Rabbit stews

Everyone has some childhood memories, says my Chinese textbook. Some memories are good, some are bad, but all of them are equally engraved somewhere in the depths of our hearts. Well, let me dig a bit, see what I can find.

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Sundays were a source of anxiety for me, when I was a kid. Don’t get me wrong, I never had to attend mass or anything like that: I was born into an agnostic family. But however agnostic, my family still had to respect the sacred tradition of Sunday lunch. Almost every Sunday, for lunch, my parents and I would go visit my maternal grandparents, who lived just a few blocks away from us: for my mom, going every Sunday was a sort of filial obligation. And despite her brother and sister being objectively less burdened than her by any kind of filial duty, they would still meet, the three of them, at least every other Sunday at the elders’ house. But my mom, being extremely filial, was always the first to arrive. She would pressure me and dad to hurry up and get ready, and than, seeing how sloppy the two of us were, she would just leave first, reminding us to hurry up as she left the house. Normally, me and dad would follow suite, between fifteen and thirty minutes later.

Upon deleting Instagram

It’s sad that the notes from my trip to China—which could have been among the most interesting content published on this blog—remain little more than a sketch in my head, their outline as clear and perfect in my mind as they are vague and unfinished in practice. Writing is, truly, a challenge against oneself: it requires patience to find the right words to express one’s mental images and, above all, perseverance to battle the voices inside one’s head that whisper, “You won’t make it.”

滷肉飯

A few days later, I found myself in Hong Kong, sitting in the waiting room for the train that would finally, and for the first time, take me into mainland China. It was a Friday afternoon in early April, a week after that evening at the KTV that my colleagues had organized in my honour. So many things had happened in that week that it already felt like a month had passed.