And what happened to me? Where did that seventeen-year-old girl go, who read these very same lines locked in her room and couldn’t hold back her tears? She believed every word. She wept over Mei’s fate, over Wang’s loneliness, over the very idea that the world could be cruel and unjust. The girl who believed that words could alter reality, that books were keys to other worlds, rather than just a way to escape one’s own. When did I forget how to cry over books?
