Dream That Sails Across the Pacific
Dear friends
The following is a translation of a Chinese article written years ago and, after
a few revisions, currently published in a book entitled "Choose to be Strong",
as my way of being thankful for friendships I've been receiving from my marvelous "net pals". Off topic: For any of you interested in how disabled people live
with dignity and happiness, the book is available on Dangdang.com at
http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=20132185 or in any of the Xinhua bookstores.
Jenny
****************
I find myself in the middle of a parade on a strange street at the New Year's Eve. I am looking for someone, someone I know and yet have never seen. Crowds of
people walk by. I search and search with my sore eyes. Seconds grow into minutes and minutes melt in hours, but that "someone" I am waiting for hasn't shown
up yet.
The tranquility issued from the inky black sky is disturbed by all the noises around me on the crowded street. No one ever told me she would be coming to see the parade. I just feel that I am curiously guided by an invisible hand to this
particular street of a small town in Canada.
I walk away from the crowds to enjoy the foreign starry sky, on which an enormous number of heavenly bodies are shinning against dark velvet. I can't see anything behind the stars, but I always get a feeling that they are somehow all connected by an optic fiber to form a colossal net, covering every nook and corner of
the world. At this very moment, I see a car pulling over to the parade, and guided again by that invisible hand I stride toward the car, out of which climbed
a very familiar figure. Excitement bites my pumping heart as I draw myself nearer. That's her! Definitely! Finally I am drawn level with her, who opens her
arms and gasps in surprise. Why in the world are you here! I try with all my might to answer, but there is this big lump in my throat that makes me unable to
utter a sound.
"Get up, you lazy bone! See what time it is now!" Comes Mother's yelling from
somewhere above my head.
Ah, that is only a dream!
My memory now takes me back to July 1, 2001. With nothing to kill time that day
, I roamed on the Hongen Website. All of a sudden, I found myself entering a forum addressed as "Hongen Online Communication". I was not a big fan of online communities back then, when nearly everything related to virtual forums was reported in a negative way so as to warn teenagers like me to be away from contents of sex and violence that were often found in such "unreal and dirty" places joined only by gangs of boring people. But I somehow ventured on it. A few minutes
later I became a member of this forum, and the first thing that caught my eye upon my entry was, naturally, English Salon. I clicked it open and randomly went
inside a "column" whose name was the strangest of all: Canuck's Comments.
It soon turned out that online forums were actually not that bad----as least the
one I was viewing. There are so many goodies in here! I thought as I decided
to leave my very first footprint, a "repasted" English article to which I found
a reply the next day! It was neatly paragraphed and written in perfect English.
Well, at least a lot better than mine. I thought. But as I moved to its end,
"how is it possible?" I could not help but read aloud several times, "Maryk in
Canada." It is impossible that people from Canada visit this forum. I concluded. This Maryk must be lying. What it's been repeated on TV is right: The Internet is full of phonies.
But I liked the all English environment there, so I stayed.
To my greatest surprise, however, I discovered, after reading and writing in Canuck's Comments for a while, that David (Canuck) the "master" there was a real Canadian who then worked for the Hongen Company. In the meanwhile, more public correspondence was going back and forth between Maryk and me.
When you stay in an online community long enough, you will sense that there is something that eliminates your desire for wanting to know faces and statuses those members have in real life. All you care about is what they type onto the screen. What they write behind their monitors gives you a lively show of who they are and how different they may be from one another. While enjoying my time in Canuck's Comments, I couldn't care less about what was hidden behind the forum IDs
. I never asked questions like "are you male or female?" "How old are you?" What interested me most was practicing my English there with English experts, who
wrote beautiful articles with their insights and wisdoms. There were some writers I admired, and Maryk was one of them. It was just her (or his?) habit of winding up post with "Mary writing from Canada", that triggered more of my curiosity.
Almost always friendly to everyone in the forum, Maryk shared her insights in a
most Chinese way that often made me wonder if she was a highly educated Chinese
senior citizen. Her topics ranged from love and marriage to history and religion, from tourism and vacation to work and society, through which I began to realize that there were much much more out there to learn, to experience, and to feel
than my naive thoughts and feelings.
A love of giving out praises was something else I discovered in Maryk's writings
. When some people-----including me of course----churned out a decent post or jotted down a good sentence, Maryk would pay them compliments. Half of my interest in English couldn't go on without her sweet words! But I used to be really worried that they would beget a sense of blind pride in me. When I reviewed some
of my articles written two years earlier, I could hardly believe I received praise for such poorly written posts. Fortunately I did not develop the sense of blind pride but rather confidence and assertiveness which helped me a lot later in
my life. Also my English skills were brought up to a whole new level. Now I deduce that Maryk must clearly know where the line is between flattery and cheer.
I had been in this forum for three months now, and I began private email correspondence with Maryk. Before too long, I received my first air mail from abroad!
In great excitement I carefully tore open the envelope and took out a thick stack of paper on which written were lines of English in the most beautiful handwriting I'd ever seen and therefore could hardly read! I once complained to her that I always had a hard time making out hand-written English. So here it was her
response: A wonderful presentation of English handwriting she so wisely planned that within hours I was finally able to read what she wrote by comparing with
the alphabet she enclosed in both uppercase and lowercase forms. Attached to the letter was a photo. It showed a couple, female in a red dress and male in a black suit. The female wore glasses, her left shoulder leaning on the man, who had small and bright eyes, a big nose, and strong cheeks, a very combination that
easily makes you think that he must be a German actor! Both wore a grandmotherly (grandfatherly in Uncle Ben's case) smile.
At long last I believed that Mary is indeed a Canadian with European ancestry married to a German and living in a small city not far from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
In the following cold and gray winter days my correspondence with Mary was the only thing that made me feel warm and sunny. Despite our huge difference of age,
I felt like I had more than what I actually wrote to her. In those long email
letters I "talked" about my life, Chinese traditions, my life, confusion, my life, worries, my life, and improvements I just achieved. She always "listened" to
me patiently and in return wrote in her timely replies about her experiences and family. She was just like a grandmother, supporting and encouraging and comforting my dark teenage self.
How could I forget the cassette she sent me for practicing my hopeless oral English----my first time to literally talk with a foreigner who lived thousands of miles away; the heavy book she bought to satisfy my wish to get my articles published in North America----my first time to get contact with foreign editors; the
new year's "lucky money" she mailed to me----my first time to see what a Canadian dime looked like; and the resume she encouraged me to send to a Canadian translation agency----my first attempt to be a translator as I am now.
Those "first times" not only contributed to most of my euphoria but also extended to me love and care from another faraway country. What is more important, they helped me accept my disabilities and learn to live with them. Though in the "
virtual reality" and with no fancy decoration of a life-saving story, the friendship I received from Mary gave me so much more than I had in reality, that I almost could feel its existence all the time in my now changed life.
The Internet, often seen as a source of evil where people hide their true identities, was in Mary's eye a way to communicate and to help. When receiving applause from members for her contributions to the forum, she would not just say "thank you" like many Westerners do, but rather something along the lines of "As a Baha'i taught to be loving and helpful in this world, I am just doing what I like.
English is my mother tongue, so I can help English learners here improve their
English skills and in return I am given wonderful friendships that go all the way from China."
At this moment what I dreamed this morning floated before my eyes again, so misty and yet so real. In this sparkling starry space, the dream carries my best wishes and sails across the Pacific, beyond the borders, and to a family that lives under a maple-leaf flag.
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