The girl who lived in Beijing lived in a world that knew her. She didn’t have a brother, and she didn’t have a sister, but her grandmother lived down the street from her in a 大高楼 that stood at attention like a soldier decorated by a million terracotta plates. If her world could be described by color, it would be green: the color of abundance and fortune… if by sound: the swinging and swaying of voices in her mother tongue that ricocheted off the tin roofs and cracked sidewalks. Despite all the things she could hold all at once in her hands, she still longed for things such as different worlds and currencies, though she never had to ache for stability or the idea of a singular home. Chinese was still her first language and very early on, she learned to love ancient Chinese poetry, which sometimes brought her to tears – that is, the comprehension did, not the black hole of forced translation. For lunch, the girl would bring 菠萝包 and sometimes 五花肉 to school and no one pinched their noses and no one asked her what she was eating… On the street, no one ever told the girl to go back to where she came from (which was three blocks to the left), in fact, no one ever recognized her… she never stuck out terribly in a Beijing crowd. Last week while rifling through her grandfather’s old journal she could read every word. That’s how she learned, in particular, his heaviness. If you’re wondering what her downfall was, the girl was just as restless… if not even more than you’d expect. I’m not sure if she wrote poetry, but she saw poetry in everything: water pouring into the lip of a 泡菜坛子 sealing away vegetables, air, time; and the slowness of tea leaves spilling inside a porcelain cup. If you’ve ever asked her directions on the street, you’d know she grew up speaking with a Beijing accent and the “ars” and “ers” curled in and out of her voice like the curves of a painted 西葫芦. Because she never left, there were so many things she simply did not forget: how to write her mother’s name, recounting all 24 solar months, knowing exactly when the mid-autumn festival fell each year… Of course there were more things she’d never know: the magic of the Pacific Ocean, and the formidable power behind a New York street, but with her hands, she could trace all of the 胡同 in Beijing. On some mornings, the girl would wake from a fever dream in which she was dropped like an alien inside a new world, all on her own…