A Response from my Sophomore Year
A few hours ago, I turned in my last assignment of the quarter: a 4000-word analysis of the relationship between bandits and religious personnel in Shi Nai’an’s Outlaws of the Marsh, one of China’s four great classic novels. I signed off my email to my professor (your fraternal, gallant, and loyal student, Ana Chen), closed all my Sparknotes tabs, and washed a handful of blueberries. And here I am, sitting in my living room at 1 AM, singing off-key to Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, and watching Shenzhen close its eyes.
I usually sleep early, but I’ve stayed up late tonight. Sophomore year turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years of my life—academically and otherwise—and I don’t want time to wrench it from me. I want to have it for just a while longer. I know by now that Shenzhen’s merciless pace will necessitate a quick goodbye: a month prior, I’d started work, and school (which was already just a single class, given the requirements for my research) had all but lost its significance until the day before finals. Yet I’ve ended sophomore year triumphant. I’m so happy, and I know I couldn’t have left spring quarter on a higher note.
Well, now it’s actually July 31st: I’ve finished my internships, I’m back in the U.S., and I’ve finally come back to blogging.
But! Sophomore year! TL;DR: This was the first year I’ve lived on my own terms. I’d seriously considered a gap year after a freshman spring of online classes—before realizing that a summer without academic stimulation, despite fostering my growth in many other ways, could not extend healthily into fall. And as such, I loaded up on units, determined to knock out as many requirements as possible.
And I found such joy in it. It’s crazy to think that this time last year, I was almost entirely disillusioned by education, caught in guilty apathy as I BS’ed my way through my schoolwork. I headed into sophomore year with intent—I redid my entire organizational system, set out a clear schedule for Zoom ballet, and decorated my room to imitate a dorm. I called my friends. I caught up on all the pop culture I should’ve watched a decade ago. I applied to the Chappell Lougee out of curiosity—and out of the remnants of my worth-equals-accomplishment mindset—and found the challenge immensely enjoyable. I began to find fulfillment in joy, rather than in pride: and when I began to operate from a confidence in my self-worth, I began to pursue work I truly enjoyed—work which subsequently improved in quality.
See, before this year, I’d thought Stanford was college. My narrative before college—the way I narrated everything from my personal values to my trauma—centered on the reward of Stanford’s name. Everything was okay if everything was done for college. My story was tidy to the point of cliche, packaged with a writer’s self-obsessed eye. Stripping away Stanford’s campus and name, and stripping away the pride that had tied me to the idea of a perfect freshman year, forced me to confront my values and needs. What if everything wasn’t okay? What if my freshman year had exacerbated, rather than solved, everything I’d try to justify out of pride? For the first time, I began to confront trauma I’d previously labeled as unspeakable—something I could not have done while on Stanford’s campus, laboring under its breakneck pace. I came to terms with home—and then I left.
Thirty-six PPE-clad hours and two weeks of quarantine later, I ended fall quarter in a two-star Shanghai hotel. I celebrated the first academic quarter I truly cared about by chugging two Starbucks lattes and watching Kung Fu Panda (a narrative masterpiece) from my bed (which I later broke during a two-hour jumping session/desperate fit of boredom—video footage exists). I’d tried to use my two weeks in quarantine to prepare myself for China, to ready myself for a loneliness I’d known only briefly before this year, but I still found myself unprepared for Shenzhen. This city and I have grown up together, and this year has seen me fall in and out of love with it so many times—it would be impossible to discuss sophomore year without discussing Shenzhen. Some say that one’s fate and personality are shaped by location, and indeed I spent so much time and energy pushing back against and surrendering to Shenzhen’s various demands that I hesitate to call the city a setting. I spent my first few weeks in Shenzhen as I usually did: part giddy awe at having returned to China despite the odds, part fearful shame for being so obviously American (I didn’t even have an ICBC account, and therefore couldn’t use WeChat to pay). I tried to keep living with intention, to treasure even the dreariest house-hunting and the most terrible mosquito bites, because I wanted to cling to the newness of it all. The affirmation of my identity as perpetual outsider, which I simultaneously loved—as it allowed me to adore Shenzhen without much attachment—and detested. Stanford’s seven-week winter break lent me more than enough time to explore Nanshan prefecture, but the city was ultimately so disorientating (and I was still lacking for friends and available family members) that I didn’t go much beyond that. This was doubly true during winter quarter, where I found myself bogged down by 2-6 AM classes in some wholly unenjoyable subjects. A disastrous finals week later, I yeeted straight into my travels.
Although I arrived in Shenzhen in November, most of my exploration of the city—and of China in general—took place from March to July. Part of me did regret that I hadn’t seized more opportunities for travel before March, that I hadn’t gone to Harbin for its famed ice festival or taken an internship offer in Beijing. But oh my gosh—the travels I did undertake! You know it’s good when your memories still take your breath away, and I’m still startled at how readily I tackled a solo trip through Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou. Here are a few of the more beautiful moments:
The sharp dry cold in Beijing: how one hu tong had wreathed all its bare trees with New Year lanterns, and how they fluttered in red wave after red wave beneath a flawless sky.
The afternoon I went hiking in the woods behind the Summer Palace, and found a lake so deserted and clean that my reflection felt almost like an accusation, or maybe a confession—too clear, no comfort in distortion. I stayed there for an hour, journaling on a stone beneath wild willows, and slowly the birds returned: small goldfinches, huge geese, birds with blue wings and white underbellies, birds with beady eyes and brilliantly crimson feathers, a flock of sparrows, a couple of bright orange Mandarin ducks, several dozen Mallards. I stood up, and in a flurry that felt almost wrathful, they stormed back into the sky.
Wandering through Shantang Street in Suzhou, over canals of deep green water, a rose pastry in one hand and a papaya tea in the other. The first time I’d visited Jiangsu, I’d been with family—now I was alone, determined to find a bookmark artist who’d gifted me several beautiful bookmarks and told me to return when I knew my Chinese name (he’d write it on a bookmark for me). When I finally found him, in a larger property adjacent to his original cramped shop, I realized with a jolt that my Chinese had improved such that I was fully confident going into our conversation—and that I knew not only my Chinese name, but the names of my professors for whom I wanted to gift a few bookmarks. We talked about his childhood in Suzhou, and about his passion for art and his love for this city that treasured its artists. He asked me to listen to a program in native Suzhou dialect on an antique radio (I didn’t understand it). And I bought a hand-painted fan from him, depicting a snowy scene in the mountains, before promising I’d see him again.
Purchasing my first qipao in Shanghai, after trying on everything the shop had to offer. My family was originally going to gift me a silver bracelet for my nineteenth birthday, but I didn’t like any of the designs, and ended up with two of the most beautiful dresses I own instead. Later in Shenzhen, I found a silver bracelet I did love from a small vendor (designed to resemble mahjong tiles, what else), and gifted it to myself.
Falling in love with Hangzhou, which I disliked the first time I visited. I spent hours sitting on the various banks of West Lake, having given up on the mosquitos that would scar my arms and legs, and staring in awe at the mist-shrouded mountains and the blue silhouettes of pagodas. The lake is truly the center of Hangzhou—during my time there, I watched it tuck the sunset into its golden waves, watched it roar and seethe beneath a lightning so terrible it cracked the sky a vivid green, watched it shimmer in a brilliance of blues and silvers during a blistering afternoon. There was so much life on West Lake: pairs of Mandarin Ducks, which glided expectantly towards my outstretched hands and then turned their backs when they realized I didn’t have food; bie, or flat-shelled turtles; countless breeds of diving ducks that plunged beneath lily pads and emerged a shocking distance away; schools of small silver fish.
Dancing late at night on a plaza next to West Lake, hand in hand with one of my Zhejiang University friends. We jumped into a dance circle, and the crowd clapped in time to our frenetic waltzing. Afterwards, sweating and giddy, we walked past the temples and docks on the lake that had been strung with golden lights for the night.
All the times my friends and acquaintances treated me to meals: a high-end roast duck with Beijing and Renmin Universities, a fushion French place in Hangzhou (thin, sizzling slices of spicy beef; pizza topped with fish from West Lake), a restaurant in Shanghai that served us in extraordinarily small, slow proportions. All the times I wandered into the back alleys and found street food: Beijing yogurt and zhajiang mian, Shanghai scallion pancakes.
One of my Nanjing friends treating me to a boat ride through Mochou Lake: the boat’s rudder was jammed and we couldn’t steer it smoothly. Eventually, we navigated to a buoy in the center of the lake, where I Sharpied our names on its wooden base. We ended that night with a dinner of Beijing food, which left me full in the way that only Beijing food can.
Finding a lone Wu Wang Mian diner on the side of a Suzhou highway. I was caught up in a strange scam scheme of a Suzhou taxi driver, and got out on an unknown intersection several kilometers from a subway station. While climbing over a few construction sites and pondering (panicking about) how to return to my hotel, I was startled to find a diner rising out of a mess of broken planks and dusty nails. The badly-cracked Wu Wang Mian sign (a chain store) was indeed a sight for sore eyes—and I was pretty much alone, seeing that lunch hour had already passed. Inside, a large menu occupied one wall, each meal option printed in size 200 font on a separate plank of wood, and then roped and nailed to other planks to form a rope ladder. Fans whirred lazily over a dozen magnificently polished fake-mahogany tables. All the silverware, including the chopsticks, were made of plastic, but painted in blue-and-white dragons. There, as an overhead TV blasted a period drama about Zhou Enlai, and as the single cook chattered cheerfully at me from the kitchen, I had some of the best eggs, tomatoes, and rice of my life. I spent the rest of that day walking back to my hotel.
Bartering for waxberries with a Hangzhou motorcycle vendor next to a sprawling tea field: I failed to barter successfully, due in large part to my inability to understand some of the native Hangzhou dialect he used (he yelled at me until I settled for his original price, but I was really too amused to be offended or embarrassed). I ate the entire carton by myself, sprawled on my hotel bed, ending up so full that I could barely stomach dinner.
Finding a pingtan, or oral storytelling, performance in Suzhou. It was held in a small hall that smelled of sandalwood: two performers sat onstage, each carrying an instrument, alternating between narration, music, and the imitation of gunfire or birdcalls. The audience was comprised entirely of elderly men and women, their wrinkles thrown into sharp relief by the light of a single projector, their chins tilting up and down as one to follow the movements of the performers’ hands. Each row was spaced with a small wooden desk, which carried a bowl of sunflower seeds and a jug of tea. The performance was held in native Suzhou dialect—I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, but I found myself enraptured by the push and pull of the music.
And that was to say nothing of my time in Shenzhen: the city I’d begun to dismiss as too fast-paced and superficial for my liking yielded some of the most transformational moments of my life. Perhaps it is Shenzhen’s heartlessness that propelled me to make fast friends with so many people—and which propelled others to make friends with me. It was an intimacy that extended beyond the courtesy that most Chinese gift upon guests. My colleagues in Zhen Fund’s Shenzhen office treated me to lunch and dinner on my first day—and after dinner, leaning into my friend’s body, my glasses fogging up beneath the swirl of hot pot steam, I realized how much I’d missed the intimacy of platonic touch. We held hands like children as we tried on outfits from Gucci and FILA. It went beyond work: I had a photoshoot with a few dance friends in an artistically abandoned warehouse next to our dance studio, and got sushi and ramen at a back alley bar in Shekou a few hours later. I shared streetside stinky tofu late at night, my tongue burning with the pungent oil; I walked to Sea World at sundown, where I gazed at Hong Kong and talked about womanhood and birth control and period cramps and our futures with my friend from Australia. I sang karaoke, where my friends hyped me up despite my obvious inability to carry a tune (I realized just how hard it was to sing Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer), and where I realized to my embarrassment that everyone there—even those not from Guangdong—knew a bit of Cantonese, and could sing all the classic Cantonese songs. My fund sent me to find startups and leads every few days, and in a frenzy that felt like a cross between The Great Gatsby and the coming-of-age I’d never had in America, I seized each opportunity to dress up and drink. I realized how much alcohol I could take, that while gin got to me alarmingly quickly, I could stomach six straight shots of mao tai and two glasses of wine and still talk business with the head of Shenzhen’s subway lines. One sticky July night, as my head spun with two long drinks, and the clouds of red cotton-candy smoke from the girl behind me, and the bass of an Ed Sheeran song that rattled my very teeth, I sank into a couch at an outdoors bar, dressed in one of my Shanghai qipaos, and all but shouted to a friend I’d met twenty minutes earlier that I was bisexual and would probably never tell my parents—and was that okay? Was that really okay? Oh, oh my gosh, you’re bisexual too? I drove past Dasha River several times each week, pausing whatever audiobook I was reading to watch the skylines roll by: Shenzhen’s richest sector on one side, the sea to Hong Kong on the other. I saw Shenzhen’s light shows from so many angles—the buildings shimmering like fish scales, blue-and-purple bubbles and gold-and-red waves rippling up over an entire prefecture’s worth of skyscrapers. My last Monday in Shenzhen, seated on a rooftop bar overlooking the Hong Kong bay, treating myself to cocktails that were far too expensive and strong for their small size and sweetness, I thought drunkenly that the gold-blue-emerald reflections of the lights on the Shenzhen-Hong Kong bridge looked like a barcode across the water. My Hong Kong friend, who arrived at Shenzhen a week ago, wasn’t impressed when I mentioned it.
“Don’t look behind you,” she said in English, “but those girls have been taking pictures of themselves for the last hour. They haven’t even, like, eaten their food.”
I turned and glanced at the women, who were busy fluffing up their hair and pursing their lips with vicious intent. Then I burst out laughing, although I usually approached this phenomenon with cynicism. “Don’t look behind you,” I said cheerfully—again, way too loudly, my cheeks flushed. “But the girls over there are doing the exact same thing. Welcome to Shenzhen!”
“Oh my god,” she muttered.
But I was doing it too: documenting everything, in a constant state of posturing. My mom told me upon my return that I’d started talking with food in my mouth, the way that most Chinese people do—but I’d also adopted something much deeper: the Shenzhen woman’s acute focus on herself, a focus not unique to this city, but made a thousand times more pervasive by its society. And so I documented myself and uploaded everything to Instagram, a perceived need and eventual habit that was exacerbated by my awareness of my limited time here, my need to invent an image for myself in the absence of any real sense of security or belonging. I hunted my experiences with hunger, although I initially didn’t know how much of that hunger was hunger for the experience, and how much was merely hunger for the image of a good life—for the ability to document that experience. But, documentation or not, I was still seizing my life with the zealousness of someone who had previously known only obedience to—and therefore feared the retribution of—various systems and authorities. School. Ballet. Parents. The expectation of excellence, and the weight of that, once achieved. I did not let loose, did not fall off the rails, in the way that I thought my coming-of-age would entail. But I still found myself mired in ten-thousand little rebellions. I came home late. I strutted past bouncers and into the dense darkness of clubs. I pulled my friends into dance circles. I drank, after vowing at seventeen that I’d never drink. I made fun of professors I didn’t agree with, to the raucous laughter of my Beijing friends. I learned several cities’ worth of swear words, and I used them to great effect. I stood up for myself: shrugging, rather than freezing up, when my ballet teacher said that my legs weren’t skinny enough to form nice lines—the first time in years I’d been attacked in that way, and the first time I realized I truly no longer cared about anyone’s opinion about my body, and that I could thrive at a high level of dance without destroying myself. I came to ballet hungover and nailed a diagonal of quadruple pirouettes. I challenged myself to learn a variation from Carmen, and I refused to beat myself up for how much technique I’d lost on pointe. I loved my experiences, and through them, I loved myself for giving these experiences to myself. I loved myself with a fierce, selfish entitlement that ran counter to Shenzhen’s persistent narcissism, seeing as I was firmly refusing to operate from the self-hatred that such narcissism requires. Eventually, as my Instagram breaks became longer and longer, I stopped caring about maintaining an image for my friends back in the States—why did it matter, when I was living such an incredibly full, breathtaking life here? I stopped blushing at the mistakes I made while speaking or writing Chinese: and one afternoon, when summoned to make a forty-minute presentation to a portfolio company’s leadership board on how they could best enter U.S. markets, I spoke unabashedly. Part of my confidence stemmed from my knowledge that I had a safety net—that it wouldn’t be the end of my career if I messed up or failed—but I was also buoyed by a deep, vindictive belief in myself.
And perhaps this is the greatest gift of my sophomore year: that I truly learned to give to myself. I dove into my classes with a genuine, renewed love for learning—and I didn’t beat myself up when my performance flagged. I confronted my family about what they’d done to me—and demanded an apology when one was due. When my Chappell Lougee project hit dead ends, over and over, I shrugged and started something new. I realized that national security just wasn’t going to be my thing, and added a major in Chinese history and literature to compliment my focus in international relations—now, as the time comes for me to consider my honors thesis, I think I’ll write about the ways Chinese and U.S. central governments narrate their histories, and the implications of that for cultural and educational exchange. As I made my first in-person friends in several months, I realized that my personality had changed: I was no longer as over-energetic or exuberant as I’d been in secondary education, no longer reclusive and coldly snide as I’d been in freshman year. I was okay with not just my image of myself, but with myself at rest.
And during my last weekend in Shenzhen, cradled in the waves of Dameisha Beach, floating in the impossible blueness of sky and salt, I realized I’d healed. I had moved on from myself. I was starting something new, in a city that prized itself on its entrepreneurship, on its ambition. If freshman year had been the year that’d brought me close to myself, had forced me to confront so many truths about my pride and identity, sophomore was the year I’d begun to move away. The sea kept dragging me under, into a mess of jade green and pale sand, my hair and swimwear billowing around my skin. The farther out I swam, the greater it felt. I considered the concept of fear, and then recklessness. I did not reach any conclusions, but I continued swimming.
Shenzhen is a city built on water. It borders the South China Sea, and its recent anti-pollution efforts have lent it waves of stunning blues and greens. It’s a good thing—in a city so fast-paced, it’s essential to have a ready source of peace. It takes twenty minutes and four subway stops along the Number Two line, from Haiyue Station to Sea World, to reach my favorite view: the Hong Kong bay, the schools of silver fish darting close to the scintillating surface. My ballet studio is close to the sea, and sometimes I would walk there after class to journal. It was invariably calming—sometimes, an old man would be playing an er hu or a woodwind in the park. Sometimes, an elderly couple would be walking there with a child: once, I watched a grandpa lie patiently on a bench for over an hour as his granddaughter arranged and rearranged a set of stickers on his face. As much as Shenzhen pained me, I was thankful for the sea—for the respite not just from the city, but from the relentless forward movement of my college experience.
And indeed, it’d be impossible to talk about sophomore year without talking about the slower moments, the undercurrent I pieced together from a thousand small intimacies. Holding my grandmother in my arms as she dozed, her hand wrapped in mine, her jade bangle clicking against my silver one. Letting my other grandmother braid my hair—and then watching my two grandmothers hold hands and walk together at a family gathering, shouting at each other through their differences in language and hearing issues (my paternal grandmother speaks Mandarin, went to Tsinghua, and worked as a nuclear physicist; my maternal grandmother grew up with Cantonese, raised six siblings by diving for oysters and hacking wood by herself, and never went to school). Small moments of forgiveness I thought I’d never see: confronting my parents, negotiating the many ways we’ve hurt each other. February, when I realized with a start that I was improving so rapidly in ballet that I would probably reach another small peak before I left—and the joy in such a blessing. My last ballet class, when I hit five pirouettes and stopped on releve before landing—the cleanest five pirouettes I’d ever delivered. Video-calling my friends whenever there was scenery to share: a pavilion high above the Forbidden City, the streets of Jiangsu, West Lake at night. Looking up from my laptop and realizing I’d let three hours on Jstor go by while I was annotating articles about China’s Republican Era. Shopping for sports bras—then just bras—then lingerie—with my friends. Redecorating my room with fairy lights. Getting caught on my balcony during a thunderstorm, right when I was gathering the laundry, and gasping as the wind hooked into my lungs and propelled me towards the railing. Mahjong at my fourth aunt’s new property, on the first floor of a building that still lacked a wall. Laughing myself to tears and then inheriting my fourth aunt’s LIKE: JUST DO IT shirt. My creative writing class, where I wrote about the first time I fell in love with a girl—and where I realized that the small, slow details in a story can indeed make it great. Sitting on a push pole boat in Hangzhou’s Xixi Wetlands, letting the swamp and its emerald waters crawl past at an indescribably slow pace, as my guide whistled and chatted cheerfully to other boaters in the Xixi native dialect—eventually, I moved past my impatience, sat back, and began to enjoy the steady sway of the boat, the clear hot sprawl of the sky, the ruby-bodied dragonflies that easily outpaced us. My guide mentioned offhandedly that we could glide all the way to Beijing on a boat like this, give or take a few months, and I realized that that wouldn’t be so bad. We wouldn’t even need to sustain ourselves—with so many cities en route, we could just buy pre-packaged food. In fact, such a journey might’ve been a welcomed necessity: in Shenzhen, I could only process my life in moments. Memories as snapshots, in the way that so many opt to capture and package their lives in the city. Even now, in writing, I’m unable to slow down. Everything is a blur of breathless intensity, and whatever imagery I use in an attempt to slow myself down is really just compensation for my inability to thoroughly process a moment or experience.
I’ve been lucky. And now I’m home. And I’ve moved forwards and outwards in so many different planes and dimensions, have grown in ways I never thought possible or necessary. This time last year, I had no plans for moving forward, no idea of what to do with myself—but now I do. I’m taking Cantonese next year. I will, hopefully, skip a year of modern Chinese. And I’m ready to return to school—I’m ready for junior year. In some ways, my sophomore year felt like Lorde’s new album: someone on Twitter once said that her songs speak to those who thought they’d never live past age seventeen, or who at least couldn’t envision their lives in their twenties. I never realized there was so much beauty on the other side.
The first time I found Sea World was in January. Having not known anything about Chinese navigation apps, I’d failed several times to find the sea before then—each of my excursions proved exhausting and fruitless, and I lost myself at every intersection and mall complex. It was an accident when I finally came across the bay to Hong Kong: I’d left ballet dejected, gripped in a mild relapse of body dysmorphia and a corresponding loathing for my legs in jeans, and I was exhausted after a night of online classes. I turned right, away from Nanhai E-Cool, and headed to my subway station. But instead of stopping there, I got boba—and turned left. I wandered aimlessly. I was lonely and self-pitying, the worst way to be lonely: I’d resigned myself, after weeks of struggling to fit into Shenzhen, to several more months of outsidership. I would go home without having any deep motherland-esque experience, the kind of reckoning all Asian Americans look for in one way or another. 来了就是深圳人, said a cheerful sign to my right, and I wanted to scream at it. I was not and would never be the image of the Shenzhen woman: professional to the point of pain, chasing after money from that ever-irritating belief that individual prosperity is the foundation of feminism, wearing the light reddish makeup or silken clothes expected even when at rest. And in the months that would follow, I found myself continuously faced with the sense that I would never belong, that even my unhappiness was not the same breed of unhappiness seen so commonly in Shenzhen. No—I’d always felt that way, even in freshman year. All my small sufferings had nothing to do with the hardships of others—until I realized that they did.
Because something else I found in sophomore year were communities. All through high school, I’d never quite had a friend group—in a system that pitted girls against one another for college admissions, my relationships were made of individual conveniences. The same was true in ballet, where I can honestly say that I stopped making friends after I turned fourteen. Spending my formulative years in such isolating environments—scarred and shaped by distrust and self-preservation—meant undergoing a terribly long journey to undo it all: a journey that started with It’s Real in 2018. With each community I joined, whether it was CBC or FACES, my freshman dorm, or the small clique of Shenzhen interns who for some reason or another couldn’t make it to Beijing, I found myself happier, more willing to trust. In May, at age nineteen and after more than a decade in the art, I found myself going to my first dinner with ballet friends. It would’ve felt impossible to me a mere year ago, and I’m still not sure how it happened—how any of it happened. I’m not really incentivized to look back to explain it, either, given how much I have to look forward to. It took leaving the country to realize that my college experience extends far beyond Stanford, and that it’s all the better for it.
But that day, without the benefit of retrospect, I kept walking. I headed past the massive Huawei store and the landlocked Minghua. Past the stalls of tang hulu and the German restaurants. I paused when I recognized the statue of Nuwa, goddess of the sea. Her hands reached high above her bare breasts. Her face was blank in a way that was neither serene nor stern. She looked made of styrofoam. Like she would float on her dominion—or, less poetically and more cynically, that she’d fit right into Shenzhen’s art scene. I followed her gaze to the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art. I’d seen it on a brochure once—it seemed that I’d already seen all of Shenzhen on a brochure, for this city’s beauty was crafted for modern visual consumption: quick browsing, an aesthetic so manicured it bordered on nausea. I stared at Nuwa, caught between disappointment, scorn and an absurd need to laugh.
And then I looked past her, out to the horizon. I felt the exact moment when my face softened, when my fingers loosened ever so slightly around my phone. Had I known it would be okay, then? That both my sophomore year and my time in Shenzhen would be a thing of such beauty?
No, but I did know that I’d found it: the sea, unmistakably blue. An immensity just steps away.