Twenty Centimeters of Moonlight

Measuring the distance between us and our destination Many years later, when I stood in my 23rd-floor apartment in Chongqing and looked out the window at the lights at the intersection of the Jialing River and the Yangtze River, I would always think of the boundless rice fields in Heilongjiang, the beads of sweat dripping down my old uncle's bronzed back, and the words that changed my life: "You are not from my family." I was eight years old at the time, and for the first time I understood what it meant to be an "outsider." From the rice fields in the north to the mountain towns in the south, from the smell of pine at the maintenance station to the smell of coffee in the design company, from the first night away from home to countless early mornings when I woke up in a strange city - it took me thirty years to realize that I have been doing the same thing: measuring the distance between myself and "home".