"The watermelon thing is that people claimed that black people were happy being slaves because they didn't need freedom, they just needed watermelon and fried chicken."

--He knows just enough American history to get this! "...of course it was something like that."

Rose is going to come give him a hug about the list of Horrible Things.

Hugs are good. "There should be less things that killed multiple millions of people."

"Technology makes everything bigger."

"Technology should stick to rectangles."

And then he is taken off to a news studio!

Being in a news studio involves having quite a lot of makeup put on.

This is a whole lot of makeup to get the affect that he is wearing none at all and he just has perfectly flawless skin (and 'please stop scratching at your pox sores' marks.)

He's wearing the clothes (plus some mending to hide where the lab sample was taken) he landed in for Verisimilitude.

"Hello!" says the newscaster. (She has long brown hair and no piercings, which is almost weird for Cascadia.) "We have a very special report here today, everyone. Can you please introduce yourself, Jing Yi?"

Okay, show time. He can be personalable and charming to a possibly unfriendly audience.

"Hello. I'm Jing Yi, and I'm a time traveller from the late Tang Dynasty."

There are audible gasps from the journalists in the audience. 

"Is time travel possible?" says the newscaster, sounding remarkably full of disbelief for someone who had been preparing for it for two days.

She's a good actor! "Time travel from the past into the future is possible, but not from the future to past, and to my knowledge we don't know how to do it deliberately."

"I don't want to offend, but how do we know that you aren't an actor from the SCA?"

"Tests were done on the clothes I landed in, and there was no bitoxiphosphene contamination."

More gasps!

The newscaster opens the floor for questions from the assembled journalists.

The journalists want to know what life was like in the Tang dynasty, and what his job was, and what he did for fun, and if his children will be unaffected by bitoxiphosphene, and what it feels like to time travel, and how he feels about having traveled through time, and whether he is sad that he won't be able to make it back. 

Very different! Cascadia has much more good rectangles technology. He appreciates all the labour saving devices and the vaccines and such like.

He was the Vice Minister for the Three Judicial Offices. The closest Cascadian equivalent would be 'a detective.'

... He's not a doctor, but probably they still would be? Even if he hasn't been exposed to all that much bitoxiphosphene, whoever is bearing his children would be?

Travelling through time felt like falling, but that may be because he was falling at the time.

He wouldn't have chosen to travel through time, but there are definitely worse places to land than Cascadia in 2050. He does miss the family and friends he has left behind.

Journalists want to know if he was really freaked out by nukes, and what he's been doing after his arrival but before the press conference, and what he's planning to do now that he's here, and what he misses most from home, and what thing he likes best about being in Cascadia, and how the history books are most wrong about China, and whether he is planning to immigrate to either Mainland China or Taiwan since he's Chinese, and have more of a comment than a question that he should definitely immigrate to Taiwan if he is looking to immigrate anywhere, and whether he has seen Terminator. 

Nukes are terrifying, and he does not even have any direct experience with them!

After his arrival, he was getting a GED. Hopefully he has passed his test and should be getting it soon.

He doesn't have any specific plans, though he would like to talk to historians in case he has any information they want. And he would love to correct the history books, but you see, for the past year he has been stuffing his head full of the history of Cascadia-- which has entirely too much history, it should really slow down-- and so he hasn't had the chance to check yet.

He misses the people, obviously, but he also does miss the food. The food you can get in Portland several centuries later is Just Not The Same.

There's a lot of good things about Cascadia! Picking one at random: public housing. He really appreciates not freezing to death in the woods.

...as a currently stateless person who can only speak Middle Chinese and English, he has no particular plans to immigrate. (Hopefully this is avoiding that hot potato well enough for by his agent's standards.)

He has not seen Terminator, but he has seen Spider Man. 10/10, he appreciates how the state of the art of theatrical performances and special effects has improved.

Journalists want to know what's the most surprising thing about Cascadia, and if he could grab one person from the past who would it be, and whether he's queer, and whether he's poly, and whether he thinks it's okay to bind women's feet*, and what theory of time travel he thinks is most plausible, and what current celebrity is the hottest, and whether he's voting for the Libertarians or the Socialists in the next election, and what people should go back to doing the way that people in China did it. 

*The agent hears this question and repeatedly bangs her head against the wall.

Cascadia is a Very, Very Free. No, even more free than that. He spent the first month or so really discombobulated by that.

...he misses all of his family. It would be very hard to choose. (...and he's going to have to rewatch the footage here to make sure he didn't react too visibly here. Fun! Hey, guys, he literally lost everything he knew a year ago. Please think this through.)

Yes, and yes. And if you want juicy details, you need to wait until the relevant tell all tv interview/memoir/etc.

...what are we doing to women's feet? What's Gilead done now?

He is a detective from over a thousand years ago who has recently got Schroedinger's GED. He thinks aliens did it.

He does have a celebrity he thinks is hottest, but he is very biased here. (He makes a winky face and points to himself.)

The fun thing about that question is that no matter which party he answers, one of them will be able to say they're the party favoured by time travelers, and the other will be able to say they're the party disfavoured by time travelers, and why are we listening to time travelers again? He's from a thousand or so years ago and knows nothing about the current political situation.

Things have changed a lot in the intervening years, so doing things the way they did it before isn't likely to... work? Even if there's some things about Cascadia he finds somewhat alarming, they are like that for reasons.

Ancient Chinese people broke women's feet and bound them so the feet were very tiny and then they were crippled and couldn't walk without pain! Men found women's broken feet very attractive. Does Jing Yi think they should do that?

...not in the Tang Dynasty they didn't...?

People should do what they want with their own feet. Why should his opinions matter on any feet but his own?

Oh! Well, that's good and kind of surprising. The journalist would have done more research on Chinese history if she'd known this would come up. 

Journalists want to know what he thinks about Handmaids, and what his favorite foods were then, and what his favorite food is now, and if he misses the tea from home, and what surprised him most about the last thousand years of history, and whether it's weird that white people ended up doing the Industrial Revolution and colonialism and so on given the position of China historically, and what he thinks about democracy, and what he thinks about free speech, and what he thinks of Christianity, and whether he believes in God, and whether he's planning to be in a reality show, and what his favorite superhero is. 

Like pretty much everything he hears about Gilead, he finds the concept kind of disturbing.

He liked mangoes, when he could get them. Another very good thing about the modern world: out of season fruit.

He hasn't had a chance to try a whole lot of foods that aren't the sort you microwave, but microwave pizza is pretty damn good. 10/10 invention there.

The tea here is unfortunately Just Not The Same.

You got rid of smallpox! He had no reason to expect this to be possible, and accidentally scared some people about it. (He found democracies even more surprising, but he is not saying that in front of the Cascadian Public.)

It was definitely kind of a surprise, but a lot of history has been surprising to him, so it isn't unique in that.

Democracy seems to work out for Cascadia, Ditto for free speech.

Did not expect Christianity to end up so big! That was another one of the surprising things.

He does not believe in one singular God, no.

It's a solid maybe!

Okay, so he's a little biased because he was in the first superhero movie he watched, but Spider Man is his favourite.

Journalists want to know if he is a Buddhist or a Taoist or a Confucist, if he doesn't believe in a singular God.