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To the little girl in a village home I never met
I've never been proud of you, your bottled-up self and penny-saving habits. Time and again you discouraged me, saying would you stop dreaming. Only the rich could afford a hobby. Van Gogh was never famous until he died. I forgot the girl you once were, who sat all day in a dim village home — faded wallpaper, a dial-knob TV, a tarpaulin bed on the verandah — thinking today I'm going to die but no one is even watching because your mother had a long way to walk back uphill at the pace of bound feet. Your father existed in your imagination across the green hills, and your ears still echoed with his instruction: just call HSBC if you need money and they will give you. Plenty. How on earth your mother escaped from Shandong to Kowloon and survived, I couldn't imagine. The day I stood in a gown at the Sheldonian, listened to all that Latin, I couldn't shrug off this girl I never met, who never finished the village primary and used to stare at the sea all day, dreaming of Australia.