It has become pretty much impossible for me to keep up to date with deviantART while I'm here, so I'm disappearing in a puff of literary smoke, leaving behind the faint aroma of apology and best wishes. Perhaps you'll see me again at Christmas.

I've been inadvertently pondering for some time how to sum up the four weeks I spent in China. I kept a diary while I was there (the first time in my life that I'd managed to sustain one), and condensing that would be nearly impossible. People (beautiful, courteous, British people) keep asking me how it was and what I did. I keep replying with 'crap' and 'nothing', because I cannot lie. I cannot fabricate experiences I didn't have out of thin air. But it gets wearying, for them and for me (and in fact so many of them have already moved on, psychologically and emotionally if not physically). So I didn't want to waste any more words expressing my self-indulgent discontent. Instead, I flicked through the emails I sent and received while I was there and found hidden in one of them a little passage that I wrote for a fellow writer, english teacher, and inspirational friend. It isn't by any means a polished piece of writing. In fact, I don't think it even qualifies as a piece of writing. But it was my one bit of glimmer in Harbin, the brightest light I could find, and I leave that with you...

I'm staying at my grandparents' old house on Mulan Street, which is in one of the poorest areas in Harbin. Buildings look like they've been pissed on from the roof down. People seem to emerge out of dark holes, tripping over small dogs that shiver with hunger. The blocks of flats are wired up to each other by thick ropes of illegal electricity supplies. You cannot escape the smell of rotting watermelon. But at night, for a few days each year (a few days that I witness everytime I'm in Harbin), when all the dirt and the poverty and the daily struggles are hidden in blackness (for there are no streetlights), people come out onto the streets and make fires. You can find them at every crossroad in the poor areas. Farmers mostly, clinging onto old country customs. They squat, their leathery brown faces lit orange by the glow of the flames. They are burning paper money in remembrance of the dead. It's difficult to say whether it is a happy thing or a sad one. My mother tells me it's their equivalent of Halloween, but there is no fear or laughter. There is only the fire, and the glassy, bloodshot eyes that watch it, and the brown hands that stir it. And then, if you watch them long enough, they begin to clump together, and offer each other sweetcorn to fight off the cold of a Harbin night. The air fills with a good smell. A smoky, xiang one. They eat. And when they are done eating, they leave, retreating back into black holes. The only sign that they were ever there, the little piles of ash to be trodden on in the morning.

Came back from China two days ago and will be going to university in eleven days so it's a bit hectic at the moment. Photos from the past month will very slowly find their way onto here, as well as a proper update at some point...maybe.

Tomorrow morning I leave for China. I leave behind friends old and new - some of whom I won't see again before they/I disappear off to uni - and the stagnant scenery in which I have paced like a caged animal for two months. Instead, I head towards heat, bodies, food poisoning, nosey strangers and the complete absence of personal space. I am sleep-deprived, beaten down by a weeklong headache, unable to feel properly, and the very thought of the trip makes me crinkle up inside. I am so close to tearing. But I have to believe that maybe, just maybe, this has come at the right time. I have an empty notebook in my bag and an empty CF card in my camera, and they are waiting to be filled.


à bientôt!

It's official, in October I shall be studying English literature at Cambridge university.