One of my most defining memories was when I was in China with my family. I was like 9 or 10 years old. My dad had business in Shanghai and took me and my mom with him. We stayed in nice, western hotels but my dad wanted to get the full experience so we ventured out for a few weeks before we went home. We did one of those things only white people do, and we rented a boat and hired a local to take us on a trip down the Yangtze near Wuhan I believe. I remember very vividly seeing dead fish floating on the surface of the river surrounded by bubbly, brown, disgusting-looking and awfully-smelling water. There were people collecting the fish and putting them in brightly colored plastic barrels in their boats, by the thousands. The ghetto tour guide dude we were with explained to us that they would sell those fish for food. It didn't matter how old the fish were, they could at the very least sell the fish to a fish oil plant.

Also, what I remember the most was just smelling shit wherever we went. There were some parts of the area of China we visited that were really clean and modern but we'd often end up in really impoverished parts where the only thing you could smell was human shit, pervading everything. My mom complained the whole time (as she often does), I remember, but I also remember my dad giving us little pep talks, like "this is how a lot of people in the world live, soak it up, experience it. This is a great learning opportunity! China will be the most powerful country in the world some day and this is what they will have come from".

This trip to China was my first brush with the real world and I remember it more vividly than anything else that happened around that time in my life.