October 8, 2016

I was uncomfortable with getting naked because for some reason I was afraid that my body would reveal my nationality. It wasn’t long before people were having sex in the room while I stood fully clothed in the corner. I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror to see that the skin on my face had dried up and become keratinized. I put my hand up to my face and felt lizard-like scales.

–

We were on a floating structure above the coast during sunset. The group of us were talking about the past when someone mentioned a “Mr. Pollack”. “Oh isn’t he building the new school?” someone asked. In the meantime someone else had whipped up a photo of where they were planning to build the new campus. I thought that the photo of the amusement park looked a bit familiar but couldn’t identify from where. “I’ve been there!” I pointed out.We quickly came to the conclusion that it was somewhere in Guangzhou so someone replied, “you don’t even know Cantonese!”, insinuating that my inability to communicate in the language cast doubt on my recognition of locations in the area. Apparently this response really shook me up and I started to cry, “I lived in Hong Kong for five years, […] in Guangzhou for ten years, and I can’t speak Cantonese. I lived in Taiwan for three years and can’t speak Taiwanese. What do you want? I never leave the house!”

“Why not?” they asked.

“Because I had no friends. I’m bad at making friends.”…

… Some time had passed and we were walking in a line between two fields of rice. The sun hadn’t completely set yet. “We’ll probably never get to be friends” I added.