Even to the Heavens (亦傅于天)2
When the ancients wrote of the phoenix in flight, they wrote of the murmur of its wings1. Later readers usually encounter the line and think first of auspiciousness, harmony, and a kind of perfection attained at a great height. Yet lately I have often wondered whether, if such a bird were truly seen from afar, all those standing on the ground could know for certain was that it remained in the sky. No one could distinguish whether the sound was one of harmonious flight, or merely the faint noise of feathers wearing against the wind and joints straining under the effort.
Before I went abroad, I was not the kind of child later narratives like to portray as having been chosen early by fate.
At the time, I understood almost nothing accurately about Canadian high schools, university applications, scholarships, or credit systems. My English was nowhere near strong enough to let me move easily through an unfamiliar system. Nor had I grown up in China being called a genius at every turn. At most, I possessed a clumsy kind of obstinacy. Once I decided that something had to be done, I would stake my whole self on it, without much concern for whether the present was bearable and without knowing how to leave anything in reserve.
People later mistook this temperament for ambition. At the beginning, it was not ambition. It was fear.
I was afraid that I would not get into university. I was afraid my language skills would not be enough. I was afraid my family could not support me for much longer, and that every additional expense would eventually harden into a debt no one could name aloud. So I began to calculate. I calculated whether a course could be finished early, whether one more class could be forced into a semester, whether AP credits might reduce the cost of university later, whether graduating a year early would mean one less year of homestay and living expenses, and whether I could begin thinning the road ahead before I had even found stable ground beneath my feet.
Graduating from high school in British Columbia required eighty credits. I completed seventy six in my first year, nearly all with perfect marks.
The number sounds calm now, almost like an elegant detail on a résumé. It was not elegant when lived. It meant a timetable packed to its limits. It meant attending school all day, then returning home to continue with online courses, assignments, AP preparation, and research. It meant using English to navigate unfamiliar classes, teachers, and rules before the language had become fully natural to me. It meant taking senior courses while disguising myself as an international student who had adapted perfectly well.
That year, I lived with a homestay family that was not suited to me.
The phrase not suited is polite and restrained. It leaves out the persistent smell of disorder in the house, the traces of communal spaces that no one truly cleaned, the noise and daily complications created by three children, the silence at the dinner table, the footsteps outside my door, the indirect tests, and the careful language of adults who believed their intentions could not be seen. That family had its own order, interests, loyalties, and ways of protecting itself. I lived inside it, but I never belonged to it. I was not family. I was not a guest. I was certainly not a child who could expect to be understood. I was an outsider who paid money, required accommodation, and was best kept from causing inconvenience.
The hardest part was not any single conflict. An argument can at least be confronted. What suffocated me was the need to maintain an acceptable quiet beneath someone else’s roof every day. I could not seem too cold when I came home. I could not close the door too firmly. I could not speak too directly. I could not allow dissatisfaction to show too clearly. During the day, I pushed my classes to the limit. At night, I still had AP work, online courses, assignments, and research. Yet after returning to the house, I had to surrender another portion of my mind to its disorder, adapt to its rhythms, tolerate trivial obligations that should never have belonged to me, and sometimes clean up the remains of a life system that was not mine.
Taken separately, none of these things seemed serious enough. That was precisely why they were so difficult to explain. No single incident was dramatic enough to make an observer say at once that I should leave, yet every one of them diminished me. They were not knives. They were sandpaper. They did not cut a person open once. They wore her down each day.
I needed quiet. I needed time. I needed somewhere that would at least allow me to stop for a moment when I returned. That place gave me no possibility of stopping.
I was not afraid of how outsiders treated me. The coldness, calculation, and evasive language of strangers could disgust me, but they could not truly break my heart. What broke my heart was turning around and finding that no one behind me was prepared to catch me either.
Even those who should have understood my circumstances best offered only the safest and most short sighted advice. Be sensible. Spend more time with them. Maintain the relationship. Their words assumed that I still possessed spare time and emotion that could be exchanged for superficial harmony. They assumed that my most important task was not surviving my courses, examinations, research, and future, but becoming a pleasant homestay student.
What finally extinguished my hope in them was the realisation that they had never understood why I had driven myself so hard in the first place.
Had I wanted only a comfortable life, I would never have studied that way. I would not have nearly completed an eighty credit graduation framework in my first year. I would not have forced AP courses, research, online classes, and senior level work onto myself before I could use English with ease. I did not do it because I enjoyed living at the limit, nor because I possessed some natural desire to drain myself dry. Much of it came from understanding too early that time was money. Another year meant another year of expenses. I had to become excellent enough to create more choices, excellent enough to compete for scholarships, credits, and cooperative education placements, excellent enough to ask as little as possible from a family that already lacked money.
Yet these were the very people who dismissed all of it with the lightest possible words.
“School abroad is easy.”
“You simply do not know how to get along with people.”
“Why not compromise a little more?”
Those words made my effort seem weightless. They turned my exhaustion into self indulgence. They reduced the desperation with which I tried to save money and build a future into nothing more than the benefits of an easier system. Perhaps it was uncomfortable for them to admit that things had truly been difficult, and that I had not achieved those marks effortlessly. To admit it would have meant admitting that they had not understood and had not borne the burden. It would have meant acknowledging that while a teenage child was calculating the cost of her future, they were still asking her to make the present look more agreeable.
For a time, I did think about ending it. The thought came without drama. Ending things was really only the matter of a moment, and it took no more courage than staying alive. A person can keep holding on, or not; and what frightened me most was that, on certain nights, both seemed equally reasonable. Yet it was precisely this that soon brought me back to my senses. If I truly stopped there, many people who had never understood me would instead be able to pass their easy verdicts on me, calling me fragile, calling me extreme, calling me immature, saying I had never been able to bear it in the first place. That would let them off far too cheaply.
The solution came to me during a sleepless night. I did not cry or tear the situation apart. I first approached a relatively reasonable member of my family and offered a sufficiently respectable explanation for wanting to change homestays. Then I brought the matter into an open conversation where it could be formally coordinated, so that it became an arrangement requiring resolution rather than a scene of emotional collapse. In the end, it was settled politely.
From the outside, it may have looked like nothing more than a smooth change of accommodation. I may even have seemed mature and capable of handling problems.
No one saw what that maturity cost.
No one rewards a person for not breaking down. No one truly understands her merely because she has managed to keep a situation respectable. When the outcome remains calm, adults simply breathe with relief, as though calmness had always been inevitable. Yet I know that if I had followed the supposedly mature and realistic advice I was given, if I had continued yielding, accommodating, and translating my suffering into a failure to be sensible, I would probably not have survived the second year.
What carried me forward was never the wisdom offered by those adults. I eventually understood that people with narrow vision do not become sources of support. At the moment of greatest need, they become weights around the ankle.
Yet the phoenix cannot fall. Not because it feels no pain, and not because it was born for the heights, but because, once it fell, the fire on its body would also burn those who once gave it food, feathers, and reasons to rise. So it must continue flying. The people below see that it has not fallen and mistake this for composure, brilliance, or a destiny fulfilled in flight. No one hears, beneath the murmur of its wings, the sound of bone grinding against wind.
There It Alights (亦集爰止)3
After I changed homestays, life did become much more comfortable.
The comfort was practical. My room was quiet. The boundaries were clear. When I returned, I no longer had to surrender the last of my strength. No one expected me to remain constantly aligned with the rhythm of a family to which I did not belong. No one disguised disorder as intimacy. No one asked me to purchase a bed and a door with agreeableness. For someone already worn thin by the previous year, these were not minor improvements.
Yet I soon discovered that comfort was not the same as being caught.
What I had been searching for was not merely a cleaner room, a quieter desk, fewer noises, fewer conflicts, or fewer daily indignities to endure. What I truly wanted was for someone to receive me gently when I could no longer hold myself upright. I did not need another person to solve every problem or release me from every responsibility. I only wanted someone to see that I had been flying for too long, that exhaustion was not self pity, and that resting was not a moral failure.
There was no one.
The stability that followed was only stability. It was not belonging. My new life allowed me to sleep, to study, to close the door, and to reach the end of a day without being subjected to further depletion. It gave me some space in which to breathe, but it could not restore what the first year had worn away.
A person does not grow new feathers merely because she has changed rooms.
Much damage occurs without sound. Only when the world finally becomes quiet does she discover how deeply tired she has become.
In my second year, I appeared to slow down.
My schedule was not as extreme as it had been before, and daily life no longer felt like a silent struggle. I worked as a teaching assistant, prepared for AP examinations, took language tests, continued my research, and travelled to San Diego, turning relationships that had existed through emails and screens into something tangible. Viewed from the outside, the second year seemed far easier than the first. It may even have looked like an extra stretch of time in which I was free to move more slowly.
I knew it was not ease.
The first year had pushed me so close to the limit that I no longer possessed the strength to burn in the same way. The fire remained, but it burned lower. The feathers remained, but they could no longer beat against the air with the same disregard for cost. I had not suddenly lost the desire to move forward, nor had I finally learned to enjoy life. I had simply admitted that if I continued as I had before, my body and mind would refuse me first.
For most of that year, I was waiting for scholarship decisions.
A full scholarship was never an ornament to me. It was not a beautiful medal or another line to display on a résumé. It was more like a distant paulownia tree. If I could land there, both my family and I would be spared a great deal of pressure. If I could not, I would have to begin calculating again, year by year, course by course, cooperative education term by cooperative education term, and dollar by dollar, until I understood how much of the future I would have to earn back myself.
I applied for international full scholarships at UBC and the University of Toronto, and I hoped for major awards from other universities as well. My referees supported me with all their strength. I also did everything I could, reshaping things I would rather not have lowered my head to discuss into the forms preferred by those who evaluate high school students.
I knew what they wanted. Of course I knew. They wanted youth, gratitude, vulnerability without sharpness, excellence without danger, suffering that ended in docile faith in the world.
I disliked the performance, but I gave it to them. At the time, I was not wealthy enough to protect my pride without compromise.
In the end, I received nothing, not a single one, an utter defeat.
What angered me most was not failure alone, but the fact that it occurred in the one realm where no argument was possible. Whenever a competition depended on grades, rankings, or explicit thresholds, I could succeed. Whenever there were rules, numbers, and standards, I did not lose. Yet the moment judgement became subjective, the moment unseen people were allowed to decide who deserved funding, whose story moved them, and whose potential conformed to their imagination, I lost every means of proving myself.
Some universities publish the stories of their scholarship recipients. I read those stories and did not believe I was inferior to them. It is difficult to write this sentence because once spoken, it is easily mistaken for jealousy, resentment, or arrogance.
Yet this was precisely what enraged me. I could not protest the injustice of the selection process, because my protest itself would be used as evidence that their decision had been correct.
“Look, she is not humble enough.”
“Look, she is not likeable enough.”
“Look, she does not understand gratitude.”
“Look, she was never the kind of child we wished to reward.”
I came to despise the endless worship of leadership in selection processes. Human society has never been carried forward primarily by polished undergraduate speakers who know how to package their résumés and present their experiences in flattering light. What society calls leaders are often merely the figures a vast social order requires in order to govern the ordinary majority. They may preserve order, but they do not necessarily create new possibilities.
The people who truly alter the world are often those who work where no applause reaches them. If every capable young person aspires to become the same polished kind of leader, humanity will gain only more people competing for positions, claiming to represent others, and repeating elegant phrases. It will not gain more people willing to enter long, lonely, and unpresentable forms of work, and to push the boundaries of civilisation forward.
Perhaps these institutions taught me something early. Prestigious universities do not naturally exclude mediocrity, hypocrisy, or people whose only talent is constructing an attractive narrative. To be chosen proves only that someone suited the taste of a particular selection process. It does not prove that the chosen person possesses greater value than those who were rejected.
The words “not pleased by external things, not saddened by personal misfortune”4 sound noble. They suggest a composure refined through storms, a person who has finally learned to hold gain and loss lightly.
In my own life, the condition was never so elevated. It was closer to a disguise I had been forced to learn.
I could not rejoice too openly because I no longer trusted the sincerity of other people’s congratulations. If my success could become their honour, conversation, or consolation, then naturally they would be pleased. Yet their pleasure was not necessarily for me. It was often pleasure in finding a place for themselves within my result.
Nor could I grieve too openly. The moment sorrow became visible, someone would be waiting to explain my disappointment as deserved punishment, weakness, arrogance, or proof that I had never been exceptional after all.
That detachment was not without cracks.
There had been no shortage of applause. When marks arrived, when offers came, when my name appeared in some attractive place, people were always willing to say something kind. Yet when scholarship decisions failed and the road ahead became heavy again, much of that concern collapsed into a casual “that’s too bad.”
They were not necessarily malicious or cruel. My difficulty simply did not fall upon them, and so they could put it down almost immediately.
The people who continued trying to find solutions were my research mentors. They had no obligation to carry any of it. They had not caused the scholarship decisions. My family’s finances were not their responsibility. My university fees were not something they should have had to worry about. Yet they still considered my options carefully, mapped out possible routes, and contacted people who might help.
Their assistance was precious because it was not vague consolation. It was not “do not think too much,” and it was not “everything will work out.” It was the experience of someone sitting down and treating my future as a matter worthy of careful attention.
In the hardest moments, it becomes easy to distinguish those who merely offer a pleasant sentence from those willing to place their hands inside the disorder and help untangle a path.
Cheap pity sometimes exhausted me more than hostility. Hostility at least knows where it stands. Pity often remains on the shore and offers the drowning person a sentence of comfort without getting its hands wet. It has no intention of entering the water or pulling her out. It only hopes that before she sinks, she will acknowledge that it once sounded gentle.
By then, I had no strength left to testify on behalf of such gentleness.
One afternoon, when my emotions were close to giving way, I cried beside my second French teacher. She had no power to change the scholarship decision or reduce my fees. She simply listened until I had finished.
I rarely trust that another person can witness my helplessness without harming me. At the time, even that small safety felt like more warmth than I dared request.
Afterward, life continued. Emails had to be answered. Plans had to be revised. Fees had to be calculated. The road had to be walked again.
I had accepted this long ago, and perhaps there was no cruelty left in it.
There it alights, says the old poem. Yet that was the place I could never reach. The phoenix had its high ridge, its paulownia tree, and a branch on which it could rest. Each time I believed I had finally seen such a place, I moved closer and found only a shadow in the distance.
All I could do was console myself pathetically.
Perhaps fate was forcing me back onto the right path.
Perhaps one day I would be grateful that university had not become easy for me. Perhaps I would thank the scholarships I did not receive, thank every necessity that forced me to learn how to earn a living sooner, and thank the fact that I had never been permitted to rest in comfort.
Who could know?
Upon That High Ridge (于彼高岡)5
After the scholarship decisions were final, I never truly recovered.
The disappointment was not simply about money. It felt as though every story that had sustained me until then had suddenly been emptied of meaning. I had naïvely believed that if I worked hard enough, became excellent enough, and pushed myself to the limit early enough, some door would eventually open in response. I believed that the nearly perfect marks, the semesters compressed beyond recognition, and the work finished late at night would be acknowledged at some decisive moment.
When the decisions arrived, the previous two years suddenly felt wasted.
A person must use reason to clear away the ruins left by emotion. The marks remained. The offers remained. The research remained. My referees had still helped me. Nothing I had done could be erased by a few rejection letters.
Yet emotion does not always obey reason.
During that period, I had no desire to prepare for AP examinations or to continue many of the tasks that should have been advancing. My efficiency became so poor that I scarcely recognised myself. The person from my first year, the one who had charged forward as though her life meant nothing, was still inside me. She was simply tired. She was so tired that even anger could no longer transform immediately into action.
It was not because I had nowhere to attend university. I never doubted that I could enter an excellent institution. Waterloo’s offer was never a result for which I believed I should fall to my knees and thank fate.
This is not contempt for the university. It is an acknowledgement of how much I had paid, and of how little the result changed my actual circumstances.
My nearly pathological perfectionism, the full marks, the courses completed ahead of time, the AP work, research, online classes, and applications forced through before my language had stabilised, all seemed to have purchased nothing more than a result meaninglessly far above the threshold.
It felt as though I had used all my strength to forge a sharp blade, only to be permitted to cut through a sheet of thin paper.
The paper was cut. It was cut cleanly, beautifully, and without uncertainty.
Yet I felt no victory.
I felt only emptiness, because the door I had truly wanted to open did not recognise the blade.
My family did make sacrifices. I have never denied this, and I would not dare deny it. I am not an ungrateful child.
The opposite is closer to the truth. My whole life seems to have been spent in gratitude. I am grateful that my family allowed me to study abroad. I am grateful that my mentors continued searching for a route when I was struggling most. I am grateful that a teacher allowed me to cry beside her when I was losing control. I am grateful to everyone who has ever pulled me slightly back from an edge.
I understand too well how difficult every form of help can be to obtain. For that reason, I scarcely dare to stop being grateful.
Yet gratitude cannot cancel grievance.
It does not allow others to diminish my effort and enlarge their own contribution. It does not allow them to reprice my achievements with the claim that education abroad is easy. It does not mean that whenever I am dismissed, I must first lower my head and admit that I have already received so much that I no longer possess the right to say I am tired.
I never dared ask to be understood. Yet if that relentless tide of negativity had only stopped tearing at me for a little while, my inner life might not have become so painful.
I had already carved myself so thin, and still I was not considered sensible enough.
How could I not envy other people my age?
I envied those who could go to shopping centres and restaurants together. I envied those who could buy things without repeatedly calculating whether they were worth the cost. I envied those who could treat a weekend as a weekend, and the hours after school as their own. I envied those allowed, at certain ages, to be genuinely happy in the way people of that age are supposed to be.
My most common form of reward was nothing more than buying a few ingredients and cooking myself a reasonably satisfying Chinese meal.
Even that was a great comfort. Oil heated in the pan. The scent of spring onion, ginger, and garlic rose into the room. The rice finished steaming. Bowls and chopsticks were placed on the table.
For that moment, at least, I could confirm that I still possessed some ability to make my life resemble a life.
I never developed much of a habit of shopping. A few items of clothing could be worn in rotation throughout the year. I did not wear makeup or spend much time dressing myself. Looking acceptable was enough. I avoided low quality social activities whenever possible, because they consumed money and strength, and neither money nor strength had ever been available to me for careless use.
They had to be preserved for the next opportunity that might alter my future.
Yet when a life is lived this way for long enough, people begin to assume that suffering is natural to you.
They imagine that I do not need leisure, beautiful clothes, friends, ease, or a little happiness without purpose while I am still young. They imagine that I choose restraint because I am nobler than others, that I save money because I dislike pleasure, and that I continue moving forward because I was born with some special fitness for pressure.
Regardless, I still chose the road that was higher, colder, and more expensive.
The choice was not entirely desire, nor was it entirely courage. It was more like choosing a direction while wind struck from every side.
I knew that the road contained the training, resources, and possibilities I wanted. I also knew that it contained no stability reserved for me. It was not a gentle branch lowered toward my body. It was not a place where I could finally fold myself down and rest.
It was a high ridge.
From there, I could see farther. The wind would also strike harder.
By then, I no longer truly believed that the world contained a resting place prepared for me.
“Abundant are the king’s worthy men.”6 The old line is too complete. It suggests that once the phoenix rises, the world will naturally provide a high ridge, morning light, a paulownia tree, and a multitude waiting to receive it.
I eventually understood that the deepest desolation is not found where no one is present. It is found where everyone is present, yet no place has truly been made for you.
Some people see how high I fly. Some praise my feathers. Some use me to decorate their own stories. Yet when my strength is exhausted, the branch that could hold me has still not grown.
My flight, then, is less a return to my proper place than a form of exile. My pauses are not rest. They are brief breaths taken before the next wind arrives.
I once hoped that one day I would be able to call all of this fate. I hoped I could say that the things withheld from me had guided me back to the correct path, that every suffering would eventually compensate me in another form.
I cannot say it yet.
When suffering occurs, it is not first a gift, and it is not first a trial. It is only suffering. When people insist on finding light inside it afterward, perhaps they do so because the alternative is to admit that they once hurt for nothing.
So I no longer rush to defend it.
I remember only that during those years, I truly worked hard. I was truly tired. In many moments when no one understood, I still completed what had to be done.
I also remember that I did want, sometimes, to be happy in an ordinary way. I did envy the easier youth of other people.
I simply had no other choice, or at least the person I was then believed she had no other choice.
I must still move forward.
Not because the pain is gone. Not because I have finally come to believe that the future will be gentle. I continue because I have already come this far, and I cannot allow everything I endured to be interpreted by surrender halfway through.
I will continue flying. I will continue calculating. I will continue securing, one by one, whatever remains within my reach.
It is only the murmur of wings.
Only nowhere to rest.
Notes
1. The title and this line adapt the Book of Songs, “Juan’e” in the Greater Odes (《詩經·大雅·卷阿》): “The phoenix is in flight, the murmur of its wings” (鳳皇于飛，翽翽其羽). Huihui (翽翽) renders the sound of beating wings; the Mao commentary glosses it as “manifold,” while another reading hears in it the rustle of feathers against the air. Fenghuang (鳳皇), the phoenix, is written 鳳皇 in pre-Qin texts. ↩
2. From the same poem (《詩經·大雅·卷阿》): “The phoenix is in flight, the murmur of its wings, and it reaches even to the heavens” (鳳皇于飛，翽翽其羽，亦傅于天). Fu (傅) means to reach or draw near; the Correct Meaning of the Mao Songs glosses it as “to arrive.” The line describes the phoenix beating its wings upward until it presses against the high sky. ↩
3. From the same poem (《詩經·大雅·卷阿》): “The phoenix is in flight, the murmur of its wings, and there it alights” (鳳皇于飛，翽翽其羽，亦集爰止). Ji (集) is a bird coming to rest; yuan (爰) means “thereupon” or “here”; zhi (止) is to settle. The line describes the phoenix, after its flight, alighting where it belongs. ↩
4. From Fan Zhongyan’s (范仲淹) “Record of Yueyang Tower” (《岳陽樓記》, Northern Song): “not pleased by external things, not saddened by personal misfortune” (不以物喜，不以己悲). Wu (物) is external circumstance; ji (己) is one’s own lot. The line names the composure Fan attributes to the “men of old with humane hearts,” who are governed by neither outward gain nor personal loss. ↩
5. From the same poem (《詩經·大雅·卷阿》): “The phoenix sings, upon that high ridge; the paulownia grows, on that sunlit slope” (鳳皇鳴矣，于彼高岡；梧桐生矣，于彼朝陽). Gang (岡) is a ridge or high ground. In “Juan’e” the high ridge is where the phoenix sings and gathers, paired with the paulownia (梧桐) that grows toward the sun; later tradition made the phoenix resting in the paulownia an image of the worthy finding their proper place. ↩
6. From the same poem (《詩經·大雅·卷阿》): “Abundant are the king’s many worthy men, whom the noble ones employ, cherished by the Son of Heaven” (藹藹王多吉士，維君子使，媚于天子). Aiai (藹藹) means numerous and flourishing; jishi (吉士) are good and worthy men; the king (王) is the Zhou sovereign. The line pictures a court abundant with worthy men, all employed by the noble and devoted to their ruler. ↩
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