December 2022

When I was small, there was a family friend who sent us a box of special biscuits every year. The biscuits were called pigeon biscuits. Huge and shaped like a pigeon, they came in a bright yellow tin box. As soon as a delivery person brought the box to the door of our tiny half-dilapidated […]

The summer when I was six, I participated in a five-day swimming program with my two best friends at a local swimming school. We all enrolled in the beginner’s class where we were going to learn how to float and how to kick the water in a proper way. During the week of the program,

When I was five and lived in a community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, once a week, my two best friends and I would go to the local YAMAHA music school together for a group lesson. We were always accompanied by all our mothers and our little siblings. Every week, the three adults, the three children

The summer when I was about eight, my mother took me to the local science museum for children. We had been there many times before, but that day, our purpose was to attend an afternoon workshop hosted by a woman rocket scientist. It was one of the museum’s summer programs designed for families and children,

When I was small, I was scared of darkness. My fear used to be manageable when my family lived in a tiny apartment where all the rooms were connected and the only dark room was our storage room. But even then, I used to feel anxious whenever I looked into the storage room in the

When I was five, my little brother went through a phase when he liked the concept of number one. In the community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments where we used to live in, all six apartment blocks were numbered. Since our apartment block was the oldest of all, its assigned number was the youngest number: number

In this memory, I’m five years old. Every day, I eagerly wait for the end of my time at kindergarten. It’s not that I don’t like spending time with my classmates or my teachers. But I prefer to be free and play with my two best friends on our favourite plum tree or go on

When I was six and lived in a community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, one of my friends and her family were going to be relocated in another city. One day, my mother and my friend’s mothers went to help the family with the painting of the old apartment, and we children were told to stay

The autumn when I was six, my family moved to a new house in the suburb. Shortly after our new house was set up, my parents held a housewarming party, inviting many of my friends and their families from our old community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments. They had greatly helped us with the move, and