The Accidental Exile: Stories of Cities, Strangers, and Silence – Details, episodes & analysis

In Shanghai’s M50 art district, I wandered into another world. In a city of 28 million souls, she was a still point: a living work of art who spoke of life, creativity, and eternity. We drank blue flower tea, sketched without words, meditated in a room filled with dreams. And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she was gone — her studio vanished like a myth, leaving only memory and the scent of incense behind. Lotus is a story about fleeting encounters, lost worlds, and the strange timelessness we sometimes glimpse inside the noise of modern life.

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After 14 days of quarantine-induced cabin fever, I found myself in a surreal banquet hall being serenaded by a Chinese billionaire — and before I knew it, I was reciting Rudyard Kipling’s If to a room of powerful men, expensive wine in hand and the weight of global history echoing through the silence. This is Part 2 of my encounter with the enigmatic Chairman — a man who survived starvation, rose through the Communist Party ranks, and now controls vast swathes of China’s new empire. From £2000 bottles of vintage brandy to patriotic karaoke, from gaudy carpets to geopolitical nuance, this is the bizarre reality of foreign design work in a country racing toward the future.

✴️ What you’ll experience in this episode: The hidden rituals of business in modern China A poetic showdown of empire and memory Brandy, billionaires, and bewilderment Why the Chinese love Britishness (but not Britain) The moment you become both useful... and expendable

🗺 Part of The Accidental Exile — a series of illustrated stories from inside the beautiful, baffling machinery of modern China.

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I’m exploring different ways of defining the book - first with artworks and now with readings which can be found here and on YouTube. I love reading to people so this seemed an obvious choice but I soon got tangled in a world of technical complexity which was not fun but may be part of a learning curve. I was, however, surprised to find myself enjoying ‘clip farming’ these longer form videos, that is: selecting one or two lines of the audio and making 10-15 seconds shorts for social media (Instagram reels, tik tok, and YouTube Shorts). This had the effect of forcing me to come up with ideas for imagery, whether using my photos and video of the actual event, creating new illustrations or generating imagery with AI. It has caused me to approach the creation of illustrations for the book in a different way, causing me to come up with ideas on the fly and execute them rapidly. I end up with illustrations for a printed version of the book…but not in a way that I had anticipated - which makes me look at the relationship between words and images in a different manner to how I may have done it in the past.

You can watch it here on Substack or via my YouTube channel below. The ‘clip farmed shorts’ become their own ‘thing’ and can be found on my other platforms and in Substack Notes (if I remember to post them there) but this brings me to another realisation: Substack works as a repository for texts (entire books and essays), illustrations and video. No other platform (that I can think of) allows creators to do that… so it provides a means of archiving multi-media projects as they unfold. Thank you Substack !

As the days pass there is an absence of talk about the place I have left behind. There is only here. There is only now. China does this in a way I have not experienced elsewhere. The fabric of my life, the culture that makes up ‘who I am’ is starting to fade in my rear-view mirror. This is the paradoxical way in which China is absorbing me, at once I am disconnected and alien but at the same time I am being enfolded into this breathless state of now.

From a selfie taken In the back of a taxi in Hangzhou, China.

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I found my way an art studio in the M50 art district of Shanghai and there she was... Lotus. I instinctively took off my shoes and stepped into another world, far away from the hubbub of the seething city of 28 million people outside. Lotus emerged, draped in a gown of her own design and invited me to tea. She poured blue flower tea into tiny cups, surrounded by her astonishing art.

The atmosphere in her studio was electric but soothing and she spoke in halting English of her vision of ‘life as art’. Myself, being useless at flirting, pontificated on the mythology and healing properties of the Silver Birch Tree and we communicated mostly by sketches and doodles. I felt a calm that I hadn’t experienced elsewhere in my stay here. She turned the lights down, curious Mongolian nose flute music (or some such thing) echoed around the room, and we meditated for a while. She projected images of herself, naked, covered in body paint, onto the walls around us. Note: If you think this was a ‘come hither’ moment then you might be mistaken, artists do this sort of thing. I drifted off into a cat-like doze until I came back to my senses wondering if it had all been a chapter in a novel. I bid her goodbye after gifting her with drawings of the Goddess Guan Yin and a few sketches of herself. She responded with a gift of tea from her ‘master Buddha type person’ in Tibet, some rare hand-made incense, and a strange and beautiful brass tool for hacking the rock-solid tea apart. When I found myself back on the street, navigating the intensely energetic metropolis that is Shanghai the thought occurred to me that this moment could have happened at any time in the past 1000 years. I could have been a traveller in the time of Marco Polo and it would have been almost the same (with the exception of the video projections of her beautiful bum 15 feet across on the studio wall). But she was, she is eternal. She has always existed, at any point in time and space. And, of course, her last words to me were, “Your blue eyes, so deep, they hold so many secrets”. And with that, I disappeared into the night.

When I returned there on a whim she was gone. Her studio had gone. As with the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon she had perhaps returned, along with her studio, to the endless realms of eternity, only to pop up again in some other reality.

The brass tool for hacking tea I carry with me everywhere - like a child that forms an attachment to a specific toy for reasons that can’t be determined.

I assured myself that the photo of us together was proof that she had existed. It wasn’t just a dream, she must have been real.

I will never see her again.

Enjoy the moment. It will not last.Extract from the book ‘Yet Here We Are’

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It’s getting late and I still need to get a batch of drawings finished for tomorrow morning. They’ve installed me in a comfortable serviced studio apartment with a view over the Qiantang river, that mighty waterway that has carried the wealth of China to the world for centuries. It was from here that tea left for the West. All the tea in China has passed my window at some point.

Across the river I can see the blocks of the Central Business District. Every night the entire cityscape lights up in a co-ordinated display of LED lights. Giant whales and strange anime characters leap from block to block. The sky is huge and I can watch monsoons roll in from the South China Sea. To my left I can see smoky hills in the distance edged by skyscrapers with

Asia-shaped rooftops.

I take a moment to stare

at my empty fridge.

I’ve been here for weeks and I still haven’t had a moment to sort out this food thing. Too busy.

I get back to work. I have some problems to solve here and I am the only one who can do it. I start tracing out lines with my pencil in the manner that a woodworker carves. Finding the shape within the space. And as I do so, I start to see the solutions. Sometimes I will chase a possibility, hurriedly sketching it out then find that it runs aground. I erase it and start again. One failure always leads to a success. Tonight, it is down to me.

China hasn’t been through our ‘Age of Individualism’. When our little company first got involved with the Chinese the tensions soon became clear. They couldn’t understand the maverick ‘me’ approach of the individuals in our set up. We interpreted this as disrespect, but it wasn’t. The Chinese just couldn’t understand the egos.

It is a paradox, they are hierarchical and people are conditioned to follow orders, but there is a baffling equality within that. But I was coming from the age of the individual, I wasn’t slotting into the hive and going with the flow.

I have learned otherwise since the early days of working with the Chinese and being frustrated and confounded, assuming they don’t understand the subtle nuances of advanced concept design. It is possible to be highly respected in a particular field, but at the same time be part of the hive and go with the flow. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. This is perhaps, the difference between the ego and humility. To be humble does not mean you cannot be elevated to a high level of expertise and respect and this is perhaps difficult for us to understand in the West. In our culture, the humble are liable to be exploited and trodden down, geniuses perhaps in their own right, but never able to reach their full potential. Stories abound of the artists that didn’t quite make it because they were too humble and thus weren’t able to do more. We value the artist who has hubris and is able to place themselves above others. The Western story is that you can be a genius but you have to be ruthless to make it. In China you can be a genius and be humble, and gentle, and this may get you elevated to a high position, maybe. But at least it’s a ‘maybe’ whereas in our culture it is seen as a ‘definitely not’

It seems that there is overlap between the two cultures now. China has many of these Western attributes and they are at times probing towards the age of the individual but there is something fundamentally different at their core and, seen this way, it does make sense. They squirm awkwardly at blatant displays of ego, they don’t celebrate the extroverted Western individual in the same way but applaud the introvert who quietly proves themselves through their work, and that seems typically Chinese.

I don’t notice the night trudging on because at some point, the concept manifests itself in entirety. Earlier today it had been a blank sheet of paper. Then it became an idea, and now it is a plan. The concept concretises and I sit back and throw my pencil on the desk. When I stretch and glance out of the window I see a faint glow of light on the horizon, threatening me with tomorrow.

I look at the clock on my computer. 4am.

I am lonely. But satisfied.

The main river in Hangzhou is the Qiantang River (钱塘江). It’s famous for its tidal bore, known as the Qiantang River Tide, which is one of the largest and most spectacular tidal bores in the world. I did this painting from a photo I took from my hotel room window during my long stay there while the pandemic raged in the UK

Extract from the book ‘Yet Here We Are’

DM me for signed prints or see my Etsy store: Finlay Cowan: Seasons in China. http://bit.ly/41DpOZ3

✴️ In this episode: A fleeting encounter that opened a lifetime of memory. Reflections on abandonment, empathy, and intuition. How transit spaces awaken the unconscious. The thin veil between the outer world and the psyche Why presence is sometimes the only answer we have

A brush of the arm. A child’s fear. A sudden flash of recognition. On a subway platform in Shanghai, I stood next to a young girl and her father. For a moment — less than a second — her arm touched mine, and I felt everything. Her anxiety. Her uncertainty. Her sense that the person meant to protect her might not. And then, later, in the silence of a farmhouse, it all came back. My own story. My own fear. The child I had once been — lost, alone, trying to survive a world that didn’t seem to notice.

🗺 The Accidental Exile is a series of illustrated stories about travel, trauma, and the quiet places we meet ourselves.

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Set among tree-lined streets, art galleries, and passing strangers with unreadable pasts, this is a portrait of someone unforgettable — and a reminder that even the briefest encounters can shape our journey.

In this intimate spoken-word excerpt from Unravelling China, Finlay reflects on a magnetic meeting with Anna, a woman whose poise and presence seem stitched into the fabric of Shanghai’s French Quarter. What begins as a romantic impression becomes something deeper: a meditation on territory, history, self-invention, and the invisible rules of expat life.

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What does it mean to fall in love with a place — not for what it is, but for what it remembers? In this evocative reading from Unravelling China, artist and writer Finlay Cowan walks through Shanghai’s legendary French Concession on a warm Saturday night. It’s not just a place — it’s a mood. A memory. A city within a city, where colonial villas lean behind high walls, cafes bloom overnight, and silence speaks louder than sirens.

This isn’t a guidebook narrative. It’s a meditation on place, memory, safety, decadence, and longing. Why does this corner of Shanghai feel more alive — and more gentle — than the West ever did?

If you've ever felt like a stranger in your own city, or fallen in love with somewhere foreign that felt like home, this one’s for you.

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✴️ In this episode: Cross-cultural burnout and quiet breakdowns. How a simple question opened something profound. A reflection on foreignness, selfhood, and meaning

The subtle emotional language of ChinaI was standing in a corridor that smelled like despair, staring at a dirty mop and a dying houseplant in the Hangzhou equivalent of Dagenham. Everything in me was asking: why am I here?

The answer came later, in the back of a taxi. A young Chinese woman — poised, graceful, and visibly holding it all together — finally let her mask slip. I asked if she was okay. She said “I’m fine.” But she wasn’t. A few words, a touch on the hand, and the dam broke.

This is a story about what happens when we actually see each other. When empathy cuts through cultural noise. When kindness becomes the reason why we’re here.

🗺 Part of The Accidental Exile, a series of illustrated, poetic stories about travel, vulnerability, and the quiet beauty of being human in a world that often forgets it.

🔔 Subscribe for more soul-soaked storytelling, illustrated reflections, and meaningful moments from unexpected places.

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Finlay’s Print Shop on Etsy - Buy my art, I'll be dead soon and the prices will go up.

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The Accidental Exile on Substack

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The Accidental Exile on Apple Podcasts

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Unravelling China on Tik Tok

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#UnravellingChina #LiteraryMemoir #TravelWriting #HybridBooks #VisualStorytelling #AuthorPitch #BookProposal