Christine Gilbert

I CANNOT relate to Futian as Shenzhen’s Central Business District. I have only visited the Huaqiangbei electronics market once in my two-and-a-half-year on again, off again relationship with this city. I am more interested in the park part of Coco Park than its drink specials. The way I met this city, the way I found a strange love for it, was through its green spaces that I love to run through.

The day after I first moved to Shenzhen, I woke up at 6 a.m. and ran around Chegongmiao for 30 minutes, utilizing my jet lag to explore pale morning streets. I searched for grass, but that day found only pavement.

After a month, I discovered a route I could run to the Mangrove Nature Reserve in under 20 minutes from my apartment. The reserve, also known as Hongshulin, happens to be a national reserve, the only one in an urban area. I didn’t know any of that then. To me, Hongshulin was the outskirts of the city. It had grass and trees, and if I wanted to take my shoes off and run barefoot, I could. If I went late enough, and ran far enough, I could see the fireworks from Window of the World when I stopped to do a mid-run stretch.

Shortly after the entrance to Hongshulin, Shenzhen Bay comes into view. The path runs parallel to the water’s edge. In my adult life, I have always lived by large bodies of water. To sit at their edges brings solace to my soul. In the months and years to come after discovering that route, I have sat upon the large white rocks lining the bay at Hongshulin and let joy, anger, and grief all come out and wash away over to the onlooking shores of Hong Kong.

If I ran out the other side of my apartment in Chegongmiao, I could also reach Lianhua Hill Park in about 20 minutes. Many guides to Shenzhen list Lianhua Hill as being one of the city’s most important scenic spots. Additionally, the Ministry of Housing and Rural Development selected it as a “national major park.” None of this mattered when I began running there, though. To me, Lianhua Hill was yet another place I happened upon, and it became the place I ran with friends.

My friend Matt and I favored the park’s southeast entrance on Hongli Road. Gliding up and along the park’s crisscrossed paths, we talked about relationships, nutrition, or practiced our Chinese. We did strides in the field to the right of the entrance, hurtling towards the trees of the perimeter and the skyline of the CBD above their branches.

Opposite this field is yet another one containing gnarled trees, the vines of which hang low to the ground. Their roots rise up in loops and fantastical angles. Behind these trees, we would follow a path leading further up the hill until we would turn down another, and then another, until we eventually passed through an exit.

We ran when almost no one else was there, during midday or in the evening. The higher on the path we went, the stiller everything around us became. It was a simple blessing of peace in this ever-changing city. Fittingly, I found out later that in Chinese, Futian means “blessed fields.”

The last of my favorite parks I found while running is more of a plaza than a real park. Behind the bar section of Coco Park, on Fuhua 1st Road, lies a large square of grass, birch-like trees and red-leafed shrubs surrounded mostly by banks. If I ran there from my apartment, yet another 20-minute route, I could stop in the middle of my run and climb one of the trees. Listening to the rustle of the leaves stilled my mind and relaxed my pulse. I returned to this park to write songs, to go on midnight picnics, to think without distractions.

In Futian, I fell in love with the parks because it was within them that I could hear myself and others the most clearly. I could listen without distractions. I could return to the blessing of the fields.

Christine Gilbert is a freelance writer and former collegiate long-distance runner. She graduated with a degree in English from Concordia University in Orange County, California. Since her graduation, she has traveled the world teaching English, yoga and writing. Her work has taken her to the cafes of Shenzhen, the slums of Nairobi, and the beaches of Bali.