Non-Fiction

Writing My Way Out

By Natasha Mofia

Some prisoners doing life without parole have obviously conceptualized breaking out. However, life isn’t a prison break series and Michael Scofield just never shows up. If he did, I’d be free from this concealed jail.

I stare at the ceiling in my room from dusk till dawn ,and I’ve learned a solitary life isn’t so bad once it becomes quotidian.Going to visit a friend or taking a stroll is not a bad idea, howbeit, owning only two pants and sweatshirts from five years ago as well as using my mums phone draws me back. Also, being around friends in varsity escalates my anxiety and college topics are all greek to me. Dreadlocks and casual look subjects are my specialty on the other hand. But maybe if I had money, I wouldn’t be so casual. I’d toss my buggy sweatshirt and trainers in the air and surprise my body with a corporate look, people would hear my heels clack from miles away like Alicia in her song,”One step at a time,”plus my family would have enough food to cobble dogs with.

Every girl dreams of the day her father will walk her down the aisle, but in my dream,He chases me like Freddy Krueger and it’s a nightmare on elm street. His love for alcohol more than family has left us helpless and pariahs in our community.He curses us, throws away our food and extends his savagery to the neighbours ,who as a result, want nothing to do with us.It has been like this since time immemorial. Memories of calling out for help while he dangled by a rope trying to commit suicide, as well as my sister hiding all the knives replay in my head.This childhood terror has left me battling with trauma based disorders and he’s the reason my life has more holes than Swiss cheese.

My mum, siblings and I bake to sustain ourselves, even so, a dollar a day doesn’t go a long way.Maybe one day he will change ,when pigs fly of course. Maybe one day I will let go, nonetheless, little Natasha will forever be stuck in a terrifying childhood and will never know how being taught how to ride a bike by her father feels like. This explains why adult Natasha cannot ride a bike.

I’ve thought of leaving many times but what about my mum and siblings? Plus, I just have nowhere to go. Saying my father has caused us great pain is an understatement, and like a bull chasing a matador, I am exhausted.

But as ridiculous as this may sound, my locks taught me to never relinquish my dreams. When I started my dreadlock journey, every day was disheartening as my hair just never locked. People with long thick locks were my role models, so I always asked them how they achieved this. I was told,” The time taken for hair to lock varies from person to person due to different hair textures. However,it all eventually locks.Keep on retwisting and never give up.” After heeding what I was told, my hair eventually locked seven months later. I now feel like Bob Marley’s niece but my Jamaican accent in the mirror isn’t so good though.What was meant for hair is what I see life through.

Every person goes through different struggles(hair texture),but if one keeps on trying(retwisting),their life eventually changes(locks).See why I said dreadlock topics are my specialty?

I believe that one day my history will be rewritten. Hope is what keeps me going and rekindles every flame that my tears put out. I am an eager beaver who stays up all night to write in English which is not my native language and someday somehow,I will write my way out. I’ve shared my story because it is not a cock and bull story, but my reality which I know will change.This is a place where I can turn every emotion into words.I don’t live with it, here I leave it, it’s my therapy. Maybe writing about adventure would have been more fun than this and I would show my mum. But how can I write something I don’t know? Every person has a story, this is mine.

Furthermore, I wrote to reach out to even just that one person who will find a reason not to give up if they read this.For if I’ve not given up, then nobody should.I still hold on to hope and people need hope.

If something good comes out of my writing, then people are gonna know how powerful one’s gift can be,this will make them search within themselves for that one thing they can use to change their lives. If more and more persons come out to share their stories,—solutions will form and healing will take place.

Like Andra Days song which got me an earworm: I’ll rise up, in spite of the ache and I’ll do it a thousand times again.

Natasha Mofia writes from Lusaka, Zambia.

Truckerado

By Emma Hill

The Zoom call makes Papaw’s face look redder than usual, and he’s shaved clean, which isn’t usual for November. All throughout the year, Papaw keeps clean shaven, but in November up until New Year’s, Nana allows any sort of facial hair he desires. By far the most popular among the grandchildren is the Santa beard. He can grow his white beard out into a jolly triangle and, with his rosy red cheeks and German nose, all he has to do is throw on a red T-shirt and take off his USAF ball cap and he’s Santa.

Not this year. Maybe Aunt Kissy read somewhere that COVID likes bearded men.

“Don Henley and I used to play a game,” Papaw begins. “With the others.”

He means Don Henley the future Eagles drummer; “others” refers to Freddy Neese his third cousin, Jerry Surratt who would die in a car accident after signing a deal with Kenny Rogers, and Richard Bowen who was “just there”. The “others” and Don Henley were two years ahead of Papaw at Linden-Kildare High School. They still invited him along, even though his success at football directly contrasted Don Henley’s own failure at the sport, which led him to music. At night, a game was played, and it involved Highway 59.

As a small town resident myself, I understand how a highway can quickly morph from a means of transportation into an opportunity for entertainment. A weekend activity for Linden teenagers involved drag racing, dirt biking, or just watching the cars pass their monotonous way.

Sometimes, they played tricks on eighteen-wheelers.

From what I can gather, it was just those five; the whole of Linden did not indulge in such dangerous behaviors. Just those five would visit a closed gas station at two in the morning, where old tires were wrapped in brightly colored cellophane to make them look brand new, like oversized candies. Just those five stole an old tire (Orange, Papaw thinks) and rolled it to the highway’s edge, where they arranged it so a passing trucker, who would be barely awake and not thinking straight at two in the morning, would think it had fallen out of a tire-supplier’s truck bed. Just those five knew the allure of a brand new tire to poor truckers, who would slam on the brakes (It takes eighteen-wheelers a long time to stop, Papaw reminds us) and run out of the truck to find the tire. Just those five rolled the tire into the woods by then, leaving a bewildered trucker standing at the empty side of the highway, wondering what medication would make him stop seeing ditched cellophane-wrapped luck turned sour.

Papaw can’t even remember how many times they did it. They transported the tire to the highway in Don Henley’s senior gift: a four-thousand-pound Chevy Cutlass that blended into the night. It never got old, and it helped take their minds off college, missed opportunities, and what could come next.

There was one trucker who stopped faster than the others. Papaw and Don Henley bent to roll the tire into the woods, shuffling feet against asphalt; they were too slow. The trucker, eyes bleary from the road, squinted to the promised orange treasure and saw high school punks trundling it away, giggling like babies. Perhaps he roared in anger. Papaw only remembers that the trucker bolted back to the cab of his truck, gunned the engine, and chased the five troublemakers down a one-lane dirt road not meant for eighteen-wheelers at all. The boys, barefoot, ran harder than they ever had before, the headlights bearing down on them and hot panic making them forget that Cass County famously had rattlesnakes hiding in the sand. The boys were terrified the trucker wouldn’t stop, not only because anger was a stronger fuel than diesel, but because the road was so thin, he had no choice. So, they ran and he drove because that was all either party could do. The tire had been tossed into the woods — abandoned — at first sign of the chase. Eventually, the boys outmaneuvered the mechanical behemoth and disappeared into the dirt bike paths under quiet pine trees.

That’s the last time I saw Don Henley, Papaw tells us. He went to college after that. I heard about the band and the girlfriend when I got out of the military.

We sit in silence, wishing the Eagles were here to laugh with us about when everything was simple and impossible and real. And I want to give Papaw a hug, a Santa-sized one – to thank him for running fast enough, back to Bear Creek where his mother waited – but he’s in Houston, and my neck is cramped from staring at the screen.

We wave goodbye and the screen goes dark. I study my face in the aftermath. Would I have ever taunted eighteen-wheelers at two in the morning with future Eagles, if I’d had the chance?

Probably not. Too many rattlesnakes.

Maybe Papaw could have been a Rockstar, but rockstars need to know more than three songs.

Emma Hill is a published author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She has appeared in the literary journals HUMID, The Bell Tower, and Route 7 Review and received recognition from various local chapbook competitions. When not writing furiously, she is enjoying her final year in Stephen F. Austin State University’s Creative Writing undergraduate program. She also edits essays for SFASU’s Academic Assistance and Resource Center, often with her not-so-helpful cat batting at the keyboard.

A New Curiosity Shop

By Jeremy Robertson

At 8:00 PM downtown Ann Arbor is bright and loud. The white streetlights blend with neon red OPEN! signs and the flashing blue and green swirls of the dance club. In the evening, passers-by have to shout over the heavy beat of the dance club’s music. A teenage couple laughs and clings to each other as they walk down the brightly lit shops, and a mother carries her screaming toddler away from a candy store. But in the middle of this bright and loud world of asphalt and electricity, a soft, yellow light shines out of a narrow storefront whose windows are stacked with yellowed books. The banner over top reads “Dawn Treader Bookshop.” I don’t visit downtown Ann Arbor much (because I hate parallel parking). But it is this out-of-place bookshop that brings me to downtown Ann Arbor.

When I open the door of the Dawn Treader, a bell rings, as if the door believes it lives in small town America. Any bookworm will first notice the air—stuffy, brittle, dusty. It’s the smell of books. Even the tiny lobby is stuffed with tables of books, mainly displays of titles like Gladwell’s Tipping Point or Brown’s Boys in the Boat. But these displays are—at least somewhat—crisp and organized. As I thumb through a copy, a man at the crammed checkout points me to the back and tells me to explore.

Even Robinson Crusoe didn’t have so much to explore. As I move toward the back, the smell of books grows, overwhelming me. The aisles of books give only enough room for a person’s shoulders, but not more. And Mr. Bumble probably wouldn’t have a chance. The shelves run floor to ceiling, crammed with books. Stacks of books higher than my knee crowd the aisles. I can see books, smell books, feel books, and almost taste books. But I can’t hear the books. All I can hear is the heavy-footed dancers on the floor above, pounding to a heavy metal beat.

The small staff keeps the shelves fairly organized. Down the history aisle, signs read “Australia, “Vietnam,” “Egypt.” As I turn the corner, my finger follows the line of books and ends on the nose of a 6’6’’ Egyptian sarcophagus. Ordinarily, a sarcophagus in a bookshop would surprise me, but the mummy seems at ease. After all, both he and the books are only dead scholars wrapped in yellowed pages.

Walking through the walls of books, I watch the characters cram into the shelves. The hungry little caterpillar squirms around the children’s section. The boxcar children, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy boys congregate on the shelf vertically, horizontally, or any way to fit. Unlucky copies gather in piles on the floor. But most shelves are full of memoirs and melodramas, dictionaries and lectionaries, travel guides and vehicle repair guides. The alphabetically marked fiction shelves boast Dante, Darwin, Dumas, Du Bois, Dunbar, Dickens, and Dickinson. To the Dawn Treader’s customers, just fingering through the books is like seeing old friends. The whole shop resembles a high school reunion.

And the Dawn Treader’s customers only add to the general lack of space. A boy clogs up the D’s in fiction, reading the opening line of Hard Times. Occasionally, he’ll laugh at Thomas Gradgrind’s all-important facts. The clinging teenagers from the neon sidewalks are now thumbing through the dystopian section to find Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. “You won’t believe how good it is,” the girl tells her boyfriend. Even the screaming child from the candy store is smiling as his mother reads Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin to him in a crammed corner.

With people-watching and book-exploring, I find (like Rip Van Winkle) that minutes have turned to hours, and it’s past my time to leave. Usually, I’ll snag a classic I’ve not read yet or a Dickens novel I don’t own and go to the checkout. With a book under my arm, I hear the bell of the Dawn Treader door as I enter downtown Ann Arbor again. Drivers are still honking, lights still flashing, music still blaring.

***

Often, I wonder how this overstuffed trough of literature can compete with the pizzazz of the NECTO night club upstairs—how it stays relevant to anyone other than me. But it does. And it stays relevant not by competing with modern city life but by being a part of it.

I think someone’s been telling us a lie that bookshops that don’t rank as tourist attractions don’t belong in modern society: “If it’s not Mackinac Island, it’s gotta be Detroit.” But the Dawn Treader sits right in the middle of the lights and noise to prove that a building crowded with books can be crowded with people too—to prove that books aren’t outdated or irrelevant. Books explain our past, interpret our present, and inspire our future. Books are vital.

Jeremy Robertson is a junior studying Humanities and Cross-Cultural Studies at Maranatha Baptist University in Watertown, Wisconsin. Jeremy enjoys writing personal essays, short stories, and stage scripts. He has published a one-act comedy play as a high school senior. Jeremy grew up in Ypsilanti, Michigan with his five siblings and most loves reading, writing, and theatre.

New Zealand’s Covid-19 Experience

By David Lu age 17, Auckland, New Zealand

Did you know that New Zealand has beaten coronavirus, not once, but twice?

Since everyone knows about the traditional quarantine experiences of online learning, interviews through zoom, etc. I won’t focus on these. Instead, I’ll cover some of the more interesting aspects of the New Zealand lockdown experience.

I distinctly remember the day that community transmissions had been confirmed: it was a bright, sunny afternoon and the sound of tense chatter was ubiquitous throughout the air of our physics class. Everyone was crowding around laptop screens, waiting for our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern (or Aunty Cindy as we like to call her informally) to make the call as to whether New Zealand would enter lockdown.

Suddenly, it was announced.

Community transmission? Confirmed. Lockdown? Starting midnight. School? Cancelled. Thus began the odyssey of our social hiatus.

As we unfortunately witnessed the number of cases slowly climbing higher and higher every day, we also watched one of our health ministers, David Clark, break the rules of quarantine repeatedly, not only by driving his family twenty-kilometres to a beach, but also embarking on a dangerous mountain-biking expedition and moving his family from one house to another. As expected, he resigned shortly after —to the delight of many New Zealanders.

However, on a healthier and more personal note, even under the strict conditions of quarantine, we were allowed daily jogs or walks in order not to completely devoid us from the crisp autumn air. To make the dull life of lockdown more interesting for children, a new social trend emerged which saw my mum (yes it’s spelled with a ‘u’ instead of an ‘o’ here in New Zealand) digging all my stuffed childhood animal friends and setting them carefully on the windowsill facing the streets and muttering a spell to make them sit upright. The idea was that children walking with their parents would notice and experience a bit more colour in their day as they could wave hello to all the plushies who were waiting all day and all night for them to walk past.

After 1504 cases, a very unfortunate twenty-two deaths, and seventy-five days in isolation, New Zealand became coronavirus-free.

We had shown the world that this horrific virus was beatable when strict measures throughout the country were followed. Although we were aided by the fact that we lived in a bubble away from neighbouring countries and both our population and population density are relatively low, the sense of national pride was in every New Zealander when on June 8th, it was announced that the last person had fully recovered from the virus.

For the next two months, life was as we knew it pre-COVID. The sense of normality after such a long period of being in isolation almost felt alien to us, and this was aided by the fact that almost every other country in the world was still dealing with this horrible virus.

Then, this deadly disease struck us once again in August and I found myself once again waking up five minutes before my online classes and lazily attending all of them in my pyjamas.

Thankfully, around a month and a bit later, we found ourselves hugging our friends at school again. New Zealand had beaten the coronavirus, not once, but twice, making headlines once again. Up until today, four months after the last outbreak, there have been no community transmissions and everyone is now hoping for a sunny COVID-free Christmas (the southern hemisphere experiences a sunny Christmas as opposed to a snowy one).

I sincerely hope the best for everyone and everyone’s families out there still currently in quarantine. Please keep yourself safe by socially distancing, wearing a mask, and following the advice of medical experts. New Zealand has shown it is possible to beat coronavirus if everyone plays their part in keeping each other safe, and I believe this is possible in other countries too.

Graduating

By Abigail Murphy age 18, Arlington, Virginia

In May, I sat on my elementary school field, masked and distanced from three friends. I’d slowly grown to know these people over four years of high school, in classrooms, hallways, blue library chairs, cross country courses. On that day, I saw them for four hours. I spent much longer than four hours on calls with them, but those calls were small in my mental quarantine timeline. Those calls were separated by boxes on our screens: screens many roads and a river apart. Sitting there, sharing words through masks and transferring glances through real, moving eyes, made more sense than any Zoom lesson I’d attended.

It was a month before my “drive-thru graduation,” but that small moment on the field was a culmination of every year of school I’d experienced. These friends I’d known for four years blurred with the pasts I’d lived on that elementary school field—seven-year-old me building a kingdom out of stray bamboo shoots, nine-year-old me running after a soccer ball and pretending to be Abby Wambach in a sea of boys, ten-year-old me helping my best friend memorize definitions of big, big words for a vocabulary test.

Seventeen-year-old me sat on a blanket facing three friends, masked, each twelve feet away, cautious. We brought our own watercolors and painted—each other, sea creatures, abstract scenes, colors lacking much thought but equipped with hidden feelings. We listened to music, and sometimes we sang along quietly.

And we talked. We talked in this place where our words could float in the air around us—because our words came from a mouth and not a screen.

Since that May day, I’ve had a few more of those small in-person moments, relearning how to understand a person far from a computer screen. In June, my high school principal handed me a diploma in the front seat of my car, and I officially graduated high school. My parents and sister were in the car with me, and we drove past cheering and waving high school teachers and staff. I hoped my eyes could show my huge smile through my mask.

If I had graduated in 2019, I would have been surrounded by friends and classmates throughout the whole ceremony. Afterwards, I could have cried in my friends’ arms and said goodbye to my teachers in person, taking photos next to them—with our entire faces and smiles showing.

But my informal, lonely graduation isn’t what haunts me. Graduation was only a small event amid months of loss and fear, months of learning how to become an adult in a broken world.

I went 25 weeks without hugging a friend before moving in with two of them in September.

Now it’s been eight weeks since I’ve hugged my family.

Back on March 13—my last day of in-person school—I drove to school like I had every morning for the last few months.

I crossed Chain Bridge, trying to sneak a glance at the beautiful, raging Potomac River as I went by.

I drove down DC’s Nebraska Avenue, the site of so many exhausting track practices, with my friends beside me. There, I tried to learn all of my school’s secrets from a senior. We created a fake reality TV show. I stopped running just to laugh a little harder at a joke. I tried to teach all of my school’s secrets to an underclassman.

I passed all those memories and thought about the future runs that I had assumed I still had time for. My eyes teared up as I kept my foot hovering between the gas and brake pedals. It’s ironic we waited so long for 2020, my senior year. This awful, terrifying, insulting year.

Back then, I was mourning the end of my high school experience and focused on what I’d lost while holding onto gratitude for what I had. I still feel all that loss, all that gratitude, but, now, the uncertainty of my future is what plagues me.

My future. It’s all so confusing now. The future became hard to imagine when I started measuring time in how long it’s been since I’ve hugged a friend.

I am a recent high school graduate grappling with a lack of goodbyes, but I’m also waiting to reenter a world radically changed by months of isolation, fear and death. I’m teetering on the edge of adulthood, and, frankly, I don’t know what that means because I may not receive the adulthood I always expected.

I’m going to college at some point in time—not this year, like I’d always envisioned.

Instead, I went from being student to graduate to staff member at my high school within a matter of months, spending a gap year doing environmental sustainability work.

Fighting climate change is what first taught me to deal with something like coronavirus. Pollution and disease both float in the air around us, largely unseen, and their full effects can only be understood through extensive studying—a studying where high schoolers have never had much control. Both present us with an inevitable, hard-to-understand doom.

My grade was born in the wake of 9/11. We’ve grown up facing constant reminders of a broken world: news notifications that there’s another active shooter somewhere, viral videos of the murder of another Black American, scorching hot summer days and winters without snow days, a stock market rapidly dropping. So, a nationwide lockdown because of a global pandemic doesn’t seem too shocking.

Before coronavirus, prom and graduation were two constants we had amid chaos. Losing those events definitely stung.

But a bigger constant we had was a future of possibility. When you’re locked down at home and the world a few feet away is changing in indeterminable ways, dreaming of possibility makes less sense.

Thinking about the future becomes nearly impossible.

Fear and gratitude bounce back and forth within me. They teach me how to move on in a world frozen in place.

Foreign Exchange

By Justin Li

He walked a few steps ahead of me on the Bund. In one gust, the air smelled of the briny Huangpu salt water. In the next, it smelled of dead pigs and chemicals.

“Martin, look. This is the old side of Shanghai.” He spoke out of obligation, like a tour guide, telling me about the history of the older architecture behind the trees and pointing across the river at the Oriental Pearl and the Jin Mao towers. I asked him how people got to the other side and he said that there were ferry boats and a shuttle tunnel with colorful lights and sound effects on the inside.

His voice was vague and apathetic. He wore Harry Potter-esque glasses, Adidas sweatpants with stripes on the side, and a grey hoodie, which he kept covered over his head. In his hand, the plastic grocery bag he carried swung with each stride, and I heard the contents shifting but couldn’t tell what was inside. The wind blew his hood off and he rushed to put it back on, as if he didn’t want me to see the back of his head. Unintentionally, I mimicked his reservedness, pressing my shirt down to stop it from showing the skin on my stomach.

He turned back to me sparingly, only looking to check if he hadn’t lost me in the crowds. When I did see his face, he was not unattractive; his facial features were not disproportionately large or small and his skin was neither perfect nor blemished. He walked cool, like an athlete. I tried to decide whether I had a crush on him or not.

In broken English, he asked me if I’d seen enough of the water, and I gleaned from the boredom in his posture that he was trying to tell me that he had. I told him that we could leave if he wanted to. He led me down the steps to the lower level platform by the street, away from the noisy crowds on the riverside. There, people wandered along a 12-foot wall of flowers. As I passed by, I brushed my fingers through the petals, which mixed into psychedelic waves of green, orange, and purple and stretched around the bend so that I couldn’t see the end.

“This is the Qingren de qiang. It means lover’s wall,” he told me in a mix of both languages as he walked towards a bench in the square. “It’s nothing special.” He sat and opened the plastic bag, revealing colorful packs of Chinese coconut candy and yogurt drinks inside. “My mom packed this for you.”

I reached my hand into the bag and pulled out one of the yogurts. The bottle was still fairly cold and dampened by condensation. The tart liquid rolled on my tongue just as I had remembered from my visits to China as a kid; I thought back on how my mom used to buy packs of the drink from the grocery store beneath our Chengdu apartment so we could have them with steamed buns or pastries for breakfast.

We took a cylindrical glass elevator up the Pearl Tower. Framed between thick cement pillars outside, the sky tried to be blue; the Shanghai smog ensured that it could not. His hoodie was black and he wore a bracelet, a braided one whose blue and white intertwined around his wrist. I caught a glimpse of it before he hid it in his sleeve.

At the top, with her hand gripped firmly around her father’s, a little girl touched one foot onto the glass floor as if the panel might loosen. As I watched tourists point their cameras downward to take photos of their feet floating way above the grass at the base of the structure, I wondered how many of them could stand on the glass until it would start to crack, and how many more you’d have to add for the floor to give way completely and cause them all to fall a thousand feet.

I asked if this was his first time up here and he told me no, that he’d been up here with his friends many times before because they knew that there would always be foreigners. He said that he didn’t get to see foreigners often. I saw some American students with University of Michigan sweaters by the elevator, and I knew I didn’t seem to be as interesting to my host as they were.
Again, he handed me snacks: rice crackers and lychee gummies. The river below circled halfway around us and moving through more city on either side, like the tortuous, wound up sensation of yearning for an attachment, with anything, but failing. Watching the crowd shuffle in front of us in silence, my inadequacy seemed as heavy as the Shanghai sky. I wasn’t hungry, but I accepted his food and the nostalgia that it brought me nonetheless.

Over the next few days, he took me to other touristy landmarks during the day and sequestered himself in his room when we returned home each night. On the night before I left, we visited Jing’an Temple, a single street block of sloping gold roofs and traditional architecture among a hundred blocks of metropolis; the surrounding towers of metal and glass seemed to stare pompously down upon the temple. I wondered whether the attraction was built as another tourist attraction in Shanghai or whether long ago, the city had been carefully built around the temple. I’d like to imagine that it was the latter.

He bought us a pack of incense sticks from a wooden stand in the courtyard. After my great-grandmother died, my mother had taught me that I was to light the yellow end and hold the stick from the red portion on the bottom, bow three times, and place them in the ash. After we’d both finished, we stood in front of the smoke for a while, watching the rows of tips glow.

That night, his parents cooked me a farewell dinner of red braised pork belly, sweet red bean soup, and other dishes usually reserved for special occasions. Against my host’s mother’s nudges and sighs, his father poured me a small shot glass’s worth of a strong Chinese alcohol and a cup of the same colorless liquid for himself. He encouraged me to drink, which I did. The bitter taste moved from the roof of mouth into my nostrils and burned all the way down my throat, where it remained for the next few minutes. After I’d helped them clean up, my host disappeared into his room as he’d done every other day this week.

Left by myself in their living room, I figured I’d do some homework, anticipating my return to America. I almost looked forward to the emptiness of my suburban neighborhood and the familiar sound of my garage door under the floor of my bedroom, and being alone, still, but at home. I carried my thick, hardcover, history textbook from my suitcase to their kitchen table and opened to pages filled with images of the conquest of the New World. From there, I moved through each line, word by word, feigning reading. I underlined a date or two and circled some names to convince myself that I was really doing anything productive.

I had gotten a quarter of the way through the chapter when I heard my host pad his slippered feet around the table and pull out the chair to my left. I looked up at him for a second and quickly turned my head towards the living room. In the dark window behind the couch, I saw our silhouettes on the same side of the table, a row of vacant chairs across from us. We were close enough that I could smell the fabric softener on his clothes. He had taken out his phone, and the tapping of his fingernails on the screen became background noise. We did not talk or look at each other. In the hallway, a key clicked inside a lock and a door closed; I presumed that the person across the hall had just returned home after a day of work or school. Behind our reflection in the window, the lives of other people played on the illuminated windows of neighboring buildings like programs on television screens. I couldn’t quite make out the characters but I could imagine them inside, wiping down kitchen tables, tucking children in, and getting ready for bed. My host remained at my side until I got through the whole chapter pretending to read and felt weary enough to excuse myself. As I collected my books, he told me goodnight.

The next morning, I left China early on a packed United flight no doubt full of tourists like me, heading home. Halfway, I opened the parting gifts my host’s parents had given me: egg custard tarts and purple sweet potato buns. They were nearly sickeningly sweet but I ate them all.

Justin Li is a rising senior at The Pingry School. He was born in New Jersey and has lived there his entire life. The recognition his writing has received include a regional American Voices Nomination and a national Gold Medal from Scholastics Art and Writing, as well as an Honorable Mention award from YoungArts. In addition, one of his pieces has been published in Issue 6.1 of the Maine Review. He also attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Workshop as a rising sophomore.