Midnight’s violet secrets lingered on the swirling enigmatic mist—an emblematic acquaintance of Dublin—that obscured the crispness of the early summer air. Drizzle, another frequent visitor of the city, came along with the mist as always. Desmond pulled his coat tight against the cold. “He looked so real,” he murmured, turning to Fia, trying his best to maintain a calm expression. The freezing temperature of the night was making it difficult, and Fia’s warm smile wasn’t helping—at all. His vision drifted to her dark eyes—they were as dark as midnight. “Was he real?”
Buxuan Wang
September 23, 2024
It’s been exactly a decade since I had my first nightmare at the tender age of three. At the start of everything, I was in my room on the 14th floor of the apartment building where I spent my early years. I lay on my bed, unaware of the intrusion of a “dream”. My mind was telling me to go back to sleep, or else my mom would come in and admonish me as she often did when I didn’t follow her instructions. In a flash, I teleported myself to the living room—the same one where I grew up in before I moved. The room’s table, adorned with a world map pattern, is surrounded by chestnut-colored sofas draped with gold fabric that casually rested on the tips of the sofa legs. My memory of what happened that night is hazy, unable to explain how I teleported. But I know I did. What I saw was more like a picture that I stood apart from instead of an event that happened to me.
Phoebe Fan
June 06, 2024
During our three-week stay at Belgrade, my friends and I lived in an apartment building that our parents rented out for us to relax and play tennis. Every morning we would head out early to the tennis court to train for the day and on that very court, we would gaze up into the hazy air and talk about our dreams and plans of the future.
Youjia Deng
September 18, 2023
A hundred miles off the Eastern coast of the New Republic, a pre-Disaster helicopter was about to land on a desolate island. From the air, the whole island seemed tilted to its side, with shallow waters on its western shore and vertical cliffs hanging from the east. Greenery covered most of the land; a few wooden huts and tents clustered around the center. Armed guards were stationed at every post on the perimeter of the island; electric fences enclosed the inhabited areas.
Alex Huang
April 24, 2023
Growing up as a musician, I threw countless hours into practicing guitar and singing, and yet the possibility of forgetting a chord or lyric on stage always haunted me. Every time I battled with my anxiety backstage, considering the last-minute decision to quit, I yearned for a life where unpredictability does not exist in those important moments.
I liked to be in control of my surroundings and put in hard work to make outcomes more predictable. Even from a young age, I planned out every family trip with a detailed agenda that outlined each restaurant and resort we would visit. Once, a terrible storm hit during mountain climbing. Yet another time, the GPS stopped functioning on a road trip. I always found my elaborate handbook could not suit the sudden change of plans.
Richard Ye
March 30, 2023
Under the delicate care of his parents, Meng Lei lived a rather spoiled life his entire childhood. Like many of his peers, Meng’s family acquired their wealth and status in the society through harvesting tea leaves and opening brewhouses in the countryside that granted them the ticket to join the upper-class elites within one of China’s most populated cities. This business eventually offered them opportunities unimaginable to hundreds and thousands who still struggled at the bottom. However, unlike many of their kinds of people from the upper class, Meng’s parents were not the typical Chinese people you would find, as neither of them belonged to the Han ethnic majority that comprised of almost 92% of the Chinese population. Instead, they come from a long heritage of the Hmong people that resided in the stockaded villages of the Yunnan rainforest, tucked far away from city dwellers, and practiced their own traditional ways of living. But despite his parents flourishing in the city without the support of their community, the villagers had abandoned their parents because of their “betrayal to their ancestral code”, according to Meng’s father. Until now, neither side has ever reached out to each other to reconcile, and it’s as if Meng’s parents were forever vanquished from the eyes of the Hmong tribe. But things are about to undergo a dramatic changeover very soon.
Mingo Yang
March 13, 2023
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