Today is my father’s birthday. He is 70 – a special milestone in China. I have to call him, it is expected and it is unthinkable that I won’t. But all day I have avoided this duty. And all day it has followed me around, silent, clinging and claustrophobic.  

After work, It follows me out into the dark November evening, clings to my back as I enter the bustling Tube station. It will weigh heavy on my homeward journey, biding its time by hollowing out the pit of my stomach. It will confront me when I get home. Cornered at last, I’ll have nowhere left to hide.

Call him, just call him

I can’t get on the train. I sitdown on a bench on the platform, watching people cram themselves into carriages as the doors slide closed.  More trains rumble by, metal grates and squeals, rails against rolling stock. Life surges all around me with single-minded purpose. The travellers’ interactions are so fleeting. At every moment lives intersect and lives diverge; a tiny adjustment and it would all be different. Sliding doors. The possibility of encounter are so microscopic, the journeys so precarious. All these people packed like anchovies in their compartments-within-compartments, a breath away from numberless others whom they will never meet, never know.

A man in hi-vis trousers with a fold-up bicycle uncomfortably wedged under his arm, a girl with a transparent backpack full of her gym kit, a schoolboy struggling with a briefcase almost as big as he is, an old lady drinking green juice from a bottle, as furtively as if it’s hooch. 

Another train pulls up, and scores of people hurry past. A mother in a silver parka struggles with a pushchair that won’t unfold. A businessman unknots his canary-yellow tie and removes it with a theatrical flourish, as if saying goodbye to the day’s performance. A tourist in unseasonal cargo shorts looks round nervously, and when there’s enough room unfolds a map the size of a table-cloth.

Their routes. My roots. I am used to living here, but that doesn’t mean it feels natural. Up at the far end of the platform I spot two men in football shirts, a red-and-white design I’ve seen so many times but which still means nothing to me — a tribal loyalty that’s both explicit and opaque. I am only grafted onto the tissue of this culture. Its ancestry doesn’t run in my blood. I exist here against a backdrop of codes and signifiers that was Still illusive.  

My business feels precarious. Though its fruits may grow big and impressive, it’s for everyone else to see. The roots concealed below will always be flimsy, shallow anchors in the soil. Only I have this knowledge. It is three months now since Leanne left, and I’ve interviewed many candidates to take her place. I am yet to identify anyone as capable: a shoot that had just begun to grow was severed, and once again I have to plant a tiny seed and begin the process all over again.

Unlike Miranda Fortescue, the competitor in my industry. She lives; I operate. She has her business, but she also has her husband and their dog, all that joie de vivre and strawberry-tinted sunshine — the perfectly curated Instagram life. But I have no life to speak of, not in that sense. There’s the team I have recruited and invested in, of course. But I have no other kind of team — one comprising family and close friends, based on intimacy. No one has my back. There is no safety net, no haven, and no secure foundation that makes it all worthwhile. 

I look at my phone. My grandpa’s quietly admonishing message stares back at me: ‘Don’t forget your roots.’

I remain on the platform. Me and my bench, motionless amid all that motion, like time-lapse footage. I know I’m using the crowds as cover, an excuse to put off the journey that takes me back to my empty flat. So I sit there, and I feel paralysed by the sickening weight of duty. Because this duty is a ruthless, compassion-free type of duty that does not care about what has passed. It stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the realities of my life and my irrevocably damaged relationship with my father, this intimate stranger. It is a duty that demands, expects. No concessions. No extenuating circumstances. 

Call him.

For the last three weeks I have been dreading the very thought of the call, yet also dreading not making it and being admonished by them,  but to the outside world it must look the very opposite — that I’ve barely let it graze my thoughts. All my tension and turmoil exists in secret, hidden roiling serpents that never sleep. I’m like a kite buffeted by winds that pull me in a direction I do not wish to go. Sometimes I hope the string will simply snap and set me free.

At the heart of the conflict lies this single stark fact: I can’t meet one side of my father without meeting the other. There is always part of me that wants to be with him and part that wants to flee. Each and every one of our encounters is like being dropped inside an implacable machine that splits me in two — and the link between the halves is thinner than a pin. But I cannot face the conversation with him; the empty wishes, the string of hollow platitudes expected of me. I squirm at the very thought of the going-through-the-motions torture of it all when all that really needs to be said remains suppressed, gagged and bound.  

Gradually, the trains become emptier as the rush hour subsides and people settle into their evenings across this city. As a passenger on the road of life, I never settle. Without deeper roots, how could I? I may feel the urge to move on at any moment. Except now, on the bench, I sit still. Watchful as a spider in its web.

I notice an Asian woman in her fifties, wearing a simple, elegant, rust-coloured jacket. She is labouring along the platform with a suitcase. The suitcase is large, black and seems unwieldy for her. She moves more slowly than everyone else. I think about getting up to help her, but she disappears at the end of the platform, as if in a puff of pantomime smoke. 

‘Is that why I feel like a guest?’ I ask myself. ‘Did my mother’s sudden departure from this world cast a spell on me?’ Here I am: an alien, a passenger, nagged by a sense of impermanence in my Western life. The English Meng feels like she is floating, transient and temporary — an adopted identity, fragile and precarious. Unlike my Chinese self who has a face, my English one still seems featureless, unembodied.

But what is truly real and substantial now? When I look back, home in China is suddenly no more than a mirage, shimmering and dissolving.  I’ve realised you can never go back to exactly where you came from because, once enough time has passed, that place no longer exists. My past has become homeless. And now I find myself lost between two worlds. It seems that it is my fate to be a stranger at home and a stranger abroad. 

Even the contents of my mind feel like a passenger that may hop off at the next station. The evanescent nature of the language I have learned makes me feel this English layer of identity may at any point be cast off, shed like a borrowed garment. Even after all these years, there are new words and phrases that refuse to embed themselves in my neurons. They are insulated from the deeper part of the brain, hovering only on the surface, visiting briefly before vanishing.

The PA system blares an announcement, so loud and distorted it’s incomprehensible, no matter how well you speak English: people cover their ears, roll their eyes. A woman in her twenties totters past on extravagantly high heels, tightening a chiffon scarf at her throat. She spins round and says, to no one, ‘I just want to get home.’

‘Come back,’ Dizheng often says. ‘It’s hard for you there, and it’s hard for me being without you. So why not return?’

It seems logical, but it’s not that easy. He doesn’t understand that going back to live in China would mean losing myself twice: first the Chinese self, and then the English persona that grow in parallel. My husband for sure would not mourn the passing of this new person. He doesn’t know this person. Only I know her and the events that have brought her into existence against such tall odds and a legacy of tragedy. She has changed me and I cannot go back to that old self any more than I could return to a home that no longer exists. Increasingly I am aware that I have, along the way, become lost between these two worlds. What do I hold onto to save myself?

It’s said that a rich man loses everything in a fire but an intelligent man loses everything after a stroke or dementia.  Material things can be replaced, but not our sane and analytical mind.

The cartoon showed a despondent business man and the calm man with knowledge on the pavement after a fire. I used to take comfort on the safety of the mind.

A fire in the mind can take away.. ( still editing…)

But A mind is such a fragile thing; it can swiftly unravel. Neurons degenerate, as evanescent as the blooms of flowers and their fragrance. Eventually we locked into a slow, inevitable mental decline from the peak of youth. Such transience is pitiful — and to me so palpable.

A young mind is declining before blossoming.

Recent memories may leave us first; if I were to suffer a stroke perhaps my English self would simply be erased after all. I am able to monitor the wispy ephemerality of my English mind, its formation and disappearance. Not taking an aerial view of it, or philosophising about it, but beholding it up close, in real time. For my Chinese mind is the witness of my English mind. There in the background, at a deeper level, it attends, appreciates and laments the coming and going of a different being.

As I arrive at my flat, turning the key in the front door, I gasp: I left the station without even realising it, walking here like an automaton. The key bites in the lock, and I open the door, awed by how long I must have sat alone on the platform, never spoken to by anyone, immobile and unnoticed. I was not simply a passenger — one transient among many, there and gone in minutes – but a bystander to life, displaced and observant, vigilant and searching.  Avoiding myself. 

Tomorrow I will get on the train again and begin the cycle once more, shuttling between home and work and back again, heading towards an unknown future, as we all do. Every journey is made up of other, lesser journeys. And my journey goes on. I am still the passenger.

I don’t make the call.