It wasn’t late—about 9 at night—when the world was dead silent. Monterey Bay had already fallen asleep, with a few stars still glowing so brightly that they gave me an illusion that I was with my granny, her arms around mine, recounting fairy tales under a tree on a summer night. Her mouth’s tips were slightly up. Her nose was like a little hill, from which a breeze came out and brushed my face. Once in a while she would look downward, scrutinizing my face the way she had done it a million times before.
The fairy tales were the very few bits of words I could not remember well. As a PhD candidate majoring in literature, I examined archaic texts day after day, reading them, understanding them, memorizing them. Every single line of Shakespeare’s masterpieces and their meanings had been carved on my brain, so clearly that, surprisingly, they bored me. One day you would find that without the mysterious veils, the little facts behind them would have no charms at all, and that was possibly the reason why Liza Hamilton, a super religious English woman, refused to explore the meanings of her Bible.
The fairy tales from granny were, in general, about life and death, which were such complicated concepts for a newborn who, yet, was trying to figure out what was beating inside her chest. Probably this recognition of heartbeats gave the little girl the first chance to realize what it felt like to be alive. In middle school, I began to define what “death” means. Was it really just as simple as a signal of light on Professor X’s panel, just like the stars glowing in the sky? What happens after we die? Did we enter into a parallel world and probably go back to earth as super heroes? Well, (since I—thank God—haven’t undergone “death,”) my answer was: I don’t know!
Later on, I learned from my science teacher that being dead meant that your brain no longer worked, that your mind was forever locked. ‘I don’t wanna be dead’, I thought, so I chose to dig into literature without hesitating, hoping my mind be always fueled by fresh words. Wouldn’t that keep me alive forever? (Ha! Another romantic way to be immortal besides Shakespeare’s — See Sonnet 18.) As a “never-gonna-be-dead” person, I started to enhance the quality of my life, which was the reason why I should try to live. Through those thoughts as I walked, I found out that the most attractive parts of life were only one word—mystery. It was this unknown that kept the world running and kept its people exploring. Wugui (the turtle in Kung Fu Panda) was right: “tomorrow is a mystery; today is a gift—that’s why it’s called ‘present.’” Most people focused on the lovely pun, but no one could deny that they were working so hard in today to ensure a better way to welcome tomorrow, which is a “mystery.”