1999

 At last, I’d arrived in the realm of the ‘ocean ghosts’, as Taitai had always called the pale people with curly hair from across the sea. I eyed them covertly. In the bustle of the arrivals hall, it seemed they came in many shapes and colours, and possessed an entirely unghostly solidity. Now I was the one who’d crossed an ocean, venturing from the Middle Kingdom to this other domain. I, the phantom.

 I dissolved underneath the interior dazzle of the ceiling lights, stunned by the shop frontages, shimmering with enigmatic, curved letters and the smell of the air itself - disinfectant, a yeasty sweetness I would come to recognise as sliced bread, a scarcely masked human bodiliness.

 Walking along a gauntlet of cardboard rectangles bearing the names of individuals and different language schools, I couldn’t spot my own name anywhere. With each step, my heart made its presence felt in my chest by fluttering against my ribcage, as it had throughout day.

 It fluttered at passport control, as I’d watched another Chinese girl lift her bag up to the counter and extract a wad of sterling secured with an elastic band. Then another, as she frantically tried to count out her money.

 At the next cubicle, a young man wrestled through a pile of printed-out documents, searching for the right sheet in blushing panic. The guard peered at him from his cubicle, amusement fighting with annoyance for dominion over the corners of his mouth.

 It fluttered early morning. I hadn’t been able to eat breakfast. The momentous journey was perhaps the biggest thing that had ever happened to me, and its magnitude lent a dissociative, anxious haze to reality.

 At 26, I was the first in my family to venture so far. During one of the succession of bank visits to use the exchange quotas of all my family, my grandma said to the young bank clerk, counting out cash from her account, ‘'This is for my granddaughter.' Then, loud enough for the whole hall to hear: 'She's going to study abroad!'

 My passage from one kingdom into the next had been a twelve-hour flight wedged between two foreigners, half a day freezing cold in my polyester Veromoda summer dress, with the metal hasp of the seatbelt jabbing into my ribs.  I hadn't dared to wake the heavy man snoring next to me in the aisle seat, so I could go to the toilet. What could I even say? Hello? Sorry? Maybe I just should have poked him in the ribs? Stripped of language, I’d remained mute and glacial in my seat.

 My eyes flicked back to my passport. My talisman. Still tightly pincered, my fingertips left a damp imprint on its cover. I’d approached border control holding it in the same grip, my throat constricted. On one of its pages was my precious 90-day visa: my golden ticket to a new level of human experience.

 Like all golden tickets, it was hard won. My original plan had been to study for a masters degree in America. At 4am one morning - the weather well below freezing, snowflakes whirling like moths - Dizheng and I had taken turns shivering in a queue which snaked around the block of Beijing's US Embassy. The line was guarded by armed Chinese soldiers standing on pedestals, watching the crowd. When the cold became unbearable, we switched places with each other, warming up inside the waiting cab I’d hired.

 Weeks later I picked up a terse rejection slip from the embassy: ‘Suspected not to return to China after the stay.’

 Since the early 90s, a business grew up around advising people how to leave China. One of these agents recommended that I throw away my passport, now tarnished with the damning rejection. I announced the loss in the newspaper and got a new, blameless version.

 Shortly afterwards, on yet more advice, I departed for a 15-day bus tour of Europe, which cost an entire year of my salary. Country after country I collected passport stamps as I went to prove I would return home after my travels.

 ‘Sleep on board. Then pee and take photos when you alight.’ That was the mantra of the middle-aged woman in the neighbouring seat to mine. Whenever the coach pulled over, she hoiked up her heavy, drowsy body and headed to the door.

 For the entire trip, my coachmates and I became goldfish, sealed in a bowl. I pressed my forehead to the window, watching the golden castles and soaring statues we passed. They were so close, yet so unobtainable.

 The Americans rejected my next application all the same.

 And then, an unexpected alternative emerged - an offer from an English firm to study English in the UK. It gave me that most precious of tokens: a visa. But for 90 days only- the briefest of windows to break into a new world.

 'This way.' A man dangling the sign of my language school was suddenly in front of me. He beckoned me to follow, so I tripped along behind him, dragging my bags.

 ‘A school?’ I blurted. ‘Do you know one? For fashion. Study.’ I blushed. I was so preoccupied with my mission that it spilled out on the first hapless person I encountered. My goal was a spot on a master’s degree and since I’d studied fashion for my degree, I assumed I’d have to do the same for a postgraduate abroad. That’s the system in China, and it was the only knowledge I had.

 ‘What?’ The driver shook his head and muttered something to himself before marching ahead. I followed meekly.

 From the backseat of his car, through my midnight drowsy eyes, I surveyed street after street of the city’s outskirts, the June evening revealing interminable red and grey bricks. I retrieved a strange red sphere from my bag, the last remaining item from my inflight meal box. I hadn’t touched it previously because I wasn’t sure what to do with it, I still had no idea what it was. I examined the wrapper. Babybel. No clearer.

 I bit into it. Chewing slowly, it tasted just like creamy wax. I swallowed my mouthful and looked again to see a pale yellow core beneath the red layer - understanding only as I did that perhaps I needed to peel off the wax outer coating to get to the milky part underneath.

 My heavy drowsy eyes flicked back to the underwhelming streets. What opaque and waxy layers would I have to peel off to reach the flavour of this city?

 ‘This is it.’ The driver stopped in front of a drab brick house.

 A woman opened the door. I followed her into a narrow hallway, noting the faint but insistent mushroom-smell of damp. I glanced into the sitting room as we passed. A man was slumped in front of the television, his profile lit by the screen.

 She led me straight upstairs to the room where I was to stay, my feet moving over scuffed floorboards. It was mostly occupied by the single bed it contained and was decorated with a shiny wallpaper which curled up from the plasterwork. At the window, straggly tentacles of next door’s greenery fingered the glass.

 I went to bed with nothing but the taste of wax in my mouth. Muffled human sounds came through the walls. A baby crying. A slamming door. An argument. The night unfurled queasily, and it seemed that the moment the voices finally died away, the sun broke through the thin curtains.

 Breakfast was in the minuscule kitchen downstairs, at a semi-circular flip-down table so tiny that my nose almost touched the wall in front of me. Overnight, I’d been demoted back to childhood. A bowl of something unrecognisable had been left out - small, dry hoops floating in a sea of icy cold milk.

 'Never drink milk before it's properly heated. Watch it, don't spill it.’ Grandma’s admonishments about milk flicked through my mind.

 I spooned a little of the cereal into my mouth. It appeared inedible and I put the spoon down.

 Clutching a piece of paper on which the woman had scrawled directions to the language school, I left the house. The platform was empty at first, but then one person arrived, followed soon after by a second. They seemed to know each other and started talking.

 'Hi, how are you?' said the first jauntily.

 'Very well, thanks. You?' replied the other.

 So, they really did speak like that! Their perfect pronunciation was like the recordings my English teacher had played to us back at home: a silkily confident river of language flowing to and fro. It was unrecognisable from my crude, frustrated attempts, made after countless hours squinting at the flimsy pages of my thick dictionary at college. When speaking is no longer as easy as drawing breath, you begin a long process of gasping for air. 

 My days - then the weeks and months to come - were spent in this state. I strained to find my words while the people I spoke to struggled to conceal their impatience. I could only nod along uncomprehendingly as they responded.

 In the crimson cubicle of a phone box, I tried to ring the numbers listed. But time and time again, a sudden dial tone signalled my failure, as I stood with a useless smile still fixed to my face and the translated note I’d read from still raised in my hand.

 I spent hours lost in train stations, deaf to the announcements, blind to the information boards, bewildered by the platform numbers and destinations.

 I only learned the meaning of a PO Box by turning up at an obscure location outside of London, hoping to find the campus of a fashion school to be told by a pitying stranger that I didn’t understand what a ‘PO Box’ was. And I arrived outside multiple college campuses to discover them closed for the summer.

 London was a tight spool of thread, impossible to unpick. Doors seemed shut fast, and even the buildings wore blank expressions.

 At the end of each day I returned to my lodgings and sank onto the single bed, looking out over the weed-filled backyards of eerily quiet streets. I wasn’t accustomed to days drawing out in summer and the queer lightness of the evening made me feel guilty about my lack of progress. My body ached, but perhaps I should still be out there knocking on doors?

 'My poor child, she wants to go to that foreign place ten thousand miles away. She is like a tiger trying to tear the sky, without knowing where to put her paw,’ Grandma had teased before I’d left.

 Now here I was, feeling less like a tiger with every heartbeat, caged in an eerie, suburban bedroom. I was the phantom that I’d first felt myself to be, incapable of assuming solid form, reduced to a fleeting transparency.

 Towards the end of my three months, I secured a rare in-person interview at a college an hour’s train ride from the capital. It was my last chance. I watched the unfamiliar station names until I was the only one left on the carriage. Only then did I realise that I’d boarded a train in the wrong direction. A kind conductor scribbled on my tickets, so I wasn’t fined when I reached the barrier at my destination. But it was too late for the interview.

 Returning, I watched the rear view of houses, their gardens and washing lines flickering past. The city itself seemed to turn its back on me. I shivered in that same polyester Veromoda dress, my best outfit and worn nearly every day of my stay. It was just right for summer back home and I’d simply never conceived that August here could be so bitter. The taste of that cold, dry cereal from the first morning, and the indigestible flavour of wax, both lingered on my tongue.

 The rain started again, slanting against the train windows, and my view was obscured.

 Finally, one of those apparently permanently locked doors opened a crack - just enough for me to slip through. By the time I received an offer from London College of Fashion, I’d already packed my suitcase to leave.