. I try to melt into the darkness of the room, the better to catch the images rising from deep in my memory. Little by little, a street scene, mostly gray and green, appears on the black curtain: the gray is a six-lane, two-way asphalt road and the bike lane running alongside it, and the green is the dawn redwoods growing in the median strip. At this moment I am standing on the sidewalk, level with the bike lane; the paving stones under my feet are about fifty centimeters square, their texture and color exactly like polished granite in Minecraft. These stones don’t meet the asphalt of the bike lane directly; instead, a band of smooth, polished gray tiles traces the outline of the border between them. I lift my gaze from the ground to eye level and look toward the far end of this tree-lined avenue—the densely planted dawn redwoods on its left and the low buildings on its right seem to stretch all the way to the distant horizon, drawing ever closer to each other, forming a perfect perspective drawing. In the gusts of the howling north wind, the dawn redwoods bend and bow like dominoes, yet no one can see where the first domino fell—the end of the road seems to be the very source of this north wind, the whole of my life.

So is this road really the whole world? No, it isn’t. It’s just a perfectly ordinary north–south road in Nanjing. Why would this ordinary road be the first thing to surface from my memory? The answer is obvious—this is where I lived for the first ten-odd years of my life; it was the center of my world. Its plainness and quiet may be the very silhouette of those ten-odd years—repetitive, peaceful, simple, beautiful. My elementary school is on this road; walk south, then turn west onto Zhujiang Road, and in no time you reach my middle school and high school.

The answer to the question is now clear to me—Nanjing. But obviously Nanjing is more than this one road: the seven-lane, two-way Jiangdong Middle Road hasn’t surfaced; the “Zhongshan” roads shaded by the plane trees that are Nanjing’s emblem haven’t surfaced, and neither has No. 2 Road at Nanjing University of Science and Technology; not even Changjiang Road, another road just like it that I passed along every day in high school, has surfaced.

Can this road of mine stand for Nanjing? No, it can’t. Any outsider who comes to Nanjing has to visit the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, the Confucius Temple, Yuejiang Tower, the Presidential Palace, and the Ming Palace ruins, or at the very least take a stroll around Xinjiekou. Nanjing’s depth comes from thousands of years of history: it is “the Ancient Capital of Six Dynasties,” and it was also the center of the Republic of China. Nanjing’s landmark is Zifeng Tower; the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, our first road-and-rail bridge designed and built on our own, is a bold stroke of thick ink in the industrial history of the People’s Republic. When we talk about Nanjing, we know it’s the capital of Jiangsu Province, and that the High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University is the best high school in Jiangsu (is it, though?). This city is not a thin patch outlined by curves on a map; it is three-dimensional, with historical depth, cultural depth, and depth along many other dimensions. But at this very instant, for me, all that depth turns out to be equal to zero.

I can’t see its long history—only the crumbling Ming Palace ruins and the Ming city wall. I can’t feel the so-called charm of the Republican era—only the slowly fading 1912 district and that tourist hotspot, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. I can’t hear the crowds cheering when the Yangtze River Bridge was completed—only the radio saying the road surface will be under repair for a year and the Fifth Bridge is still under construction. All of this about Nanjing is, to me, just a thin surface layer. But my life in Nanjing unfolded along the dimension of time; it “has a history.” I’ve been to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Xuanwu Lake, and Yuejiang Tower, but not the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Xuanwu Lake, and Yuejiang Tower other people see—they belong to me. The Nanjing I know is the intersection of the city and my life here; as for whatever lies outside my life, the probability of it surfacing in my memory is zero.

For xjh, maybe No. 2 Road at Nanjing University of Science and Technology would be the first to surface, and with it, surely, that grove of dawn redwoods and that sea of February orchids—maybe even the playful silhouettes of flocking magpies.

So that’s how it is.

I’ve finally figured out why Nanjing is my favorite city.

Finally, since I’ve just learned probability theory, I can use Bayes’ formula to calculate the probability that the answer to this question is Nanjing: P{the city is Nanjing | a beautiful fragment of life in some city surfaces in memory}=P{memories of life in Nanjing are beautiful|the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Nanjing}*P{the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Nanjing}/(P{memories of life in Nanjing are beautiful|the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Nanjing}*P{the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Nanjing}+ P{memories of life in Montreal are beautiful|the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Montreal}*P{the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Montreal}+ P{memories of life in Shaoxing are beautiful|the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Shaoxing}*P{the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Shaoxing}+……)

Since I lived in Nanjing for a long time and spent the happy days of my childhood there

therefore

P{the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Nanjing}

and

P{memories of life in Nanjing are beautiful|the fragment surfacing in memory is set in Nanjing} are both large—much larger than for any other city

So the probability that the answer to this question is Nanjing is pretty high.