The midsummer sun weaves its rays through the straw that lines the flea market, spinning the stalks into gold. Shade is scarce in the Village Square, but freckled and fortified by lemonade, I stroll past the stalls, the tables of treasure and trinkets level with my curious six-year-old eyes. The light catches on something smooth and white, and my eyes come to rest on a porcelain lady, dressed in traditional Chinese garb. These mass-manufactured caricatures of foreign femininity are a dime a dozen, I now know at the ripe old age of thirty-one, but to my young mind, I had made the greatest archaeological find of the century. Her graceful posture, her flowing robe, her gentle face—all floated from the table into my eager hands after my grandparents exchanged a few quarters for her. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would hold her outstretched hand and pretend she was leading me into a new world, so very different from the one encircling my impoverished rural childhood.

Six years later, my cousin would give me a set of chopsticks, having given up on mastering them. I appeared at the dinner table with them that night, proudly brandishing them with the expectation that my family’s fascination would match my own, but the warmth of pride and joy dissipated with my grandparents’ ridicule. “Put those down. You can’t even use them right. Forks aren’t good enough for you anymore?” I was left with cold resolve. Every night those chopsticks accompanied me to the table, and every night my family’s reprimands grew less severe, finally simmering to a scornful silence.

When high school arrived, my adolescence in full swing, little had changed. I still burned with questions that were more often punished than rewarded by my own blood, and I still dreamed of a world that I had long since despaired of ever seeing. Books being cheaper than plane tickets, the pages would roll beneath my fingers like so many waves, bearing me along on what I feared would be the only voyage I would ever take.

Then came college. And three-thousand miles away from the shackles I had shed at home, I felt as terrified as I did liberated, for I had journeyed for the first time into the unknown. The palm trees, barren mountains, and city lights of Southern California were unlike anything I had ever seen in the green wilds of the Virginian countryside. I knew nothing and no one in this new place, so I made a companion of the Chinese language. Its logograms had enchanted me all my life, beckoning me from scrolls hanging on the walls of antique shops, from stoneware teacups, and from ancient paintings in gallery halls. This tonal tongue seemed impossible to match with my English one.  The writing system being equally challenging, I drilled characters so often that they poured from the sky when I dreamed of rain.

Five years later, devouring takeout during my lunch break in the coffeeshop where I worked, I would hear a small voice spilling over the counter. “Wow! Those are cool. How do you eat with them?” Glancing down, I see a young boy, his wide eyes fixed on my chopsticks. I let him take a closer look and offer to teach him, but he suddenly grows shy, intimidated by his own ignorance while also longing to dispel it. The recognition of this feeling is immediate, as is the recognition of my six-year-old self in this child. He becomes a regular at the shop, and I entertain and answer every question he asks. Every time I do so, I can feel old wounds stitching themselves together.

That spring, using some of the money I had saved from working as a part-time barista and freelance editor, I traveled to China. I walked along the Bund in the chilly April night, gazing upon the glaring neon glow of the skyscrapers, standing tall against the starless Shanghai sky, their colorful lights scattered across the water like the sparks of silent fireworks. Perched atop a mountain, I ran my fingers across the coarse stone carvings of flowers and dragons that adorned the temple grounds and watched the sun set over the city of Nanjing, the red lanterns coming on one by one, guiding me down from my monastic vantage point. And one day, in Mochou Lake Park, I found my porcelain lady, taller—much taller—but clad in the same flowing dress, smiling the same gentle smile. Alone in those quiet waters, she had been waiting for me.