Eighteen Years

Nov, 05, 2025

November 5, 2007 — Eighteen years ago today, I boarded a flight from Shanghai Pudong to Vancouver. Somewhere above the Pacific, I took this photograph through the airplane window with my Contax T3, loaded with a roll of black-and-white 135 film. Since then, this image has marked a turning point in my life.

The scratches on the airplane window, the unfolded wing, the suspended space between two continents, above the earth and beneath the sky—they all felt like a portent, a scene pregnant with meanings I could not yet grasp at that moment. I was covered with invisible wounds, yet I spread my wings, leaving behind my homeland and flying toward the unknown.

At the airport that day, just before boarding, he was still somewhere making a phone call to her, long enough that the airline staff had to announce his name over the loudspeaker. We rushed onto the plane—a threshold between a life I knew and one I could not yet imagine, which carried me into eighteen years of solitude, reinvention, and becoming.

She—I learned of her in the very same month I received my permanent residency card, while preparing for our great move. She worked with him at the same art academy, the daughter of a man whose name could almost open any door in the city. That night, after the opening of a major exhibition they had organized together, he didn’t come home. I waited all night. The dishes I had prepared to celebrate his success were put back into the refrigerator. 

After I arrived in Vancouver, he helped me rent a basement room. Two weeks later, he flew back to Shanghai. I knew no one there and could barely speak any English. That winter, it snowed heavily—the first real snow I had ever seen after so many years of living in Shanghai. I walked alone around the small park beside my basement, my footprints tracing circles upon circles in the snow. A few months later, I signed the divorce papers.

From that day to this, eighteen years have passed—in the blink of an eye. 

//