Image credit: Ray Zhou

         You arrive twenty minutes earlier, clutching your personal statement, at your favourite teacher’s office. There is no name card on her door. You stand clumsily, rehearsing the self-introduction. You watch the time. Perfect, two o’clock. You knock on the door. You wish that she will be your academic referee for your PhD application. You write good essays and get good grades in her classes. You are impressive. She arranges this meeting to know more about you.

         “Yes?” She answers from inside.

         You go into her office.

         You talk about your undergraduate experiences, your creative work, and your published translations. She is the sort of person you admire: intelligent, knowledgeable, logical, and considerate. After finishing your introduction, you discuss the research proposal with her.

She says you have done a lot. The conversation was amicable, but you think that there was something left unsaid, something crucial to the reference letter. You try to say it, but you cannot. You do not have the courage. At last, you say, “Thank you,” and leave the office.

***

         He was in his gap year. He lived in Shanghai, a thousand miles away from his hometown, all alone. He rented a house near a university where the best professors of Chinese literature taught. He knew these professors, for he once translated their theses into English. He went to the university to audit and study literature, repeating this routine from morning to the afternoon.

         He did not have a student ID card, so he could not eat in the canteen. At noon, when the rest of the students went to lunch, he sat alone in a classroom with his bread and laptop, eating and translating literary theses, and waiting for one o’clock, when afternoon classes should begin.

         In the evenings, he went to his part-time tutoring job. It took two hours or more to commute from the university to his students’ residences. The four students he had privately tutored all received excellent results and entered top universities. He was happy upon hearing this news.

         On the weekends, he went to a tutoring institution and worked thirteen hours a day. He taught writing courses and spent hours and hours commenting on students’ compositions.

         He was not in good health. The stress from working and studying deprived him of sleep. He vomited eight times in the recent year and fainted once on the subway.

         He kept asking himself, “What does all this life mean?”

***

         You send her an email after the meeting and tell her about your secret. She is the only one you can trust in the university. You search her name on the department website. You search it on Facebook. You search it in the library. She puts no name card outside her office, and no introduction on the department website. You write to her sometimes, but you do not know much about her.

         You find a creative writing journal published twelve years ago. She was then an undergraduate, and you were in primary school. You read three or four short stories she wrote twelve years ago. But you do not know much about her.

         You find an academic book with her name in the co-authorship. You leaf the pages. But you still do not know much about her.

         How could she, studying in the university from an undergraduate to a doctoral level, and becoming a teacher in the same department, leave nearly no trace of existence after all these years?

         What about your life? Complete the program. Move onwards to become a doctoral candidate. And then what after?

         You keep asking yourself, “What does all this life mean?”

***

         He had been away from home for five years. He was born a girl, but he always wanted to be a boy. At the age of 18 he went to Shanghai to study English literature. He refused financial aid from his parents and started his own life. He had been writing, translating, and tutoring. He earned money. He had no friends. He was always alone. He bought male hormones.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he decided to take a gap year to transition from a boy to a man, and from a student to a better student. When he received admission to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he resigned from all his part-time jobs and came to Hong Kong, alone.

         If someone asked why he did all that, he would answer, “I know who I am.”

***

         You write in an email to your favourite teacher: “I feel so blessed for having lived twice.”

You go with your friends to the department building. You find your favourite teacher smiling in one of the graduation photos. You suddenly realize, this building, this department, this faculty where several generations come and go, all of these, are meaningful to her.

         And all of these are a part of who she is today.

         What about you? You embark on a new life in this city, in this department. You become a new man. No one knows your past. Now you have friends. You have a future.

         You say to yourself, “I know who I am.”

         You do know. He became you. You became me. And I will become someone like her.

         All those painful memories and untold scars flood your mind, but peacefully, you accept them all. You buy a bottle of beer near the campus. You get drunk on the sidewalk. You hear the wuthering winds on the metro and start to tell your friends who you are.

***

         And I, in the midnight before graduating from this department, am writing this memoir as a dedication to this extraordinary year that gave me a new life. Here is the starting point of a new person. Here is the destination for a man to find himself.

***

Author Bio: Ray is a sort of ordinary young man at first glance. In this memoir, he tries to cram in most of his life experiences, including his struggle to be himself and to be a literature lover.