Encounter

My Snow White

I landed Canada at Toronto city in the winter of 2007. Toronto is a large city which population is about 4.3 million, and this probably caused my problem. I felt I liked a dust swung among the crowds. Nobody noticed me, and I knew no one either.

A week before Christmas, I was disappointed instead of excited about the life in Canada. The terrible banality of daily activities in Toronto invaded me like a kind of flu. The charming way the sales talked to me when I wanted to look at something, the colourful postures and handouts in front of fast food restaurants, and the laxative actions those birds and rabbits performed everywhere made me sick from time to time. Walking the broad and busy streets, I caught myself looking too thin and pallid to accept those cultural manifestations.

Toronto with its hotels and subways and huge shipping malls was a modern industrial complex. Adults went to work while students went to school in the morning, and they both travelled home again at night. These homes were impenetrable to me, but the busy working and studying days bore the same rhythms as those found in any large city such as HongKong in China. The traffic noise and the civility of people in the street made me think of my hometown. I had hoped for more than this. Although immigration to a new country is exhausting and often lonely due to the cultural confusion, the taste of food, and the unreadable information, it does provide me an opportunity to improve acknowledges and personalities.

I was on my way to my shelter after school. It was a snowing evening and the thought of a happy Christmas appealed in my mind. I looked around into the window of street shops, breathed the fresh smell of the snow, and imaged my first Christmas in Canada. At that moment it began to rain. A few drops in the snow at first, then it came down like a waterfall. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an umbrella and was wearing a thick woollen sweater at that time. The worst thing was...