It has been a secret being occasionally disclosed to others. I am 19, and when I arrive in my father’s flat in Shanghai, in 6 hours after I first arrive in Shanghai train station, there are imaginary soul guards standing besides my father’s bed, my father withholding a curious yet disdaining smile that translates into an adult’s ignorance over an adolescent, when I, clearly infatuated and lost, walk in with silence.

Before this scene, I am on a train from Suzhou to Shanghai, and then on buses leading to a university located in the amidst of the abysmal city skyscrapers. And no one else knows that I am on that train and the buses. Months in college for the semester, suffocated by the escalating hormone scent emanated by my classmates, determined to cuckold that girl whom I have not met, I am pursuing an artistic dream with the ferocious single-mindedness known only to sentimental youth.

I have had pretty girls, I made sure to leap over that risky threshold early on, but HH, I will call her, was the first in reality I wanted but have not got. She was a student at a high-school and then in college. She had the beautiful face as my parents accidentally divulged in their conversation I overheard, and the demeanor pleasing to the older. But I have not seen her, which both frustrates me and enchants me. In my mild imagination, I try to control it somehow to avoid the disappointment; she would have long hair and grape-shaped eyes, a feature considered a must by my mom.

I was then a tormented dreamer, a bit of a poet, who quoted Lawrence and Beidao in lonely times and knew about Virginia Woolf and Jia Pinwa. In an age prior to 20, ignoring a girl is the only pity pride a boy like me can possess and use, an internal struggle of attention and solitude. So when I sensed the strangeness and distance of HH, I poured out my artistic soul in a Geteesque way as such depicted in his "Young White’s Sorrow." The only effect of that is to make my heart beat fast and my eyes stare out windows at a subject I have no memory of. I miss that age and that full yet empty emotional mirage.

After a few letters exchanged, written with intensive zeal and vain, and now I am walking on a smelly street besides the Suzhou River, a pond filled with dark-water vastly winding through the heart of Shanghai city, in a spring evening. I hear the murmur of my thoughts along with that of the city, cabs one by one passing by as motors within a cat’s body. The shoe shops and knock-off CD and Video shops light the shadow of the half narrow street and street food challenges the night’s hunger. A sense of void. And on campus, with clean trees and sappy students, I meet my poetic imagination. She called my name with a sound sweetening my ears. I am impressed by how irresistible she is.