小蝴蝶结又有心事。

Hello Er chong

We are looking forward to meeting you on Sunday in Armidale. I hope you have a good and uneventful trip from Hong Kong to Sydney and then to Armidale.

There are two of us. My name is Loretta and I work at the University of New England in the School of Health as a lecturer. I work fairly long hours but when I can I like to read, listen to music, make mosaics and garden. Unfortunately my garden was damaged recently by a hailstorm so it is looking very sad. Joshua is my son. He is 16 years old and is in Year 11 at high school. He likes to cook and to learn about cuisine from throughout the world. He loves music and doing martial arts.  We both really enjoy meeting with people from other cultures and look forward to learning about you and giving you many opportunities to practice your English.

Your room is quite large. It has a double bed and a single bed and is painted pale blue. We will have it all nice for you when you arrive. It is large enough so that if you wish to have a friend stay overnight then you can and we will all speak English!

With best wishes

Loretta

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I digged it out from the old blog that I digged out not long ago. I still remember that for one time in the past years I abruptly thought of the existence of this email and wished to read it again, but found it deleted by the system from my email account. And now I'm really delighted to have it back.

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Below is an essay I wrote in the last semester as an assignment practicing something so-called journalistic style. I've hesitated whether or not to show it to others but I decide it's ok to paste it here now.

A star always shining there

BY ELLEN WANG

On a pleasant weekend evening when I was surfing on the internet, an msn message box popped out, with words in it saying:“I spoke of you when I was talking to my friends days ago.” It was Josh, someone popped into my life three years ago, someone I will never forget.

I met Josh at the beginning of 2007, when I was 19, three years older than him.

It was an English immersion program I joined in my university in Hong Kong, in which a group of students would travel to an English-speaking country, in my case, Australia, for two weeks, taking classes and home-staying at local families. After an exhausting flight of nine hours, we finally arrived in Amidale, a small and peaceful city situated in the half way between Sydney and Brisbane, southeast of Australia.

The two members in the family I stayed in are Loretta—a red-haired Australian lady with nice smile and oversized body, and her son, Josh—a 16-year-old boy with healthy brown skin and great teeth.

Life was simple in Armidale, everyday repeating the day before. In the morning I had English classes at University of New England, a local college, went to sight-seeing around the town in the afternoon, and went back to Loretta and Josh’s house around five. 35 Brown Street, that’s the address I still clearly remember. It was a white-painted house with a green roof and a cute mailbox standing beside the road. It wan’t a big one, but definitely cozy.

It was only untill my first dinner there, that I realized all the table manners I had been taught in Hong Kong just became useless. We didn’t even eat at the table. “We just eat anywhere in the living room near TV, come on and grab a spot for yourself!”Lorreta smiled and beckoned to me, while I was standing awkwardly with my plate of food in hand.

Everyday between 5p.m and 7p.m, after I was back from school and before the dinner was ready, were the only couple of gap hours at my discretion. Loretta was usually in her room, busy with something I don’t understand. She was a professor teaching nursing in the local university. Josh would also be at home enjoying his summer vacation. I didn’t speak with Josh a lot. With different gender, different race, different age, different everything, I just couldn’t see any possible common language between us. The only thing I knew about him was he did exercise everyday. “50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups, everyday,” he told me vigorously. I was usually sitting on my bed reading novels. With my bed facing the window, everyday I experienced the sunset, watching it coming down inch by inch. When the sky color gradually turned from pale red to pale blue, Josh would appeared at the door of my room, gently knocked on it and said,“Hey, dinner is ready.”

Sometimes, in a transient second, I forgot why exactly I was in that small Australian city; I easily slipped into the illusion as I had lived that same routine of life there for years, peacefully and happily.

The days in Armidale passed quickly. On the last evening after dinner, Joshed invited me to take a walk. We walked through the unmanned roads nearby, feeling the sky turning darker. The whole world was totally quiet except some intermittent dog barks in the distance, and we seemed to be the only two human beings in town, walking briskly in the summer breeze without lots of words.

When the temperature was dropping as it went later into the night, we began to walk back home. Summer nights in Armidale can be really cool, with the temperature being around ten centidegree while we were still in summer clothes. To keep me warm, Josh put his jacket on me, and naturally held my hand into his. I was too cold to feel surprised, but still able to feel the warmth.

After a long and silent walk, we finally arrived home. Before entering the door, Josh yelled: “Look!” I looked up as he pointed to, just over our heads, in the inkily black sky, a complete Milky Way composed of millions of stars was hanging over there! For several minutes, neither Josh nor I said anything. We remained wordless, looking up at the spectacle, transfixed. The universe was quiet enough for us to hear each other’s breath. Occasionally I could see that Josh was watching me. Before we entered the door, under the hanging Milky Way, Josh hugged me, long and tight. Then he said softly: “Let’s get in. You are trembling.” I was, trembling, blushing, and all blank.

Neither had I ever imagined my uneventful stay in Armidale would end up with so romantic a scene, nor that Josh, a 16-year-old Australian boy with brown skin and clean smile, would make me feel the warmth the way he did.

On my following birthday in June when I was back to Hong Kong, I received a parcel from Armidale. It was a necklace with a customized silver pendent, on which engraved a few stars and my name. In the card sent together with the necklace, there was only one sentence: I remember how much you liked the stars in Armidale.

And it was in the instant I realized that this affection, not necessarily love—beyond the language, beyond the skin color, beyond the culture, beyond the distance, beyond everything—would happen anyway as it was meant to be. The two weeks in Armidale was short, but the memory of watching the sky switching color at dusk, of the dinner at 35 Brown Street with Loretta and Josh, of the Milky Way just hanging overhead, is something eternal.

“What exactly did you tell your friends about me?” I asked on MSN.

“Once upon a time, there was an Asian girl named Ellen living at my home,...” he said, making naughty faces.