I remember Christie once telling me that she always wanted to bring presents to someone’s house at Christmas. We were waiting at the train station to Toronto, our exams finished, doing exactly that. Carrying bags with a fondue set, maybe a candle holder, and other assorted miscellany for my parents who already had everything.

As a seventeen-year-old with an adorable baby-face, she was rarely taken seriously as a mature and responsible person. I could tell that having this holiday tradition was her way of feeling like an adult. Not the grocery shopping we would do, not the lingerie she would wear for me, or even the act of love itself, but a family to go to, gifts to give, a house to stay in, a little piece of maturity.

For me, it’s this car.

Not the bills. Not the house. Not the mortgage.

It’s being able to get anywhere. It’s feeling these keys in my pocket and knowing that they’re mine. It’s driving home after class when it’s dark out, blasting a night mix on the stereo. It’s even looking for a parking spot downtown on a Monday afternoon, or getting stuck in traffic.

It’s having all these things that I’ve never had before.

(I’ve been writing this in my head for four years. Four years and seven months, to be precise.)

So one last touch and then you’ll go
And we’ll pretend that it meant something so much more
But it was vile, and it was cheap
And you are beautiful but you don’t mean a thing to me

—Death Cab for Cutie, Tiny Vessels

I got this picture in New Jersey. It’s the most peculiar size for a photograph: 3 7/16 by 4 13/16 inches.

For some reason, I see it properly like this — landscape orientation, with the white stripe on the left — when it could just as well be rotated any other way. This is the bias I place on it. The way I view it.

It almost looks like a room with a wall in frame on the left, and the camera has metered for a flash off the wall, underexposing the rest of the picture. There are two smears in the blackness. Maybe an out-of-focus object, maybe a fingerprint on the lens.

I didn’t take the picture. Someone else did, thought it was bad, and was about to throw it out before I asked for it. Someone who took me for granted. Someone who’s world I lived in but for a week, in the midst of the intense summer humidity and coitus interruptus.

I’ve kept it in one of my notebooks since. The edges have turned yellow, and the corners blunt from handling.

Every time I look at it, I like to think that I see something in that grain and that noise. That something’s there; I just don’t see it because there isn’t enough light to expose it, but it exists nonetheless. Some photographic kōan, where I become that which I seek.

But I know there isn’t, the way I know it was nothing more than passing moment, a week forgotten, a life unchanged.

And I’ve been happily fooling myself ever since.

I often explain to people that Karaoke to the Chinese is like drinking to the British. We don’t pour pints at our parties, we sing. It’s part of the culture. The Chinese-Canadian dream is a Toyota in every driveway and a Karaoke machine in every house.

My dad was no exception. Like all his hobbies, he took Karaoke seriously. He had singing lessons from a famous teacher. Sometimes, he would record himself and listen to the tapes to analyze his singing when driving me to school. We would never talk on those hour-long rides, I would only hear him singing, sometimes along with his recorded voice, sometimes practicing the parts that he didn’t have quite right.

When I was young, about seven, I would sing one of the English songs from his collection. I couldn’t tell you why. Karaoke didn’t particularly interest me. Maybe it was a way for me to be a part of his life. He had nothing to do with me otherwise.

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