“You never talked back then, I don’t really remember much of you.” Joseph sat across from me, examining my face and sipping green tea. “But you look the same.”
“There’s no way I look the same. To say the least, I grew taller.” I bursted out laughing. “But I can’t believe I never talked! Nowadays I talk so much that it annoys even me. I probably just never talked in public and never to you.”
We sat in a restaurant that day, reminiscing for three hours straight. Yes, Joseph is one of my past classmates from China, who moved to New York City last summer, like I did.
But one may find it curious as to why neither of us seems to actually know what we’re talking about. Well, I think we have a good excuse for our blurred memories. I’m lucky to have even recognized him in the street. He was a classmate of mine back in first grade, when I was still living in Shanghai, China.
I was seven when I transferred to Hui Min Elementary School in Shanghai, from a school in another district in the city, starting the second semester of first grade. At that time, my parents were not in China so I had to live in the boarding school. Joseph (back then he didn’t have this English name, of course) like most kids, went straight home every day after school was over. And as he said, I seemed to have something against talking then. So we never really talked to each other.
But I’ve always remembered him very clearly, perhaps because he sat just one desk away from me, or perhaps because his “prefect” (head of the class) status required him to collect homework assignments everyday. I don’t know exactly why, but I do.
After he found me through my Chinese blog and met up for the first time in NYC, we hung out with each other frequently. He said he wanted to make more friends, since he just moved to New York. So I introduced him to my husband, and some of my friends. It amazes me how well we’ve been getting along, considering we barely spoke when we were kids. On the other hand, meeting someone who existed in my life 15 years ago is an amazing experience. It’s almost like getting back in touch with the 7-year-old me again.
Looking back, there are so many people I grew up with in China, whom I wish I had gotten to know better or had kept in touch.
I’ve always felt that, in the modern world of vast social networking, there are just a bit too much of introducing and meeting new people, and a bit too much of forgetting. I really don’t like to forget people, but unfortunately, sometimes my limited brain capacity just let go of all those names and faces.
But now, after my re-encounter with Joseph, my elementary school mate, I’ve come to realize that most of the time, we cannot control whom we meet in our lives and whether we can develop special bonds. However, we can control whether we cherish these people while we’re in touch with them, and leave it up to yuan (缘, a Chinese word meaning serendipity or destiny) to decide whether our paths cross in the future.