Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

by looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more clearly than with their own eyes.

Each time, it was like I was traveling at the speed of light, as if I had spent all my life living in one dimension, only for its very fabric to tear open and a whole other universe to be revealed.

It occurred to me that by the age I was now, my mother had already made a new life for herself in a new country. She would have, by then, already become mother to a new baby, and would likely have been able to count the number of times that she would return to Hong Kong to see her family on one hand. I tried, and failed, to imagine her first months there. Had she been homesick? Had she been awed by the streets, the brick and weatherboard houses, so different from her own home? Had she been worn out not by the big changes, but, as is often the case, by countless smaller ones—the

we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting.

no longer reading, but looking at me as one is able to look upon a person one knows well, fully, and without reserve.

parents were their children’s fate, not only in the way of the tragedies, but in many other smaller, yet no less powerful ways as well. I knew that if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived, and her memories would be my memories, and she would have no choice in that matter.

I thought too of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese, and how mine was English, and how we only ever spoke together in one, and not the other.