Oh Emily!
I guess I never really recovered from my experience in Hong Kong. Intense, shocking, and lost. My studies in Europe was perhaps very much triggered by that exchange semester in Hong Kong. Over the years I was trying to narrate it — again, no not good enough — retake, retake and endless retake. Never was there once I felt my writing was complete to the extent of ‘Alright, this is it.’
Never.
On my ride home today, my bike went broken and I was having big headaches absorbing David Malan’s course. He is just really cute, but my mind was just somewhere else— —there is no proper swimming pool for me in Tainan. There was an unknown pain in my lower back that I wanted to shout out loud, as if I was subconsciously holding some thoughts back.
Each time when my body starts to ache, there would always be a certain memory related to the pain. And the lower back pain — — -I think it came from Hong Kong. Emily heard me complaining my physical pain the most. But neither of us had known about the psychological pain.
Emily and I met somewhere on a hiking event in Hong Kong. She was drunk back then, but I couldn’t relate to anyone else of the group, so I sticked to her. And we became library mates, and then night market mates, and then mates.
She went to visit me in Hsinchu once, and I went to UK to visit her , but mostly for my own purpose of traveling.
There was nothing special about our friendship, except that I found her very genius and she found me ‘very special’. But I could say it sprung from both our agony in Hong Kong. And apparently there were not just us, but many others who just didn’t tell. And our experiences dominoed the aftermaths of our lives. Later these years she was the only one I could go for seeking approval of my decisions, because she understood how Hong Kong impacted me severely.
Emily, Rebecka and another Korean girl were the three exchange students from the same university in the UK. After the semester, Rebecka quit her study and went back to Sweden out of depression. It took her a couple of years to recover and then she moved to Norway. The Korean girl quit her study and returned to South Korea indefinitely.
Emily herself, for years, suffered from pretty much the same syndrome as I did. I was always trying to grab something, always fidgeting, always escaping from somewhere, always loads of emotions coming up. Some say it’s called bipolar. And personality disorder. And names. And diagnosis. I don’t really care what kind of names they put on me. It’s a phenomenon instead of a problem now.
It’s been a lot better after 7 years. Earlier last week we were discussing feminism, the evolution of urban planning, and the equality of altruism and neighborhood gentrification. And the books we’ve read and wanted to recommend to one another — Julian Barnes ‘the sense of an Ending’ for example, the Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher ‘the language glass’, the Nigerian author about post-colonial racism issues ‘the thing around your neck’, and ‘Clara and the Sun.’
But mostly, I love how we have grown to became the very support of each other for modern relationship, career-wise, or just interesting lovely plants — when I was crying over Cedric on the floor in panic, Emily pretended to contemplate for a while and said, ‘Hey Stase, why do you still want to see him if he makes you so stressed out?’ ‘ I don’t know. I really don’t know. He was the only one by far that I liked so much. So smart, so beautiful, so heartless.’
Or we pretended that we didn’t care about dating because heterosexual guys only looked at our appearances on dating apps. So let’s just be smart and independent women first. Until the very last day of 2021 she told me she went out on a date for the very first time. The narcissistic attractive flatmate no longer in the play.
I think I burst out into laughters, and then tears.
It’s like a talk back — -when we were deeply rooted in the Hong Kong paste, we couldn’t talk about it because that made us even more hopeless. And now we’re finally becoming more of the ‘grown-ups’ of our own, we can begin to heal the little adolescent we once were.
