It was winter.

 

The apartment was caked in a layer of thick, sooty dust, wallpaper peeling down in dirty pink strips. The frost made everything look even sadder than usual. In between the occasional shouting was the scratch-scratching of those trying to drag their bicycles back into their homes through corridors barely big enough for a single man to pass through. The sky outside our single, tiny streaked window was always a searing, angry red or a muted gray.

 

Sometimes, the shouting was from those who realized, their nostrils clogged with the sharp pang of alcohol and eyes watering from the haze and smoke, that there was really no way out. That even as they toiled away in ten-hour shifts, it didn’t matter how long they worked on the assembly line; didn’t matter how long they spent huddled on the sidewalk selling iPhone cases off a dirty, tattered mat, or how many customers they chauffeured across the city in their illegal taxi-cars. There was no escape from a life where the few dollars they scraped together would barely feed their family, let alone give them a good life.

 

But there were also times when the shouts were from a neighbor who said too much, too wrong. Who ran their mouths at a bar, or cafe; or published something the government didn’t particularly like the sound of. Children weren’t allowed near the windows when the police came knocking at their doors, but the noises left little to our imaginations.

 

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Every Chinese New Year, a beast — the 年 (nian / literally: "year") — would terrorize villages, ripping into houses and devouring children. One day, on coincidence alone, the villagers realized that it was terrified of loud noises, and of the color red. Every year from then, it became custom to line your house with red sheets of paper and set off strings of firecrackers -- to scare away the “beast”.

 

Or so the fable says, anyway. It was easy to believe as a child, as you vehemently plastered strips of red paper across your walls so you wouldn’t get eaten; but somewhere along the line, it becomes less about survival and more about the joy and atmosphere of it all. Chinese New Year brought a splash of color into the neighborhood — no matter how poor you were, the 新年 -- (xin nian / literally: "new year") — was the one day you could, would and should splurge. The wet markets were packed with tanks of live fish and slabs of fat, bloody meat; all of it gone by nightfall. Shelves of firecrackers and decorations sold faster than hotcakes, and soon every reasonable surface of every wall had at least a little crimson pasted on. Outside any house, you’d be able to get a good whiff of spring onions crackling in hot oil.

 

As the sun set over the tired city, the lion dancers would set up their show - five people hidden under a massive, flowery “dragon-lion” costume, stalking up and down each the busiest streets. I remember clamoring at the window with other children, watching as the leaping colors of the beast stark against the melting gray snow.

 

The little TV in the living room would stay on all night, buzzing out the cheer of the 春节晚会 (chun jie wan hui, literally: the spring night festival). This was the long-awaited, annual Spring Gala — the most decorated comedians and performers in all of China would gather to dance and put on sketches, full of raunchy jokes that would leave the children asking “what’s so funny?” indignantly as the room full of adults cried helpless tears of mirth.

 

If Ba was home — the few times he was throughout the years — I would curl up in his lap to the sound of firecrackers and my older cousins howling with delight with every pop; stomachs full of warm food and heart full of joy.

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But, well, that was just the one night of the year. The rest of our days were just like the city, tired and dusty. There were the “haves”, with their fenced-in neighborhoods and three-story houses, BMW’s and gilded terraces: the epitome of luxury. But mostly, Tianjin was a city of have-nots: buildings stuffed full of families lined my street, crumbling, dull, and smeared with thick, gray dust. Tiny corner stores packed with cigarettes and dirty vegetables; hawker center that smelled of chili oil and tofu in the morning, and roast duck and pig tongues at night.

 

It was a twenty-minute walk to school — usually made longer by the fact that not one driver nor pedestrian cared remotely about the color of the traffic lights. The streets were lined with desperate street vendors and their stalls and carts, trying to stop everyone who walked past. As I walked, careful not to get my pinafore dirty from the black puddles bursting under busy tires, the city would flicker between affluence and poverty. If I had an extra few pennies, I would stop by the candy store and buy a skewer of tang-hulu -- hawthorne berries drenched in translucent candy  -- fingers sticky from the sugar melting from the heat of my hands.

 

It’s hard to remember how the city looked before the factories spewed all that thick black garbage into the air; but I can’t remember a time when the sky was blue.

 

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The little apartment I shared with my cousins, uncles and aunts almost always smelled like cabbages and chinese chives — except when my brother was home: then it would smell like beer and spirits, and cigarettes.

 

He was fourteen years older than me — incidentally a bypass of the one-child policy. I was too young to understand it all then, and as I grew older I learned not to talk about him, much. My classmates marveled at how lucky I was to have a sibling. I don’t tell them about the night I spent cornered, pockets emptied so that he could buy more cigarettes and alcohol. I don’t mention the harsh shattering that always came with his anger, soil from our mother’s potted plants streaked across the scratched floorboards, and sometimes across my face.

 

He spent most nights out, though, with his friends, gambling and shouting over the clicking of mahjong tiles somewhere else. That was always a small mercy.

 

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Mama owned a tutoring centre, and often brought me with her to work. I probably spent more time there than at home. The school catered to children and was nice and clean, if not a little old. There were five little classrooms and a big wooden desk that served as a reception counter, where I was allowed to sit after closing hours. The teachers that worked there spoiled me with treats — if only because I was the daughter of their boss.

 

Mama often had to stay behind late to figure out the bills and inventory. This was when I could sit anywhere I want, doodling or reading to my heart’s content, as the searing red sunset turned to black behind the stained glass window. After Mama was done, she would take me home on her bike, my little arms wrapped tightly around her waist as I fidgeted in the backseat.

 

Baba was, as I mentioned before, rarely home. He was studying at the National University of Singapore, something that would later allow our family being able to move away from Tianjin altogether. Either that, or he was busy running errands to and from Australia for his company -- which he would later become the CEO of.

 

Regardless of where he went, however, he would always bring back an animal plushie as a souvenir — a jaguar from Singapore’s National Zoo, a kangaroo from Melbourne, and the like. He promised me one day I’d have a stuffed toy of every kind of animal in the world. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting pretty damn close.

 

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Dao Nan Primary School was infamous for being, in its prime, one of the best ones in the neighborhood. It was mandatory for every student in the nation to assemble in the quad every morning at seven to pledge allegiance to the nation and the school; but Dao Nan took it to the next level. Teachers and prefects scoured the assembly of six to twelve year-olds, watching if anyone so much as fidgeted or broke out of the “at attention” stance -- chin up, chest out, stomach in. If you did, God save you, you’d be dragged out to the front of the quad to stand in shame in front of all of the two thousand other students for the next half hour.

 

In the winter, it wasn’t too bad — you could wear as many pairs of pants as you wanted under the mandated skirts. But the summers were hell. There was no air-conditioning, and the sweltering air hung heavily in your lungs, especially on Mondays when you had to wear a tight tie over your two layers of uniform. Students took turns going to the bathroom to slip out of the tight noose of fabric, enjoying every second of the two minutes we got for bathroom breaks. There was always a thin layer of chalk dust in the air, scrapped off of the scratched blackboard, stirred gently by the wobbly ceiling fans creaking of our teachers’ tired drone.

 

From Primary 2, schools begin to split the “good” students from the “bad”, with rigorous testing, twice a year. The classes are labelled classes A to K, with K being the gifted, and A the ones with less-than-satisfactory grades. I made it into J — second best, and my best friend into E. To this day, her self-esteem is still rock-bottom. It’s a horrible system.

 

Math and Science came easily, and the teachers adored me; until Primary 3, when we started writing compositions for English. We were given illustrations and told to conjure up the stories behind them. Really, it was a test of memory — there are “sample essays” that we were meant to memorize and regurgitate for these assignments. I thought that that was literally the most boring thing on earth, and instead created my own narratives — sometimes fantastical, sometimes humorous, sometimes controversial. My grades plummeted, and my parents tried, in vain, to find me writing tutors who in turn tried, in vain, to get me to write “safer” things. I refused to spend hours memorizing essays I didn’t care about, and decided with as much determination as an eight-year-old could muster that I hated English, and I hated writing.

 

Almost every week from then on, my homeroom teacher would find a reason to force me to the front of the class, palm out, where she would be waiting with a meter-long wooden ruler. A spelling error, a calculation mistake -- I went home on my eleventh birthday with a fractured thumb, palms bruised purple-yellow. My palm smarts right now, just remembering the crack of wood against flesh.

 

Looking back, perhaps it was a good thing. If I had been able to write freely and without fear, if I had tried to explore “rhetoric” in communist China, I might not be alive today.

 

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At some point, Ba graduates with his PhD in Engineering and Mathematics. His brilliance is recognized by his graduate professor, and this nets him a great job that lets him bring his family to Singapore. We move into a three-storey house — more space than I knew what to do with —  with a domestic maid and a little pond in the front yard, which I filled with Koi that I fed each day religiously. It’s terribly hot there, a thick, humid 100F all year round, and we promptly switched our wardrobes to t-shirts and shorts. The sky was clear as a stream, an unending, cloudless blue.

 

Life was good, but my parents didn’t account for the consequences of plopping a child into a school year, halfway through. Confused by the complexity of the sociopolitical system of friend groups and social circles and “you-can’t-sit-with-us”s, I turned to reading constantly, and began writing online, under the comforting guise of anonymity. I posted hideously embarrassing stories on art sites and picked rhetorical fights with anyone I could find on online forums. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I didn’t mind writing, after all, when it didn’t involve a beating. In fact, it was nice to wield words like a tool to inspire, and a weapon to win. But beyond that, I wanted to create — narratives, lore, universes, and most of all, I wanted to pique emotions and joy: for myself, and for others whom this world may not have been so kind to.

 

All of my family members have been strongly inclined to mathematics and sciences, and while I was certainly more inclined to the arts, I’d catch myself lapsing into puzzlement at the logic of rhetoric: what makes good writing good? How can a series of words ordinarily mean nothing, but when put together adequately, trigger tears and laughter? How can one word fit flawlessly into a sentence meant to persuade, while a different but synonymous word in its place could put someone off thoroughly and mangle the meaning of said sentence? I was learning that there was a method to writing well, that there were techniques and rules that I could learn; that there was more of a process to writing than getting hopelessly drunk and picking up a pen, as my teachers had joked about.

 

I wanted to pursue this in higher education eventually; but my community in Singapore, as with many places in Asia, still scorned the notion of (what they thought to be) such an unstable career. Many a family-friend gathering started with the joke, “you’re lucky you’ll never miss your daughter because as a writer, she’ll be too broke to move out of your house.” My parents brushed off these tasteless comments and encouraged me to pursue my passion, but I think that to some extent, we were all worried about it, too. I know I was.

 

A few years in, we move again, to California. Once again, I am thrown into an unfamiliar environment. Just two days after I settle into my new home, my parents push me to start going to classes — since I was already transferring at the end of the freshman year, they worried I would fall behind too much. My accent was thick, and with years of docility and the fear of authority quite literally walloped into me, I spoke as little as possible.

 

The first English Lit. teacher I met in America was a chubby little old lady. When we had our first writing assignment, she pulled me aside and assured me that I didn't have to submit a paper, as I had not having read To Kill a Mockingbird with the class. The look in her eyes was best described as pity. I was too afraid to correct her — I had read the book so many times that I almost knew it by heart — and turned in the assignment, anyway. Shortly after the paper was graded, she sought me out and referred me to become a TA in a senior-level class, in which the teacher encouraged me to read any book I wanted from his bookshelf, if I finished helping grade papers before the class ended.

 

I was more sure than ever, now, that writing was a valid choice of career in America. That I wanted to pursue it. Two years after that, I received my acceptance letter to Syracuse University’s Writing and Rhetoric program; and well, the rest’s history.

 

Sometimes, I grow complacent in my new life, and then I remember the gray city I spent so much of my life in — my friends and aunts and uncles and cousins. It drives me, more than anything else in the world. If good writing and rhetoric is so vehemently regulated in a nation ruled by tyrants, it has to be worth something. It has to be able to make a difference.

 

I want to make that difference.

 

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I went back to Tianjin last summer - filled my lungs with the hot, sooty air and my heart with memories. The city had moved on. The sky was sometimes a very, very pale blue now, the streets less cramped — the results of ham-fisted environmental conservation efforts put in place by a desperate government. My uncle told me on the way from the airport that if your license plate ends in an odd number, it’s literally illegal for you to drive on certain days of the week, and vice versa — to reduce environmental pollution. Still dreadfully authoritarian, as always, but it’s a start.

 

My old neighborhood was long gone, a pile of rubble — erected in its place the shiny metal pillars of a mall. The old rain tree I used to play and sit in for a quiet getaway from the other kids, had been reduced to a stump. Maybe I should have felt some kind of sadness or nostalgia at that, but I didn’t, really. It was never really my home. Life goes on.

 

The smell of alcohol and smoke lingered at family reunions with my cousins, aunts, uncles —  who, despite my fears, don’t resent me for leaving them behind. They eagerly awaited my stories of USA, if it’s “like the movies”. With the money I’ve made from a job I’ve held for a little over two years now — writing narratives, advertisements and changelogs for a multi-thousand-player video-game platform — I treated them to the grandest dinner I could find. Jokes about my career choices no longer came up at the table, not even once.

 

The traffic was still almost as bad as when I was a child. There were fewer cars because of the environmental policies, but the human refusal to heed traffic lights transcends any government law. (Poverty is also so bad that people have also taken to throwing themselves at moving cars to feed their families with the compensation. So really, we just tried not to drive.) My youngest cousin — Yuan Yuan, twelve years old then — grabbed my hand with contagious eagerness to show me the stops on newly-built metro line. She bounced with excitement as the train rumbled into the stop in a bellow of warm, smokey air. I wish I could see the smile behind her thin white pollution mask.

 

I invited her to visit my apartment in Syracuse — an empty invitation; we both know that her family had applied for a visa three times and was rejected in succession. With the new political atmosphere, I don’t expect it’ll be any easier for them to enter the country, to ever visit and see what my new life is like. Just another thing I’ll be fighting to change, I suppose.

 

My brother owns a salon close by. I don’t visit.

 

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It’s winter again.

 

There’s nothing but glimmering white for miles, the air hazy with only gentle snowflakes. It’s my second year in the Writing and Rhetoric program of Syracuse University - five years that I’ve lived in America. I’ve just dropped Baba off at the airport after his visit for Spring Break. The plush toy he brings me this time — a tiger, my Chinese zodiac — is the size of a body pillow.  “Because you grown big too now,” he says in endearingly imprecise english.

 

I am incredibly lucky to be here, with a roof over my head, warm food, and the chance to graduate with a bachelor’s degree doing what I love. Yet, much of my experiences affect my life today, and the thought that there is so much wrong in the world haunts me endlessly. The impossibility of my goal — to make a difference in all that wrong through my writing —  follows me like a shadow and on particularly gloomy days, I wonder if I will ever be skilled enough to achieve it.

 

What I have learned from it all is this: sometimes your past shapes you — your personality, your nervous tics,  your fears and anxieties. Sometimes, what once happened to you makes you silent and afraid, whittles your nights into sleepless ones filled with doubts.

 

But sometimes — and it happens more often than one might think — you become who you are today in spite of your past — you can find passion in strange places, courage that you never thought you had in you. You can find beauty in living on without being crippled by the things you’ve left behind, and gratification in remembering all that which you were strong enough to live through. You can find it in yourself to stop casting furtive glances behind you, and take all the potential in your future head on.

 

It’s winter again, and the view from Crouse College is stunning, sun-kissed sky bright blue smeared with the pink of the setting sun.

 

Today, I don’t look back.