Staff Writer Emily Ng reflects on her time as an international student in London as she enters her final semester in the city.
Earlier this month, Disney released ‘Dream Productions’, a mini-series that explored the psyche of a pre-teen girl named Riley from the Inside Out film franchise. The show was centered on the imagined Dream Productions department, a part of Riley’s mind that was responsible for making her dreams.
Throughout the series, Paula the dream director struggled with her rapid decline into obscurity: her dreams were quickly becoming irrelevant as the maturing Riley no longer subscribed to her signature unicorn flash mobs and glitter explosions, or to her guiding principle that dreams must be magical and otherworldly to make a lasting impact. The entire Dream Productions department, in fact, scrambled to produce something impactful enough to carry into the next day and to inspire Riley to make the right decisions. But this was to no avail. Each morning, Riley would wake, and it would have been like she never had those dreams at all.
As I write, I am plagued by the thought that I, too, am in the midst of a dream and, more urgently, the feeling that I am about to wake. I write about a quiet, gnawing sensation, the murmurings of an omnipresent anxiety that I trust my fellow international students must sympathise with to some degree.
When I left London after my first year at King’s, I had imagined with horror through all fourteen hours of the flight home that I would become a shell of myself, that I would lose crucial parts of my character that I could only recover when I returned again in the fall.
We landed back in Hong Kong. I stepped out into the glaring sunlight, and, feeling my agitated hair rise amid the overpowering humidity, I almost believed I had never left in the first place. Mechanically I walked down the same brick path towards my apartment complex. Unthinkingly I pushed my granddad’s wheelchair up the same concrete ramp to the wet market. Habitually I pulled out my Oyster — I mean — Octopus card and, took the same escalator to the Underground — sorry — MTR station.
I was shocked to see how easy it was to slip back into the habits of my old life. As the summer crawled along, I felt more and more that my year abroad had been a dream, through which I had only temporarily escaped the mundane realities of home. With each recall the memories grew more surreal; they felt so far away, as if they belonged to an alternate dimension entirely.
Second year came along. I was relieved. As I plunged back into the chilly dreamscape at Heathrow Terminal 3, I was fresh with a lucid optimism to take the opportunity of another year and to wring it dry.
But with the end of my third winter term, I am forced to reckon with a rude awakening. Dreamscapes and paradises are exclusionary; London, the ultimate destination for hundreds of thousands, is merciless by necessity, cutthroat by nature. Increasingly I am unable to reverse the fact that as time passes it becomes set in stone, that as the future approaches the present and its boundless possibilities drop like leaves.
And now each peal of the church bells past the Strand are a nostalgic pang – even more painful for the fact that they will one day be subsumed into the blaring bellows of my alarm clock. The details of the stone masonry and high brick towers that surround the way towards Temple stand strong against the winds and rains, only to be washed away by the babbling days and gushing years. The bitter draught that rushes down Chancery Lane rakes my face like a million claws as if to hold me back, back from going to a more familiar place where I might never feel this cold again.
And then my place in the city will be taken over. The ever-moving pieces of London will fill up the cavity that my absence will have left in the streets. A new set of clothes and boxes will move into my flat. I will return a loan on borrowed time, and wake up from a dream that has to end.
Maybe this is a more romantic picture of university life than is warranted. Maybe the rush of seeing the world that has been advertised to me from a young age – from the tailor shops in Kingsman to the red telephone boxes in Peppa Pig – points to the fact that I have been quite stupid to fall for a mere cultural export. Maybe the magic in abandoning my forever reality for a sojourn on the other side of the world only exposes my tendencies towards delusion, escape, and melodrama.
Maybe I should realise what Paula the dream director had already learnt. Dreams aren’t made to dismantle reality; nor are they made to last. Above all:
“They don’t even need to be remembered. Sometimes they just need to be felt.”
My London is a dream: it is not made to be sustained. Indeed, I should be grateful to have lived it at least.
