A Little Girl's Dream

The last summer of the 1990s. Hangzhou, west side of the city.

A seven-year-old girl has kicked off her blanket. The family has just moved; in the new apartment she has her own room, and on its wall hang her drawings: a family of three, a sun, and a sea colored grey with great determination — the art teacher said seas are supposed to be blue. She didn't listen.

The little girl is asleep.

She is having a dream. It is the first one.

In the dream she stands somewhere enormous — so big it has no edges. The wind is huge and it makes her want to laugh. The ground is covered in small white flowers, one against the next against the next, as if all the stars fell out of the sky and landed here. She is barefoot. The earth is cool, and the cool feels good.

There is someone else in the field.

A boy, a little taller than her, hair the color of sun-dried straw, standing a few steps away in the flowers, looking at her. His eyes are strange — grey mixed with blue, like the sea in her drawing.

The two children look at each other. Neither is afraid. In the dream, each seems to know who the other is, and neither could say it out loud.

The boy speaks first. A string of sounds, and she cannot understand one of them.

She shakes her head.

The boy thinks. Steps closer. Says it again — slowly, carefully, one word at a time. Still nothing. It's a language she has never heard, with sounds that float upward at the ends, like water birds.

She answers him, just as carefully: "I don't know what you're saying."

Now the boy shakes his head.

They both laugh.

Then the boy reaches out his hand. Palm up. Open. The one gesture every child in the world can read.

She puts her hand in it.

His hand is warm. The wind presses the whole field of flowers down and lets it go, like someone very far away letting out one long, relieved breath. The two children stand in the flowers holding hands, and now nobody is talking — it's no longer required. The clouds run fast overhead. The sea shines at the far edge. And the dream stretches on ahead of them, long, long, long as a lifetime.

Morning, Hangzhou. The little girl wakes.

She lies in bed and holds her hand up in front of her face, and it seems like there's still some warmth in the palm. She means to tell her mother about the dream — but by the kitchen door there's the smell of rice porridge, and her mother calling eat faster, you'll be late for school —

—and it's gone. Children's dreams wash out fast.

Except that autumn, when school starts, the English teacher tells everyone to choose an English name. The other girls grab Cindy. Amy. The girl flips to the name list at the back of the textbook, runs her finger down the page, and stops. For a long time.

The teacher asks: why that one?

She can't say. She just feels like the name is something she knows. Like a place. Like a wind. Like a hand.

"This one," says the little girl.

Daisy.

She forgot the dream for twenty years.

The name she kept for a lifetime — because the things a person truly can't bear to lose will find their own way to stay.