Black rimmed glasses
"The sun is out!"
The student sitting at the table next to me exclaimed as the first rays of sunlight flooded the upper floor of the Science Student Centre, where dozens of students were toiling for their endless rounds of midterms and assignments. I looked outside the large window facing the Nest, mesmerized by the ashen clouds parting to reveal the deep blue sky. My laptop monitor was glaring, so I quickly adjusted the light setting down to continue my frenzied pace on reviewing Anki flashcards. The sun could wait later, but suddenly one sight caught my eye: a BeaverTails food truck. It must have just arrived, with the staff setting up the area and preparing the cash box. Sure enough, within two minutes, I finished wrapping up my study and belongings and dashed out to the truck before the massive crowds of students trickled out of lecture halls around noon. The tantalizing buttery smell of pastry from the truck, plus earthly petrichor after the torrential drizzles engulfed me with all its might, briefly brought me a wisp of reminiscence of my middle school days in a riparian Saigon suburb. Spring is coming, I thought.
Before I could realize it, another term was rushing by. The workload from 6 courses and my part-time job was piling up even faster, often leaving me crawling onto bed and sinking immediately into sleep just to get up again at some wee hours in the morning. This term was even more chaotic than the first one, as I had the golden opportunity of enjoying the 4.5-hour lecture block on Tuesday. From a cheery morning bird satiated with a homemade matcha latte and fried noodles for lunch, heading to my seminar at 12:30 PM, I soon became a walking insomniac sleuthing out of my biochemistry class at 5 PM. Still, I tried to find some joy during those endless days. After my first morning class on plants and animal physiology, where the two professors are beyond amazing with their witty humour and captivating lectures, I quickly devoured lunch. Then, the 4.5 hours of food coma started with a seminar class required for my degree, where we had weekly presentations on "sciency" topics (yes, that's a word) and the applications of scientific communication, then onto physical chemistry and introductory biochemistry. One of the professors for physical chemistry and also of my favorite ones was insanely hilarious, with his no-nonsense monotone voice telling the wildest stories and occasionally typical Asian uncle jokes ("the more you learn, the more you forget"). For the first half of the term, I always came out of that class with my belly still hurting from laughter, just to break my back during another 1.5-hour class, biochemistry, on a rock-hard bench. On other days, I would rejoice in psychology and public health, except the 4-hour break between them. The woes of second-year registration time...
Outside of classes, I occasionally put my comfort on a zipline. A club I was in held a stand offering free tea for students during midterm season, so I helped make the sign and distributed tea in subfreezing weather. To add some fun, we had to choose between setting up our stand on a huge pile of snow or next to a row of trash cans near the Physics building, since somehow that was their scheduled garbage pick-up day. Despite the initial hurdles, many students dropped by to enjoy some tea and write positive messages on the board (my favorite one was a krill drawing with the line "You're one in a krillion!", restoring my faith in this generation). I even ran into some classmates way back from my Portuguese class in first term, who were so thrilled that we met again. Speaking of languages, although that amazing class was over, I still found some ways to satisfy my never-ending passion for Romance languages and cultures. With the Arts Multilingual Week in March, I found myself treading through the slippery snow to Buchanan Tower every week to join the epic workshops and seminars. Nibbling the chocolate biscuits offered on the 7th floor of the building, with the vast expanse of the icy ocean in sight, I savored every second of listening to the Dr. Anje Ziethen's discussion of African Brazilians returning to West Africa after slavery ended. On another day, battling the downpour, I practiced my rusty Spanish with an improvised skit of Little Red Riding Hood while our cheery Colombian facilitators and fellow participants laughed with all their strength. Somehow it was worth the embarrassment of misgendering "the point"...
After class, rocking on the bus during my 3-hour daily commute with Morat blasting from my earphones, I often thought of things happening across the ocean. It was another Lunar New Year far away from home. No firecrackers, no pungent scent of pickled onions in fish sauce, no humid air damping the collar on my áo dài, the only solace being a vegetarian bánh chưng my parents brought here. On the day of Lunar New Year's Even, the 30th of December on the lunar calendar, I skipped my biochemistry class to come home early to enjoy a warm home-cooked year-end dinner, with the nutty taste of the mung bean in the bánh chưng and the succulent slow-cooked pork with eggs still lingering on the tip of my tongue. Since the Buddhist temple was closed long before I got home, we couldn't go there for prayers, so I spent the rest of the evening avoiding the bitter winds blowing outside and tried my silk áo dài on. There were no mai or cherry blossoms in sight to celebrate the new year as per our traditions, not until March, when the first silky petals of cherry blossoms started peeking out of their emerald armour.
On sunny weekends, I would spend mornings chasing the first blooms, from the early Yoshino forming cumulous cotton-pink clouds to the fuchsia Kanzan cherry blossoms forming delicate bouquets on the branches. Deep in the sunshine, listening to the ocean breeze rustling through the flowers, I watched the petals falling like pink raindrops. The entire city was in all shades of pink, with petals falling on car tops, resting on people's shoulders, and covering my shoes with rosy speckles. The flowers kept falling until the rain came again in April, leaving pale pink petals on the green grass like bits of firecrackers after a celebration. The quiet days studying for finals were sometimes spiced up with family visits, DQ hot fudge sundaes, and biweekly trips to Waves to get a maple iced macchiato (pure heaven). Sometimes, I would go all the way to the southernmost tip of the Lower Mainland to get lost along the vast sandbanks on low tide, squinting my eyes to find colorful seashells or little crabs under seaweed-slathered rocks. The sleepy neighborhood of Beach Grove was the embodiment of summer, with kids racing on their tiny bikes along the birch-lined trails while the charming scent from a lilac tree in someone's backyard trailed slowly.
As the kids disappeared behind the thick blackberry bushes on their relentless wheels, I was reminded of my childhood roaming the alleys in Saigon with my little pink four-wheeled bike. It must have been easily more than ten years. Just a few weeks ago, my family gathered along our cozy kitchen to celebrate my 20th birthday, with the most succulent ribs and roasted vegetables made by my mom's magic hands and a Black Forest cake. As I dipped a piece of toast into the warm broth, the rain outside tapered, and the whole world just narrows into our tiny round kitchen table. The world can suddenly be so small, but can get so unfathomably big when I sipped a cup of iced macchiato under the blazing sun on the wooden plank near the Nest after my last final for second year.
Or so I saw through my nearsighted glasses. I'll get them fixed over the summer in Vietnam, eventually.
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