In my childhood, my teacher Mrs. Hunter announced that our class would complete a pen-friend project. We would write letters to children in some African countries to make friends with them. So all of us needed to bring stationery (信纸) to school the next day.

Finding some beautiful stationery which was designed with lovely cartoon characters, such as Minnie Mouse and Snow White in the store, I asked my mother to buy it for me. At the store, we learned that a pack of ten pieces of such stationery cost close to seven dollars.

“You’ll have to use common paper,” my mother said. Then, she bought a pack of cheap common paper for me. Obviously, there weren’t any cartoon characters on the paper, so I was upset and disappointed. At that time, I didn’t know my mother was facing some financial (财政的) problems and was trying hard to support the family.

That night, my mother, a lover of schedules, sent me to the bed at the usual time of 9：30. But then instead of going to bed as she normally did, she remained in the living room. When I didn’t hear the voice of a news host through the TV, I wondered what exactly kept my mother up past her bedtime. Walking up to her I found she bent beneath our single lamp, sketching (画素描). When I asked what she was drawing, my mother just covered the page with her arms and ordered me to return to my bed. A week ago, I had begged her for a new box of crayons and she refused. Now I wanted beautiful stationery and she refused again. That night, I lay in bed looking at the moon, believing I was the unluckiest girl in the world.

The next morning, my mother’s eyes were black-ringed, and she looked so tired while preparing the breakfast of oatmeal (燕麦糊) in the kitchen. “Drink it before school,” she said, pointing at the food.

“I don’t want any,” I said unhappily, still upset she didn’t buy beautiful stationery for me.

“Mom, the cartoon characters are so beautiful”I said, with a smile.“Thank you.”

Postcards From The World

While the sun washed over the grass of my grandmother’s front garden, I sunk into the familiarity of one of her armchairs. Life, as I knew it, had changed. My beloved grandmother, my nanny, a stand-in parent in the absence of my father, had cancer. It was terminal, and could never be cured.

As she watched Getaway on television, she remarked to me that she’d never left Australia and that now she never would. I swallowed the sadness that came with knowing that chapters of her life were to be left unwritten.

At work, feeling helpless, I wiped tables and took orders and thought. HARD! The Saturday afternoon lunch rush was not enough to lull me from my thoughts. Wracked with grief, I pondered the power of Facebook and the collective strength of human empathy. I raced from the end of my shift to ask strangers on the internet for help.

“My Nanny Del has cancer. It’s terminal and she will never see the world. Please send her postcards so she can see the world from her armchair. I can offer nothing but gratitude.”

I resolved not to breathe a word of this; should nothing come, I couldn’t bear to carry her disappointment along with my own. Should something wander into our humble little letterbox, I would consider it a blessing and embrace it like I embraced her little, shrinking frame.

Days turned to weeks and Nanny’s health worsened rapidly in the early months of 2018. Life took me through my full-time study, babysitting and waiting tables, along with the responsibility of caring for a grandparent who was too sick to care for herself. As I helped Nanny in the early hours of those mornings, she would chat to me, sometimes joys, other times, sorrows. Whatever she shared became precious.

One afternoon, finally, a postcard from the United State arrived in our letterbox.

In the months that followed, her living room became a departure hall and our flights departed daily.