Our rented car jolted along the narrow passageway among a conglomeration of cypresses on a sulky winter day in the States, underneath an overcast smothered by languid, fat clouds studded with grey tints. My parents, though fostered in an awfully conventional backdrop of Chinese public education, were seeking for me an international secondary school where they coaxed to me, would preserve my creativity and my naïvety as an eleven-year-old. I glimpsed listlessly outside of the grimy car window, at a forest of bald tree boughs and dull foliage. Leaves of distasteful colors grinded into shreds under the bumping tires while a small, compressed building loomed over the barren clusters of branches like a sharpened piece of slate.

We parked the antique at a vacant spot near the entrance. As I reviewed the scene in hindsight, an astonishing realization smote me with the school’s resemblance to Lowood, where Jane Eyre lingered in for 6 years only to be pestered by an assortment of ailments and the despondence of a loner. Chiseled in monstrous, inky black fonts onto a varnished wooden plank, was the name of the school.

Mother descended the car with me to the glass panes, through which an eternal hallway extended into an endless shade of light gray. A woman with a black skin tone and mischievous curls of hair bundling into clumps, stood there, her red-wine lips grinning into what I perceived as an indifferently pleasant beam. My hand slid from my mother as the woman ushered me into the hallway, “we had been hyped up for your visit since yesterday morning..."

Gaping, wonderless, at the subdued compilation of ponytails, varying skin tones and hair colors, the concrete and bricks framing the walls of the architecture, an eerie oblivion had sneaked into my irises like a gauzy veil weaved of electrical wires, arranged crisscross in a net to deprive my heart of its vital vibrations. I did not catch the rest of the woman’s lecture, for my soul had sidled away from her verbose drawl of vowels explaining to me about my trial lessons, into the torrent of girls undulating like suppressing breakers in the hollowness of the hall. My eyes drifted along the crowd seeking for boyish figures and existences of masculinity, yet it was vain effort, for I discovered none but hordes of girls and adult women flittering about in polished leather shoes. I was 11 years old, when my tongue and teeth were still entangling in discordance as the unfamiliar stretch of English language clashed between my lips. Yet it was the same incessant, feminine drawl of the not-so-familiar language that jounced against my ears as a deafening flood sprinting down from a mountain apex.

The pupils of my eyes flitted among the foreign faces, receiving glimpses of occasional stares of sheer curiosity, and sometimes, detachment that must had derived from a salient difference in appearances, and a deeper discrepancy I could not name. Hymns surged in like a forest creek from a nearby room with chord cadences resonating like a bottle of whiskey prickly and unbefitting in my dry throat. “For the lord God omnipotent reignth…” I did not understand the lyrics, nor comprehended the significance of that song. However as I peered into the slightly ajar door of the music room, into the arrayed lines of girls cladded in tidy school uniforms, several sensations soared from the pit of my stomach and accumulated into a clump of messiness suspended in my chest beneath the serenity of my complexion. Poets thought that serenity was a source of joy, a derivation of infinite beauty from the quiet chatter of nightingales and the jocund swaying of daffodils. No; the stillness on my face was merely a presentation of numbing puzzlement, an exclusion from the surrounding passions which I didn’t deserve to hold, and the weird settling of my heart as I started to ponder about the reason of these said sentiments. The melody was catchy, and sticked to my head for quite a long time; I knew not it was called Hallelujah, but for some reason, I knew it was something people like me wouldn't be able to understand.

For years I failed to comprehend that inscrutable chasm between me and the place, until things in general started to reveal themselves to me. I started taking music theory courses, and the hymn I had heard in the music room in the States recurred to me in an amicable sense of familiarity. For sure, I am not the eleven-year-old who struggled with oral English anymore; but I know there will always be a barrier in between, an irrevocable obstacle that no matter how I tried to shatter, will still exist.