My best friend Sharday moved to China in 2015. We grew up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx, and her courage to take her very Uptown style and sensibilities to the other side of the world inspired me to tag along and explore Hangzhou and Shanghai with her. I had read a lot about being Black abroad. And I was curious about the version of me that would be revealed in the margins of another society. Sharday and I decided to revisit Shanghai after spending days in Hangzhou visiting temples and eating our way through any restaurant that had pictures on its menu. We booked an Airbnb and set off on a high-speed train. Once we arrived in Shanghai, we checked our email for a message from our host that we just knew would contain information for accessing the apartment. Our host informed us prior to booking that she was in California and would have one of her friends bring us the keys. We figured we would have instructions by the time we got to Shanghai (considering we arrived after 9p and had booked the room before noon). As we incessantly refreshed our inboxes in a Shanghai Starbucks, we realized the time difference between us and our host and decided that we might as well head to her apartment in hopes that she had left a note on the door for us with info on how to get in. Once getting off the metro, we had a 15-minute walk to the apartment. The main street was well lit and while many scooters passed us by, not too many people were walking. When we turned onto Xingfu Road where the apartment was, it seemed like all of the lights from the street had suddenly been disconnected and as Sharday described it, we were in Gotham City. It was dark with piles of stuff everywhere (Literally, stuff. You name it. Chairs? Yes. Clothes? Certainly. Water coolers. But of course.) To keep going in the direction of the apartment meant we would walk through clotheslines and essentially forego seeing our hands in front of our faces. Sharday stopped walking and turned around to me. "Ummm, yeah, I don't have a good feeling about this," she said. "Go with your first mind," I said, and instinctively and in unison, we turned around and headed back to the main street. Sharday took a right. "Where are we going?" I asked. "To the train station." "To go where?" "A hotel." No sooner than Sharday said that, I looked across the street and saw a sign for the Raddison hotel. Although there were several signs for the hotel along the iron gate, which spanned the street, you could easily miss it in the dark. We walked down the street to the entrance and entered a compound of villas. The hotel, situated in Shanghai's French Concession (an area once occupied by France), was distinctively European, and when we walked through the doors we were greeted by a doorman who spoke English and called us "madam." "We've had a long day," I said to Webber, the gentleman checking us in, as I reached for a couple of individually wrapped Mentos. "I can tell. You don't have a reservation," he said. We all laughed. I took two more generous handfuls of mints now that we were acquainted. Sharday and I had walked into an oasis. Everything in the lobby was immaculate and when we walked into our room, Sharday belted, "Treat yo' self 2016!" We threw on our luxurious terry cloth robes, took off our head wraps and debated opening the two bottles of wine in the room. We popped our bottles. We took pictures like we were in a Bad Boy video circa 1997. I put on my shades, posted up against the door, one foot on the marble floor and my other foot against the door, holding our wine. Sharday took the classic squat picture like a real b-girl. We ordered room service and giggled. When we were at the temple in Hangzhou a few days earlier, a Chinese man had bowed to us and said, "Beautiful." We smiled. But when we walked away, I joked, "It's about time I got some respect 'round here!” I said the same thing that night in Shanghai as I closed my robe and plopped on the bed. We went to a more affordable hotel the next day. But we have lived. Although I was an outsider in China, I felt free. There was something very liberating about not being on guard — the type of on guard caused by that special brand of U.S. racism. People were mostly unfazed by me, and in that pleasant disregard, in the margins of that society, I felt free. P.S. Sharday made me promise never to share the hotel pics. I agreed, but we might have to talk about the statute of limitations.