Zahra sat in the back row of her Mandarin language class, her notebook a mess of slanted characters and frustrated scribbles. The teacher, a petite woman with a sharp bob haircut and sharper tone, spoke rapidly, pointing at the whiteboard like the characters themselves should leap off and make sense.
They didn't.
"Nǐ hǎo ma?" the teacher said, then motioned for Zahra to repeat.
Zahra hesitated, unsure of the tones. "Nee... how... ma?"
A few students giggled. The teacher frowned but moved on. Zahra sank lower in her seat, cheeks burning.
Outside of class, the silence was even louder. People didn't meet her eyes on the bus. Shopkeepers gestured instead of speaking. Even the warm greetings of her dorm mates were mechanical, formal, surface-deep. It wasn't hostility, it was something harder to name. A polite detachment. A wall.
Except for one person. Elijah.
He was from Nigeria, a second-year medical student with a calm voice and an easy smile. They met in the campus cafeteria when Zahra accidentally picked up a spicy Sichuan dish that set her mouth on fire. Elijah had laughed, slid her a packet of milk, and said, "Rookie mistake. You'll learn." He became her translator, her guide, and before long, her friend.
"I came here thinking I'd be different," Zahra said one evening as they walked back to the dorms under flickering street lamps. "That I'd fit in somehow. But I feel... invisible."
"Trust me, I know," Elijah replied. "But maybe invisible isn't so bad. It means you can observe. And when you see clearly, you can survive."
She looked at him sideways. "That's dark."
He smiled faintly. "No. That's reality. But you'll learn to bend it. You'll see." There was something in his tone, careful, practiced. Like someone who had learned to measure his words, to hide more than he shared.
Later that night, Zahra opened the envelope her father had slipped into her coat pocket at the airport. Inside was an old black-and-white photograph. Two people stood in front of a pagoda: her father, young and smiling, and a Chinese man with his hand on his shoulder. On the back, scribbled in faded ink:
"To Liang. For the life we never spoke of."
Underneath the photo was a folded paper, within it was written a name, a phone number. and one sentence in Mandarin which translates in English as:
"The past is buried where the banyan tree casts no shadow."
Zahra sat frozen, the envelope trembling in her hands. Her father had been here before. And whatever he left behind, he hadn't wanted to forget it. Only to keep it hidden.
She looked out the window into the dark, wondering how much of her coming to China had really been her decision. And how much had been written for her... long before she boarded the plane.