On Thursday, August 29, our MA in Creative Writing program's core faculty and all incoming students gathered for a dinner and reading party in our school's historically rich Alumni House. After enjoying Thai food and cheesecake, each student had five minutes to read a piece of original work. Below is the short essay I wrote for the occasion:
Time is elastic.
I was born in China in the 1960s. The 1980s saw China open its doors to the outside world after almost thirty years of isolation. Much momentum had been built up, and once the dam was opened, the flood immediately rushed downstream with great potential energy. This flood smoothed out the age difference among Chinese readers. Regardless of age, we all read The Great Gatsby in 1982 when it was translated into Chinese. Unless you can read English directly, even if you were my mother, you read the same page in the same year as I did. This shared experience made me confident in saying that I was of the same generation as my mother in terms of exposure to foreign literature.
Time is elastic.
In the summer of 2022, I spent two weeks at Drew University in New Jersey conducting research in the United Methodist Archives and History Center. I perused volumes of The Heathen Woman's Friend, a monthly magazine published by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church from 1869 to 1940. Within its pages, I encountered a plethora of intriguing figures, both foreign missionaries and non-fiction writers.
One afternoon, I read an obituary of Miss Lucinda Campbell, and an unexpected wave of sadness washed over me. Miss Campbell was dead! But should I have been surprised by this information? After all, she was a historical figure, a fact I had been well aware of when I began my research. Yet, the sadness I felt was palpable and inextricable. Why? I walked out of the reading room into an open courtyard. It was late July, and while the weather outside in New Jersey was scorching, the archives—likely kept cold to preserve the old documents—were freezing. For the past few days, I had eagerly sought refuge in the cool, air-conditioned space, but that afternoon, I felt a sense of relief as I stepped out and was met by the awakening warmth.
I realized that my sadness stemmed from the way I had approached Miss Campbell. If I had encountered her name only the Wikipedia style—"L. Campbell (1846-1878)"—her death would likely have evoked no emotion in me. But I was engaging with her life through her writing--her reportage of events and characters in the Far East. That very morning, she was still alive within the pages of Volumes VIII and IX, speaking joyously and lively to her audience, to me. Yet, when I returned from my lunch break, she suddenly departed in Volume X; an irreversible sense of loss hit me in real-time. The abrupt shift from "alive" to "dead" within the pages of a historical document profoundly impacted my emotions.
Time is elastic because of the malleability of emotions, which can be as endless as the universe and as bottomless as a rabbit hole. At that very moment, I heard the sound of “click” when my experience intersected with my ambition.
I’m here, pursuing my master’s degree at this later stage in life. I’ve wanted to write in English since 2007, the year I immigrated to Canada, but I didn’t act on that dream at the time, which I now regret. There is often a long distance between what a person wants and what they actually choose to do. I could have walked a straight path if I had been more determined and had a clearer sense of myself. But I didn't. Fortunately, there has always been a star in the sky, even when I wasn't looking at it. Now, I'm winding my way on earth toward that star in heaven. Time isn't rigid; the meandering paths I've trekked through are proof of time's elasticity.
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