The beginning of any old story should always be exciting.
Stepping off the plane after a thirteen hour flight, hit by the blast of cold air and unfamiliar language, she walked the air bridge. In the immigration office, she waited beside her mom for the officer to call her name, her hand clutching the clear folder holding her identification documents.
She faced the officer sitting in his tiny booth and pushed her passport and other paperwork through the semi-circle opening in the thin pane of glass separating her from the Canadian, her fingertips trembling. The officer flipped through her documents for a long long time. Waiting, she stood.
I don’t remember my early days in Canada clearly.
It all went by in a blur—the auditorium at the mouth of the forest where we learned about how to react if we were to run into a bear, the boat trip to the little island just outside of Peddar Bay, where we saw otters, a barbecue at my advisor’s house by the seaweed-covered beach. One of my first culture shocks was what they called a barbecue—there wasn’t even a grill!
As I gradually memorized the locations of the buildings in my high school and the names of my peers, things slowed down and began to fall into place. In November, I was invited to a bonfire by a new friend, a year older than me. Let’s call him my bonfire friend. Someone in his friend group who was from Quebec had grown up gathering firewood for his family, so he had us gather wood from the forest and showed my roommate how to split wood. We roasted marshmallows. The Canadians in our group preferred to smoke their marshmallows slowly atop the wood at the bottom of the fire till the marshmallows turned a pretty shade of gold; I didn’t have that sort of patience and would always thrust my marshmallow into the fire, watch it burst into flames, and throw away the charred outer layer. Grinning at my new group of friends through the flickering flames, it was as if I had found a second home.
Soon, it was winter break. I went back home with outstanding grades, giddy, and to be perfectly honest, feeling just a bit obnoxious for having successfully made a place for myself at school. I went back to my old school, wearing new black boots I had bought in Canada that made me stand taller and straighter. As I walked to my friend’s classroom, I passed by someone I had stopped talking to after a huge argument. She was part of the clique of students that received bilingual education growing up and thought about studying abroad in the future. Well, I’d made it, so I stalked past her, heels clicking.
Covid hit soon after I returned to school in January, and my school shut down in March. After it was announced that juniors were to return home while seniors were to stay until they finished their IB finals, the seniors rushed to organize the Circle. The Circle was a tradition normally done at the end of the year, where seniors, holding hands, formed a circle and had us juniors form another circle around them. Slowly, the seniors would rotate, stopping for a couple moments in front of each junior to say something, before moving again. I spent most of my time staring awkwardly into space while the people beside me cried. Then came my bonfire friend. We had grown closer, although there was always some sort of weird distance between us, and looking back I could never be sure if we were actually close, or if I was simply playing the role of the kind of person I thought he would want to be close to. I thought I should cry at the thought of not being able to see him next year, so I did and averted my eyes. When I finally lifted my head, I saw that he wasn’t crying.
The night before we left, my bonfire friend and his friends set up tents in the forest, and we played board games inside for a couple hours. Then I walked back to meet the other friends I had made, one of whom was staying up the whole night for us. We talked in front of the crackling fire in his dorm’s common room until it was time to leave and get ready. Before dawn, I went to see my bonfire friend one last time. We hugged goodbye, and he said he was probably too tired to see us off at the bus stop. That was the last time I saw him in person.
At the bus stop, my friends crushed me so hard in their arms that for the first time in my life, I had the chance to cry out, “I can’t breathe!” while flailing my arms about, as they do in movies. But then the bus came to separate us, and we drove away in the darkness. Droplets of dew condensed on the bus window, coalescing into thin streams as they slid down.
That summer, I learned that someone had faked a conversation of me confessing to my bonfire friend that I had something for him and put it in their yearbook. My roommate insisted that he must’ve felt something for me. Neither of us ever said anything, and I’ve never been sure. But of course it doesn’t matter anymore.
I returned to Canada for my senior year in September. We were forced to quarantine in a hotel for fourteen days before being allowed on campus. Ashes from wildfires in Washington state drifted northward to where I was, and from my room’s balcony, I could see the sky bleed red every dusk. I started to write again; the plastic shower curtains, the blood red sun, the vague feeling of uncertainty for the year ahead, the ashes covering the sky and the sickness spreading across the land, an end to a world I knew how to navigate.
Things sort of got better when I went back to campus. I saw my friends again, and after Canada gradually lifted restrictions on student visas, new people came just when it started to snow. Life crept into the dreary campus for a brief moment. I remember watching the newcomers hugging my friends outside of the window while doing practice problems on my makeshift bed table, a piece of wood perched on my bed posts. A thin sheet of snow covered the ground; people were hurling snowballs at each other. One of the new kids who was hugging some other kid let go to join them. But he looked up first and met my watching eyes.
Stanford decisions came mid-December. The night before decisions were released, I sat in the girls bathroom, shouting at the chimney-shaped chute connected to the second floor’s bathroom that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was the acceptance letter. I was driving myself mad at this point. A couple months later, Berkeley decisions came out during my chemistry class. I watched the girl sitting in front of me open her portal, let out a squeal of excitement, gesturing at her friend to look, and I knew I probably wasn’t getting in.
I don’t remember my last days in Canada clearly.
After all the waitlists and rejections, everything started going by in a blur. I sat at the docks and gazed at a tiny spot of light bobble in the dark waters. I watched my friend scream when she learned she’d gotten into her dream Ivy before Ivy Day. My thoughts sank into the nights I walked to the school library thinking how nice it would be to just fall asleep under the blocks of ice still floating in the bay when she told me a couple days later that she was so excited for Ivy Day, since that’s when you get to see your hard work pay off.
There was also tension simmering on campus; feelings of restlessness boiled under frustration, and anger began to swell, pushing against the restrictions imposed by the school. Two hundred teens had been confined to campus for months at that point. Vandalism spread; the auditorium windows were broken, swear words were written with chalk on the road before dorm buildings, the fire alarm in the physics classroom was tripped when someone sprayed perfume everywhere to cover up the smell of them smoking weed. Within all this turmoil, some students asked to leave, while others were asked to leave.
But of course, there were still moments of sweet clarity in this haze. During creativity week, a small group of students gathered in the floating building and wrote. The trees bobbed up and down as I concentrated on the scenes that were trickling into and taking shape in my mind. That entire week, all I could think about was writing. One night, after getting out of the shower, I stayed up in the common room, beside the electric fire, and typed down my first story. The next day, I showed it to the faculty advisor for writing, and he said he loved it. I ended up making my story into a book with the art supplies our advisor brought. My own tiny, perfect book, which I displayed proudly during Nuit Blanche, an annual all-night art festival.
The night before I left, I knocked on my houseparents’ (dorm RA) door. Most people had already left that morning, including my best friend, and I was wallowing in the regret of not having tried to make more friends. I was also lonely. My houseparents, S and B, were watching a cooking show on Netflix with their kids. I asked if I could watch the show with them, and S repeated my question. I nodded. He let me in. And then he left. I think he just didn’t know it was my last night. With B, I watched American chefs make the most amazing Halloween-themed cakes, and together we tried to guess who would win the competition. The two ladies who crafted a glow-in-the-dark witch statue with cake ended up taking home the grand prize.
The grand prize I ended up taking home was my gift for my eighteenth birthday. A covid shot I traveled all the way to New Jersey to get, three precious weeks spent with a childhood friend. MoMA, the Met, Barnes and Noble, the sun never setting in New York. Her baby cousin crushed me at scrabbles and Super Mario Smash. When it was time to go, I spent my plane ride thinking I’d spend the rest of summer mad and bitter towards my parents after a rough senior year I wasn’t ready to forget. But when my mom opened the door and thanked the taxi driver for driving her daughter safely back, I found that I just felt glad to be finally home.
And then it was September again. UCLA. I struggled to find friends that first quarter but was somehow lucky enough to make one lasting friend, who is now my roommate. My intro computer science classes intrigued me—I mean, how cool is it to give life to something that moments ago was just words on the screen—so much that I eventually switched into CS, but that’s something to come later. Yet despite all my excitement and trying my best to put myself out there, I found myself alone often, and I began to reminisce on my high school days, focusing on the days of pure joy that I spent lying around, basking in the sunlight and gazing at the ocean with friends who knew me so well. I wanted nothing more than to go back.
In February, a Taiwanese girl on my floor introduced me to a Taiwanese guy who was an alum and had been in the area forever. We went to the Studio Ghibli exhibit at the Academy Museum. On our way back, he played studio ghibli songs as we whizzed past closing shops. Neon lights bled together, sparks of light danced, and I was on a merry-go-around, watching my childhood, glazed and golden, spinning around me until I fell down, too giddy and dizzy to stand up straight. Through the magic of LA, I thought I saw my past, present, and future. I didn’t want to wake up.
That summer, I went back to Taiwan. Things felt different. My friends were busy with college activities. I had an internship that required three days in person. Suddenly, it was making plans weeks ahead to meet for a couple hours instead of them being just a couple rooms away and always there. It felt like I was trapped in the wrong time, expecting that time would still be abundant even though it had thinned as my friends became semi-adults. Taiwan was, and still is, comfortable yet jarring because I was able to remain a child there.
The following summer, I had a wonderful time interning for a company in the bay. My American dream came true. Everyone was super nice and supportive in the beautiful office, and I successfully delivered my project. Both my manager and mentor seemed happy with what I had managed to build. The last day of my internship, my manager began our final one-on-one with “Congrats.” Yet three months in the bay made me realize how fast the time I had remaining with my family was slipping away. I was graduating in two years. Summer was no longer family time. The clock ran faster than I was able to.
This winter, the Taiwanese guy I went to the Studio Ghibli exhibit with left LA. People come and go, but I never expected it to be him. On the way back from our last dinner, he dropped another masters student off at her apartment. I was left alone with him. As he drove through the underpass beside Luskin, I told him about being rejected by Palantir. It was such a random thing to mention, but I didn’t know what else to say. Keep in touch? I never thought you’d leave before me? I brought up the girl who introduced me to him. How is she doing? I’ve lost track ever since I quit instagram. Now we were driving past BFit. She made new friends at work, seems to be doing great. We were at Holly now. I opened the door and shifted so that my legs hung above the pavement. My feet hit the ground. Take care, ok? He gave me a smile and drove away. Will I ever see him in person again?
Tomorrow when I open my eyes I will spend a second in panic about where I am because it doesn’t feel like my bed at home. I always do. And then I’ll remember that I’m in America, in LA, in that same glistening city I saw atop the Griffith Observatory last spring, living the golden dream that they granted me when they let me cross their air bridge and welcomed me in.
The officer looked up, his lips pursed and his fingers drumming the surface of his desk. For a second she thought she had heard him say Sorry, we can’t give you the visa. Her mom’s sharp intake of air, swelling and swelling until she squeezed out I’m sorry I don’t know why, at which it pops like a balloon that’s been pricked, the air whooshing out of the dreams they’d been dreaming, the friends she’d make, the life-changing experiences she’d have, the golden future that she’d work so hard for.
But of course that’s not what happened. The man in the booth gave them a tight smile, slid her new study visa toward her sweating palms, and said
Welcome to Canada.