An account of moving
Posted: 2025-10-15
I have not moved that much but I hate it. I guess I just hate any sort of change in my life.
I remember living in 6th floor, 4th floor, 8th floor, the commie-block, and Grandma's.
Apparently my parents still lived in my dad's dormitory when mom got pregnant. But they moved to 6th floor before I was born. Which brings into the question of when they bought 6th floor and how were they confident enough to move in so soon after furnishing it, considering how paranoid they were about newly-furnished spaces. They delayed my starting middle school for two weeks because the classroom I was assigned was newly-furnished. Unless 6th floor was pre-furnished when they bought it, which I doubt.
Apparently I had drawn all over the walls. When I was like, I don't know, 4 or something, they finally got all the walls repainted white.
6th floor was outside the pass. According to the internet, the pass was canceled in 2010; but in practice it must've gone on longer because I still remember the red and green taxis. It was when I got back from the US that I noticed the taxis all turned the same color.
Soon after starting elementary school we moved to 4th floor, a place close enough for me to walk to school myself. It was also probably cheaper because no one wanted to live on the 4th floor. I had my own room in 4th floor.
My favorite thing about 4th floor was the bauhinia flowers. We were just high up enough to be surrounded by them. In winter, I would wake up to a window full of pink. Sometimes they grow into the bars on the windows. Sometimes birds land on the branches. One time they cut down all the trees for no discernable reason but they quickly grew back up. There was one tree that remained a stump for a while, but someone put a rack around it with a sign saying "this tree is still alive — let it grow!"
At noon I would also go to 8th floor, where my brother and his dad lived. They had no elevator. Neither did 4th floor but 4 stories was a lot easier to climb than 8. I would read my brother's collection of The Adventures of Tintin until the pages ripped, and eventually I bought another set.
We went to Grandma's place in the middle of nowhere one time for New Year. That was when COVID happened and 4th floor was in the middle of it, so we were stuck there. And then school started, which was awkward because 4 out of the 5 people living there needed to attend online classes — two as students and two as teachers, the one lucky folk who doesn't need to being grandma. But the apartment was quite new and we weren't planning on staying this long, so we didn't have Wi-Fi, and we couldn't afford doing so many online classes on data. We ended up borrowing the Wi-Fi of our neighbors directly upstairs. Now that I think about it, are they the ones with the kid who kept messing up Ode to Joy?
Eventually we resumed offline classes and moved back to 4th floor.
In high school we moved again to the commie-block because of my parents' work. This was the real upsetting one. We were leaving 4th floor for good, and I still don't think I'm over it.
We moved everything to Grandma's, including my books, the pipa I'd never touched since then, and Sandstorm. Sandstorm took a while to adjust. She found the nearest bed and crouched beneath it, refusing to come out for a couple days. Now she also liked poking her head dangerously out the window, not registering that we're now 5 times higher than we used to be and if she fell down again she's dying.
We also started to move between the commie-block and Grandma's because nobody liked the commie-block. My parents would stay there in the weekdays while I was at school, and during weekends they would pick me up from school and drive to Grandma's. On Sunday they would drop me back off at school and go back to the commie-block. Sometimes they'd have plans during the weekend so we would stay at the commie-block that week, and I'd have to sleep on the couch, unless my dad was sick; then I'd sleep on the bed with mom and he'd be off to the couch.
The commie-block wasn't all bad. There's actually life there. We were also close to a shopping mall. There was no life at Grandma's. Everything felt dead and my room didn't feel like mine. There's some neighbor who practiced the piano every weekend. They were playing Ode to Joy really badly for months.
I wrote this post mainly to reminisce about 4th floor. I missed the feeling of home and the bauhinia flowers. Sandstorm seemed happier there too. I don't know if I'll ever find somewhere that I could feel like home again.