Kelsey Li - A Tale of Three Continents: Coming of Age in CHINA, NEW ZEALAND, and CANADA

The Countryside of Montreal The fields are arranged in neat rows of brown mounds with green stalks waving gently in the breeze and the barns are painted red. Horses neigh and nicker in the fields, lazily swishing away flies with their long tails while grazing in the pastures. I have yet to ride a horse that isn’t a pony. In New Zealand, I rode plenty of ponies at local fairs. Looking back at it, I feel rather bad for them, having to carry countless kids on their backs all day. Long driveways lead from the farmhouses with green mailboxes at the foot. Gardening rest in buckets as people prepare their flower beds and yards for the coming winter. I identified a few—tulips, chrysanthemums, hydrangea--as my mother is an avid gardener. The red stop signs are slightly rusty and battered. In front of some garages, boats sit in trailers, soon they will be put to bed for the winter, wrapped in canvas and plastic to keep out the ice and snow. The Saint Laurent River isn’t far from here. It was from there that the French first came to Nouvelle France, AKA, Canada today. A tall hedge lines one side of the road, an impenetrable wall of shrubbery keeping out prying eyes from passers-by and clearly defining property boundaries. I peer through a crack in the hedge and make out a rusty playground in a sad state of disrepair. The kids who used to play must have long since outgrown them. I remember having a blue swing in my old house in China. Last year my dad had it torn down as part of his renovations. I used to swing on it all the time, jumping off at the apex of the swing’s arc, much to my mother’s chagrin. It made me feel like flying. As I walk by a junkyard filled with broken and rusting cars, I think about how many things from 40