Smoke is the smell of nostalgia — so is bus exhaust and steaming, sun-baked concrete. The putrid perfume of garbage trucks could whip my feet off the sidewalk and plant them on the streets of Shanghai, where I lived for seven years.
Daydreaming of the rosy-misted days of my childhood, devoid of self-consciousness, is easy. I could close my eyes and be rescued from the lasso of the wild, wild future.
Folded in memories, I am dragged to mountains, forests and riverside towns. We were the three musketeers — my mom, my brother and I. Weekends spent lurching from sleep at 4 a.m. to catch a bus that would drag us to another province, to march up some mountain named River Ox. Out to conquer the world, my brother and I wrapped bandannas on our foreheads, waved sticks like longswords and slew ferocious beasts.
We roasted mythical monsters on barbecue bars and leaped across brutal waves. We clung to a sailboat pole for our lives as the ocean roared beneath. We drank ourselves dizzy on rice wine and stood guard in a yurt. At some point, these memories blur together like a montage.
In the days we didn’t sail our boat into battle, I spent my hours in the then-idyllic embrace of my grandparents’ neighborhood, my castle. The blocky buildings were surrounded by a moat. I remember the bridge, red and royal, so anyone walking down had the aura of an empress returning to her Summer Palace. On days when the sun was so hot it whipped sand into the air and into our eyes, my grandparents and I rode the rattling bus down to the community swimming pool, where we could swim for free because my grandfather was a veteran.
Each scene was stuck in amber. Crystallized, I could examine them forever. Even as they gathered dust, I still plucked them from the drawers of my mind to admire each one. Soon, picking up a love for storytelling, I wrote about the same things over and over again: China and childhood. It seemed like all the glorious things that had happened to me, and that I’d done, were many misty years ago. The things I understood were no more, maybe less, than the next girl.
But that simply wasn’t true.
I didn’t have to turn my back on the comfort of the past to move forward. In fact, it was the voyages my mom led us on that laid the lure that I have followed ever since. All that walking rendered any view out the window a potential adventure to embark on with my own two feet. I am grateful for my mom’s willingness to plan those trips for less-than-willing children, and I am grateful for the agency I myself have gained with age and experience. Now on the cusp of college-hood, it’s long overdue to put that power to use.
I remember the summer of my sophomore year: my brother and I returned to China for the first time since fifth grade. Our mom had already been there for a week, and we were taking a taxi to a hotel to meet her. I don’t know exactly what I expected to see, but I imagined a place of reminiscence, where I would pick up where I left off and once again feel my roots grow with familiarity. But on our way driving through the city, the things I saw out the smoke-filmed window were foreign. In a familiar place, I was starting to journey again. On the way, the driver asked us if we went to school overseas. Yes, my brother answered for me — in the U.S.
Approaching an intersection in front of the hotel, he glanced at us through the rearview mirror. Which way?
“Go forward,” I said in Mandarin. “Go forward, go forward.”
