Non-existent Childhood...

I'm running out of things to write about, so today I'll write a rant/anecdote about my childhood.

Fact: I didn't have a childhood really.

I didn't realize that until recently, when we were assigned a project about childhood in our French class. It just got me thinking. I have minimal pictures, no toys, and basically no memory. I didn't remember having many friends, I probably had 1 friend for the duration of my 9 years growing up in Beijing and that was it. It's so sad...! So recently, I started this group on Facebook, uniting all the Beijing people in Vancouver. In less than 3 days, I got 35 people joining the group. All of those 35 people are from the west side of Vancouver, a few of them from Richmond. Of course we started groups on MSN and QQ started chatting. Almost everyone says that they love Beijing because they have their best friends there, and I'm just like... I didn't have any friends when I was in Beijing, but I just feel like I belong to the city...

Of course all the people in the group couldn't believe that I grew up in Beijing without friends, since our generation, especially in Beijing, values friendship so much. I had ONE friend when I was growing up, my neighbour. He was 7 months older than I was, and we knew eachother since age zero. I lied to him when I moved to Canada, I told him I would be back the following week. Of course, my first visit back to China was a whopping 6 months after I left China, and even then I didn't get to see him. So fast forward seven years and 10 trips back to China later, I still haven't heard anything from him. Of course, before I left China, I had no idea how to use the Internet, and I didn't have a cellphone back then. I never even bothered to know his home phone number because he was always a shout away.

Determined to bring back my childhood, I got Xiu to register a Xiaonei (the Chinese equivalent of Facebook) for me because I couldn't register one myself due to the fact that I never went to high school in China. I entered my neighbour's name into the search engine on Xiaonei and ONE result came up. My neighbour had the most unique name ever, and I wasn't surprised that the search only generated one name. However, there was no information connected to that name. No information regarding network, or anything. Out of desperation, I messaged that person, hoping it is him. So far, I haven't got a reply yet... but I hope I'll get one soon.

I grew up way too fast, entering society at an early age is such a bad thing because I missed out on alot of childhood stuff.