Arriving at Chinese New Year's Dawn

I arrived at Taipei on the dawn of Chinese New Year's Eve. It was only 5:50am, and outside temperature was around 10C.

It is always nostalgically unfamiliar to return to the city of current residency. Recollecting the pieces of images through the windows of a bus returning home seems like a process of reassurance and recovery of one's acquaintance to the city.

In less than a few hours, I may return to my previous daily schedule and style of life. I will be surrounded by daily errands and familiar people, as well as what should be considered as a home, sweet home. Everything shall stat as -- or return to -- its most versant status. Versant. Familiar. Conversant.

I could also assume that everything shall be different. Because as one always learns and experiences through a journey leaving town, I might as well return with new, exotic thoughts and values. It is very likely that this city might possess new meanings, even new inspirations, as I return from faraway to this resting land and examine it with new eyes. But somehow, there are certain journeys that does not shade such positiveness on a returning traveller.

The fact that my arrival falls on the dawn on of the Chinese New Year's Eve probably sheds some effect on my feelings, too. All the agreed concepts of Chinese New Year being a time of reunion and family bonds is contradictory to my arrival. I left my own family -- that is, my parents and my siblings -- to fly back to a city I reside merely due to temporary studies here. While the rest of the nation is busy with transporting themselves back to their family on this annual holiday, I am arriving to nothing, to nobody, to a dorm of four that is currently empty, to a city where I have no relatives at all, to a ghostly campus where all schoolmates have gone home, to a chaffy refrigerator holding old food with conservation concerns, to dusted stoves and vans, to a bed filled with nothing but all my loyal stuffed friends.

As the day breaks, many people will be on their way home, by train, by bus, by car, by plane, by all means of transportation. They will begin their journey, looking to arrive in warm, lighted houses crowded with family, with hot food serving and freshly done laundry drying outdoors in the air of this light winter sun.

While their journey is just beginning, mine has just already ended.