I once had so many questions about this world. Why do mountains and rivers move? Why do the stars in the sky blink their eyes? Why did my mother weep before me? And in the universe beyond our universe, is there another me? To me, this world was like a giant question mark breaking forth from nothing, filling me with wonder and with dread. I longed to know, to understand, to grasp how exactly I had become myself, and what it was that built the bridge between me and this world. The first answer I found, the first definite exclamation mark within all those question marks, was reading. From Fabre’s Book of Insects I learned about nature; from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, about life; and from Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions, I learned how to understand myself. For the child I was, reading was like a prism: the sunlight I couldn’t comprehend, the light that had once stung my eyes, needed only to pass through it to become a rainbow — one I could see without waiting for the rain, a rainbow for me to take apart and to understand. I grew up nourished by reading.
In high school, my questions about the world turned into countless reflections. During those years, I struggled with mental illness, and the world I had spent so long learning to understand collapsed before my eyes in the wake of trauma. It was then that I encountered Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Imitating the book’s protagonist, I found my own way of taking sorrow apart: writing it down. I wrote down the egrets by the lake, the fantasies that came between sleeping and waking, the inspiration that burst up from my reading; I broke myself apart into words, one by one, and gave myself over to words. I am grateful to my high school literature teacher, who, after reading my work, helped submit it to a magazine, where it was published. For me — disheartened as I had become — it was a chance to feel, once again, connected to this cold world.
For university, I moved from Asia to North America, and once again the world refreshed itself before my eyes. One culture shock after another led me to reexamine my identity and my position in the world. But unlike before, I now had words; it was the key to the world that was mine alone. I studied cultural and literary Studies, first at McGill University and then at the University of Alberta, pursuing a great deal of interdisciplinary literary research. During my undergraduate years, I also returned to China for a three-month internship as an editorial assistant. This time, it was no longer literature fishing me out from the long river of life; instead, it was I who went fishing for words in the vast, boundless sea of everyone’s inspiration, and assembling them so that the world could see.
All of these experiences have brought me here, to become an editorial intern at Sundress Publications. I want to see words ever more clearly and to embrace them; to embrace reading and writing, to embrace everyone who, like me or unlike me, has used words to search for a rainbow of their own. I would like to let the keys that different people have forged shine with their own light, so that they might open this world to ever more possibilities.
Ziyi Zhong (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA from McGill University and an MA from the University of Alberta, both in East Asian Studies. With a background spanning Asia and Canada, she is interested in identity, belonging, and the ways literature helps us understand ourselves and one another. For her, reading and writing have long been tools of inquiry and repair, turning difficult experience into meaning, and of connecting with others who are searching, in words, for a light of their own.
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