December 2022

When I was six, my family moved to a new house in the suburb, leaving the community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments in the city centre where we had lived for five years. The house was part of a new suburban development, and as such, everything in this neighbourhood was carefully designed: the streets, the playground, […]

The spring when I was turning eleven, my family made our first oversea trip. The destination was London, England, and we stayed there for ten days. It was my first time ever to go outside of my own country, and so, I observed everything that came into sight with great curiosity. The colourful underground trains,

One day, when I was about six, I was visiting one of my two childhood best friends at her place. It was the time when we both still lived in the community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, and we visited each other’s apartment almost every day. Just like at my home, there was a small YAMAHA

Growing up, I was always one of the tallest kids in my age group. When I entered primary school, I started growing even faster, and every year, I was about 10cm taller than the year before. By the time I was in Grade 5, my height reached 160cm, becoming as tall as my mother. At

In December when I was ten, my family visited my maternal grandmother’s house to do the end-of-the-year cleaning of their house. Since my grandmother and her family members were usually busy preparing food and gifts for the New Year, my family went there to take care of the cleaning. Their house was big and traditionally

In the autumn when I was in Grade 1, I was invited to my classmate’s birthday party at her house. It was the first birthday party I had ever attended, since in my family, birthdays were always celebrated within the family, and in the previous community I had lived in, none of my close friends

When I was four or five, my little brother got pneumonia and was admitted to a local hospital for some time. My mother accompanied him for the hospital stay. One day, my father and I went to visit them at the hospital to see how they were doing. My father put me on the back

Throughout my childhood, my parents were eager about my language education, and they gifted me with a new dictionary at each new milestone of my learning journey. The first dictionary I ever owned was a dictionary of my mother tongue written for young children. Seeing that I had started reading books, my father bought it