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Hannah came to Hangzhou because of a snake. While researching Chinese ghost stories for her college thesis in Iowa, she discovered the legend of Madam White Snake, a shape-shifting spirit whose story is tied to Hangzhou’s West Lake, Broken Bridge, and Leifeng Pagoda.
The legend helped draw Hannah to China after graduation. But when she arrived at 22, she found a modern city filled with factories, high-rise apartments, crowded buses, concrete walkways, shopping centres, escalators, and millions of people.
Years later, Hannah wrote In Search of White Snake, a creative nonfiction essay about Chinese mythology, culture shock, disillusionment, vulnerability, and the gap between the life we imagine abroad and the one we actually find.
What happens when the place that inspired your move doesn’t look anything like the story that brought you there?
Original publication date: November 26, 2018
Links:
Hannah: https://hannahlund.com/
In Search of White Snake https://www.shanghailiterary.com/tslr-online-collection/2018/12/31/in-search-of-white-snake
In this episode
- Hannah reads In Search of White Snake and explains how Chinese mythology drew her to Hangzhou
- Moving from Minnesota to China at 22 and discovering a modern city instead of the mystical place she imagined
- Visiting West Lake, Broken Bridge, Leifeng Pagoda, and Hangzhou Zoo in search of traces of Madam White Snake
- The gap between romanticizing a place and learning to live with its everyday reality
- How culture shock, mistakes, and asking for help changed Hannah’s idea of independence
- Learning Mandarin, misunderstanding strangers, and becoming more comfortable with embarrassment
- The pressure to “live the dream” abroad while friends built careers back home
- Recognizing Orientalist assumptions and the problem with treating China as one uniform culture
- How editing revealed the deeper coming-of-age story inside Hannah’s essay
- Moving from Hangzhou to Shanghai and building a life around writing, editing, translation, and literary community
- Chinese ghost stories, strange spirits, haunted writers, and the stories that still shape Hannah’s imagination
About Hannah
Hannah is originally from Minnesota in the United States. She studied at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she researched Chinese mythology and ghost stories.
After graduating, she moved to Hangzhou in September 2012. She taught English and later completed graduate study at Zhejiang University in Chinese.
Hannah lived in Hangzhou on and off for approximately six years before moving to Shanghai, where she studied comparative literature, worked as an editor at Sixth Tone, and became involved in literary, poetry, writing, and translation communities.
Her essay In Search of White Snake was published in the Shanghai Literary Review’s special edition, Concrete.
From Mythical Hangzhou to Modern China
Before arriving, Hannah imagined Hangzhou as ancient, poetic, quiet, and mysterious. She pictured willow trees, pagodas, spirits, and traces of mythology around West Lake.
Instead, she moved to Xiasha, an industrial area filled with factories, apartment towers, shopping centres, and crowded streets.
Her visits to West Lake and Leifeng Pagoda challenged the version of Hangzhou she had created. The pagoda connected with Madam White Snake’s imprisonment had escalators, tourist displays, and reconstructed foundations beneath glass.
From a distance, it looked like part of a legend. Up close, it felt like a memorial.
Learning to Work With Failure
Hannah arrived in China seeing herself as fiercely independent. She believed she should solve problems alone, remain in control, and avoid appearing vulnerable.
Living abroad gradually changed that.
She got lost, misunderstood strangers, struggled through classes, and discovered that her Mandarin listening skills weren’t as strong as she believed.
In one memorable moment, a man tried to warn her about a crack in the pavement. Hannah assumed he was asking where she came from, answered “I’m American,” and then tripped over it.
She eventually began using the phrase “work with the failure.”
Instead of treating every mistake as evidence that she was incapable, she learned to laugh, ask for help, and accept that not every difficult experience needed to become a triumph or poetic lesson.
Writing, Transformation, and Madam White Snake
Hannah came to see a connection between herself and Madam White Snake.
Both left a familiar world, entered a place with different rules, and changed through the experience.
The transformation Hannah experienced wasn’t the glamorous adventure she had imagined at 22. It happened through buses, classrooms, mistakes, friendships, language learning, writing, and ordinary daily life.
The essay’s discarded snakeskin became a metaphor for the identity she had outgrown.
Hannah never found Madam White Snake in the form she expected. Instead, she found her throughout Hangzhou in stories, performances, postcards, tourism, public memory, and her own transformation.
The legend didn’t lead Hannah to the city she imagined.
It led her to the life she needed to live.
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