2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

PART II Chapter 47

"Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your lives."

This is the wedding planner talking, to brides on the eve before their wedding day. In a lot of ways, my return to Vancouver that day felt like the first day of the rest of my life.

It was early July. Stepping out of the Vancouver airport, the sky seemed unbelievably clear. Far and high. Everything looked so...HD. Especially coming from the metropolis of China, where smog presses down like grey gauze, and everything looks fuzzy. Now that I'm back, all I want to do is inhale, inhale, inhale, and inhale some more.

Zooming along the road, speeding past the birch trees, my heart hammered with excitement. The experiment is over. The dream is over. Now real life begins.

For the first couple of months, riding on the high of the trip, I powered through the first draft. Cheeks flushed the honeymoon glow. My parents already knew about the decision from the call from Bali, so they let me be. My jet lag and nocturnal habits, left me sleeping through the daytime heat and writing in the coolness of night. But my friends had yet to find out the big news. I wasn't sure how they would respond. Now, most of my friends are from business school. Openly and proudly, we strive for money and status. Our value in the eyes of each other, has a lot to do with the kind of job and salary we score before graduation. I love our school. I love my friends, but how do I put this nicely, business students have a tendency to espouse superiority complex. We like to grow our nostrils on the tops of our heads, and regard the world from there. Like all self-respecting business students, we don't trouble ourselves with paying much attention to kids from lower rungs of the ladder. Especially not the artsy ones.

Yet now, I've become one of THEM. I don't know how my business friends would react to that. Concealed skepticism maybe? Concern? No, don't do it? Scorn? I wondered if they would think less of me now that I'm no longer making money at a respectable company.

My friend David, an investment banker said, "You're lucky that you're a girl. You can travel and not work because you're not expected to make money. For guys, we don't have the same kind of luxury. We can't take these kinds of liberties or we won't find a wife!"

We both laughed. What he says is true. Though not completely true. As I found out firsthand the other day, when I spoke on the phone with a new romantic interest. This new boy was in his twenties, a friend of Dad's friend's husband's. While I was still traveling in China, Dad sent him my photo and he was keen to meet up. When I finally made it back to town a few weeks later, we had our first phone conversation, where we exchanged basic info. I thought everything went really well. I kept on waiting for him to ask me out, but it didn't happen. He never called back. Did he perhaps lose my phone number? How did someone go from being really interested to totally not? After one phone call? Dad said it must be the job, or the lack thereof. I found it hard to believe. But couldn't think of any other explanation for his sudden withdrawal. Unless it was my hypnotic voice that creeped him out?

Anyhow, I hoped dearly the same thing doesn't happen with my friends. For them to start dropping like flies, I would be devastated.

So my friends and I, we caught up over bubble tea. We guzzled the pearls in midsummer night's breeze. They listened to my tales of the road, joyful and giddy. And then wistfully examined their own palms for "writer's lines", confessing that as a child, or a teenager, or a student at uni, they too wrote stories, or poetry, or essays. Some published, some locked at the bottom of drawers never to be revealed again. I grinned, warm and fuzzy, at the knowledge that we're all closet-poets.

Nobody ever sneered or once said, "How completely crazy of you." They may have been taken aback by the news at first. They may have even wondered how long this fever is going to last, whether it's "gonna be forever. Or it's gonna go down in flames." They may wish they could take the same liberties with their own lives. Or they may not know what to think at all. But really, other people are too busy with their own lives to think deeply about yours. So don't worry too much about what they think. They will think what you think. If you're happy, they are happy.