“At crossroads of fantasy and reality.”

I like to say that my home is found in three places. One of them is in NYC, where I live and breathe; the other is in Beihai, where I spend my summers, and the last is contained solely in fantasy. 

Not very long ago, my parents confessed to me that when I was very young they had me tested for mental disorders. They’d tell me that I would spend ages obsessing about one certain thing, whether it be a stuffed animal, a singular grain of rice or the last commercial of a television programme. I tested negative for all of the disorders, however; even the psychiatrist agreed with my parents that perhaps instead of a mental disorder, I was most likely just a weird and pecuilar child. 

Yet the obsessions didn’t involve anything remotely sinister. I distinctly remember that even when I was very young I would become intensely bored quite easily. Oftentimes, I would just fixate on a certain object and random stories would materialize from my thoughts. Perhaps the stuffed animal was not simply a toy; perhaps it was only frozen and static because it was a secret spy for its stuffed animal country. Maybe the grain of rice was once consumed by a dinosaur from the Mesozoic Era and was sent back to the environment—it would be a shame if I’d consumed it after millions of years of history. It was those types of imaginary stories I would love to create to entertain myself. Not many people quite understood why or how I’d think, or find these stories even slightly intriguing. 

When I went back to Beihai in the summer of 2010, however, I’d finally found myself my perfect partner in crime—my talented and beautiful cousin. She was, and still continues to be the fixation of my mother’s family. My cousin is a person of great virtue. She is the type of person who would never boast or brag, choosing instead to keep acheivements modest and secret.

She was the older sister that I never had for all the summers I spent back in Beihai. We would share secrets, tell imaginary stories, and fantasize about our long-lost dreams. But out of all things, we shared a common obsession of the world and all of its stories. We wanted to travel. We were like ravenous pirates, thirsty for knowledge and adventure. I was obsessed with every country, every city, every capital, and spared no favorites, but she loved Paris the most of all the cities. She loved its charm, its fashion, style, and people—she knew a decent amount of French because of it. She loved the phrases ``déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu,” just all the vu’s, because to her it all seemed oddly romantic. To this day I still remember that déjà vu translates to “already seen,” or “already lived.” Jamais vu translates to “never seen,” or “never lived,”  and presque vu translates to “almost seen,” or “almost lived.”

In the local bookshop we would spend hours just scouting out books and point out all the pictures, all the text of the lands that we would travel to, far away, just one day. She would read me the Chinese charcters that I wasn’t able to decipher, and slowly I began talking to her in a jumbled mix of English and Chinese. Gradually we both had a shaky understanding of three languages—of Chinese, English, and French. 

This continued for summers and summers on end. In the summer of 2015, however, my mother started working and the job didn’t include summer vacations. That did not discourage my cousin and I, however—we would talk constantly on WeChat—never on text, but by video call. She would always call in the morning and I would answer at night. In some ways our personalities were opposties, yet clashed beautifully. I was a night owl, and she was a morning bird; I was a Slytherin, she was a Gryffindor; I loved music, she loved sports.

But by 2015 both my cousin and I had duties outside our imaginary worlds. She was enrolled in a highly competitive secondary school and rarely had the time to talk. I was drifting away from Chinese and gradually my sentences became fragmented and my words became distorted. The stories I had morphed into my daily life, of all sorts of mundane repetition as the elementary freedom I’d once enjoyed melted away into harsher responsibilities. 

I didn’t see her again until last summer. I could no longer hold fluent conversations in Chinese, and after four years apart we had grown distant. She was very much the reflection of myself. We now were similar in height—she’d always been taller—and she also went to a highly ranked high school.

 But now everything was different. I knew nothing about this person. I did not know if she still liked stories, or Paris—I did not know about any of her new passions, hobbies, or interests. She was very much a stranger to me. When we met again after those four years the first thing that I asked was that if she still knew any French. Because I had taken French class in school, I still had basic knowledge of it. She smiled and replied perfectly—“Oui, et toi?” 

I told her that I still knew a bit of it. Then it was her turn to ask me in Chinese if I’d still remember any of the stories that we’d shared, almost a decade ago. 

It was my turn to smile. The memories were so familiar, almost like reality, yet so distant they could be fantasy. It was just at the tip of my tongue, so I replied—“Presque vu.”