Thirteen years ago, youthful optimism and curiosity carried me across time zones as I made my way to Beijing. An apartment on the tenth floor near the 5th Ring Road became my home for the next year. I arrived knowing very little Mandarin and even less about what it actually meant to live in a city of more than 20 million people. I knew there was a Great Wall to see, temples to wander through, and a history that stretched back millennia. What I didn’t know was that some of my favorite memories would happen nowhere near the places I had traveled halfway around the world to see.

Beijing is organized around a series of concentric ring roads, beginning near the historic center and expanding outward. Places like the Forbidden City occupy the heart of Beijing, and as you move toward the outer rings, the city begins to feel increasingly residential and local. I felt privileged to experience a culture and history that spanned multiple dynasties and thousands of years: walking through old hutongs, wandering through temples—my favorite was always the Temple of Heaven—and, of course, making the obligatory trip to the Great Wall.

You can hop a train from Beijing and reach the Badaling section of the wall in about an hour. What I was unaware of on my first trip was the lack of assigned seating—or, more importantly, what that meant when the gate opened. I stood dumbfounded as everyone around me suddenly sprinted toward the train. By the time I figured out what was happening, I had secured myself some lovely standing room. It was one of many early lessons in living abroad: part of the fun is realizing that your way of doing things is not the only way. Sometimes there are entirely different rules at play, and everyone else seems to know them except you.

But the Beijing I miss most isn’t the Forbidden City or even the Great Wall. It’s my small section of the city near the 5th Ring Road, where I slowly learned how to live.

I learned how to enter and exit a subway car packed beyond what I previously understood to be the physical limits of public transportation. Once, I watched a friend get lifted completely off the ground and carried out of the train by the crowd moving toward the platform. Don’t worry—she eventually found her footing and somehow made it back onto the same car. We laughed the whole way home, probably stopping at the street vendor who made wok-style noodles and cabbage on a contraption attached to his bicycle. I ate those noodles at least twice a week. At six yuan, how could I pass them up?

I also have strangely fond memories of my landlord coming over to investigate whatever minor apartment crisis had emerged. My favorite was the day he fixed our toilet with a gum wrapper. To this day, it remains one of the most impressive feats of engineering I have witnessed. That gum wrapper held for the remaining six months I lived there.

Then there was the water heater.

The flame had become considerably more aggressive than usual, and I was uncomfortable with my odds of accidentally setting a 15-story apartment building ablaze, so I shut it off and contacted the landlord. When he arrived, I relied on my extremely limited Mandarin to explain the problem. I’m fairly certain my explanation consisted mostly of repeatedly saying something approximating “BIG FIRE” while gesturing urgently toward the water heater. He laughed. I laughed. Then he went to work and returned the flame to something that looked considerably less likely to kill us all.

For all the moments when I felt completely out of my depth, what I remember most clearly is how often someone helped me find my way.

There was the security guard at the bank who helped me figure out how to pay my electric bill. In China, I had to load money onto a utility card ahead of time, and when the balance ran out, so did the electricity. I’m sure there was a way to check the balance or receive some sort of warning if you knew what you were doing. I did not. My system was much simpler: wait for the electricity to shut off, realize what had happened, and go load more money onto the card.

And then there was the family who ran a tiny store out of a first-floor window of my apartment building. I could never repay how often they helped me navigate daily life, although I certainly tried through an impressive number of Coke Zero purchases. On more than one occasion, I appeared at their window asking for help with something I couldn’t quite figure out on my own.

Perhaps the most ridiculous was the night I decided I needed Domino’s Pizza—a little taste of home. I called and pressed 2 for English, and things were going remarkably well until the person taking my order needed my address. I repeated it. I tried again. I changed my tones, hoping one combination might magically turn my Mandarin into something intelligible. When the order taker eventually asked me to draw my address, I knew I was in trouble.

So I ran downstairs to the familiar window.

Somehow, through a combination of gestures, limited language, and people who were much more patient with me than they had any obligation to be, the family got my address sorted out. The pizza arrived. I ate my Domino’s in a tenth-floor apartment near Beijing’s 5th Ring Road and celebrated another tiny victory in figuring out how to live somewhere that still felt wonderfully unfamiliar.

When I think about Beijing thirteen years later, I remember standing on the Great Wall and looking out over mountains that seemed to stretch forever. I remember the brilliant blue tiles of the Temple of Heaven and wandering through hutongs that carried centuries of history. But those aren’t the memories that make me ache to go back.

I miss six-yuan noodles cooked on the back of a bicycle. I miss laughing on an impossibly crowded subway. I miss a landlord who could apparently repair anything with whatever happened to be in his pocket. I miss walking downstairs to a little window when I couldn’t figure something out and knowing someone there would probably help me.

Living abroad taught me plenty about independence, but Beijing also taught me something about the limits of it. My little successes there never happened in isolation. I figured out how to live in Beijing because, again and again, people welcomed an outsider into the ordinary rhythms of their lives and helped her understand the rules.

For one year, in a little corner of an enormous city near the 5th Ring Road, a community adopted me.

And thirteen years later, that’s the Beijing I still miss.