I love rivers. My hometown is a small village in the south of China. The rivers passed by almost every house and houses are connected by the bridges. 
My mom, dad, grandpa, and grandma, or grew up there. People like swimming in the river. My dad told me, so he used to dive in the water and catch those tiny shrimps to eat. He and his friends enjoyed spending summer nights on a wooden bridge. I love the rivers as much as my dad does. I always feel like there is an inexplicable yearning to rivers deep in my soul. Therefore, every time I go to the city, I will go looking for a river.

I'm standing besides riddle river in Ottawa. The wind is cold and bedding. The winter has already arrived. I often come here to learn about this city, I believe in Ottawa for more than 4 years and will probably continue to live here. I came here for study in 2018, recalling the last 4 years in Ottawa. I think I'm already familiar with the rhythm of the city.

I see the pride and innocence of students, cheeks on campus.  
I hear animate songs coming from the spars in bad world. Market. 
I can tell people's tireness by their expressions in Walmart at 10:00 pm。 
I saw people's most dramatic emotions during a soccer game. 
Those sounds of Ottawa are authentic and lively. They just never enter my heart and read a river. It's just too noisy for me. 

My heart never really resonated with the rhythm of this river or this city, because my heart is always occupied by those sounds that are happening now on my homeland, China.

I hear a mom begging for a febrifuge to save her kid. 
I hear people screaming from the windows of apartments, as they were starving and panicking.
I hear people were beaten by the police because they protested for stopping the lockdown. 
I hear a girl begging for seeing her mom after her mom jumped from the building but the ambulance could not approach due to the lockdown policy. 

For the past 3 years, Chinese government has practiced an extremely strict zero-Covid policy. The policy has caused horrible humanitarian crisis. My feelings towards my home has never been such complicated before. I found that I no longer wanted to go home as much as Iused to.  I was even afraid to go home. Policy in China is not only preventing me, but also numerous overseas Chinese from returning home. The Chinese diaspora is going on.

In this summer, my grandpa passed away. It was a normal morning. I saw a message from my dad. The grandpa said goodbye to the world this afternoon at 4:50 pm hope the grandpa rest in peace. I didn't have a chance to see my grandpa for the last time. Because at the time, there was a mandatory 14-day quarantine if I entered China. But in my hometown, people held funerals only for the first 7 days of their person died, and then the body would be cremated. I still remember my mom said your dad and I feel lonely in the funeral procession. On that day, i've never felt that I was such far away from my home before. 

I'm not a Canadian and my home is always China. But if the home is a place that you can hardly return, where do I truly belong to standing on the bank of riddle river? I feel like I'm standing on an age in front of me. Riddle river is close, but I'm familiar behind me. I can see the rivers of my hometown that are too far to return. I feel like I'm stuck in between somewhere that I don't fully belong to either side.

Though I'm now thousands miles away from China, sometimes those sounds could bring me back to that land. And then, the pain and despair would prevent me from sleeping. On my distant homeland where my friends and family live, people are suffering every day. It broke my heart, and it seems like I couldn't do anything about it. This feeling of powerlessness pushes me forward. I want to be a journalist in the future to help those people living on that land. I work hard to acquire journalistic skills, and I try to apply what I learned in school to analyze social issues. I keep observing and thinking about what's going on in the country. By doing so I start to learn how to live with my anger and despair.

Looking at the riddle river in front of me, I'm thinking about that small village again. It was always raining there and I remember the sound when the rain falls on the water. I recall those days that my grandpa wrote me to the center of village to listen to a Chinese opera. Now, the kid, the grandpa, the rivers has been separated in different worlds. 

I start to understand that no matter how long I would live in a foreign land, the concrete thing in front of me would never be home. Home is that distant and small village with those lovely rivers that always lives somewhere in my heart. I start to understand that standing on the edge, there's no need to panic because this struggle is part of me, is part of the miserable, beautiful souls of the separated Chinese in this age.