（非得用中文概括一下中心思想大概就四个字：“别来无恙”。）
Dear Mike,
Greetings from Manchester again. In case you wonder why I have such an obsession with paper-based letters, it is because their concrete forms of existence have ironically caused my mind to grapple onto in the height of the digital era. Also, I know you don’t like emails; neither do I.
After “deciding” to apply to Education, Social Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Literature, Education again, Media and Creative Writing, I have finally settled on Literature (again) for graduate school, not least because I got rejected from that Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop I had so enthusiastically told you about. My subsequent attempts to publish anything did not get much success either; after nearly a hundred submissions by now there are only two journals, one online and the other in paper, that host my poetry works. When I went back to Shenzhen during Easter break and was sitting at my old desk one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that five years before I was sitting here like this, busily making up excuses for not practicing AS English Language Paper 1 while lavishing my time on paper 2, the writing paper. All along I have been one that loves practicing writers’ crafts but is lazy to learn the underlying tricks of the trade, something I am now determined to change now that I am aware of its existence. I learn literature not to be a better critic, but a better writer.
I don’t have enough space on paper to even start ranting about the trials and tribulations of attempting to apply to graduate programmes in literature as a social science major who did not even take A Level Literature. Yet the question “whether I regret not having taken A Level Literature in high school” is one I still struggle to form a clear answer to. My time at SCIE was undoubtedly packed with regrets, but it was also equally packed with gratitude; while my biggest regret was not having taken A Level Literature, I am most grateful for having taken AS/AL English Language. It is a paradoxical statement that makes equal sense if “Language” and “Literature” swap places, and for this reason would never be fully fulfilled. - Anyway, who could say that I have missed out? I dare say that the passage analysing techniques you taught us still benefit me till this day; occasionally I can see your annotations next to the lines when I open a book. I have thanked you again and again for having taught us writing, and I am not going to bore you here; yet I still want to say that, by giving me tools that organise my words on paper until they could be called proper writing, you are the one that string my lonely, messy SCIE days together and make it make sense.
I am now seriously running out of paper; I guess this side is going to overflow a bit to the opposite side, pardon me for that. You will be glad to learn that I am reading New Zealand literature at the moment, as part of my preparation for the final essay of one of my Sociology modules, one that focuses on decolonising, for whose final essay I plan to write about Indigenous literatures and how such cultures are depicted in literatures. While I still have not got beyond Katherine Mansfield’s short stories yet (side note: her works are amazing), I am already starting to get intrigued by Maori culture featured in such works, and hopefully Maori literature as well in the near future. Be prepared for my questions on such topics I may have for you the next time we meet, I shall inform you.
One other thing I hope you would give to me the next time we meet, apart from answers to Katherine Mansfield-related queries, is something you handwrite to me. I understand that you lead a busy life but I shall appreciate anything that bears your handwriting, the same writing that has pushed and encouraged me throughout the years, before and after I had been your student, before and after I graduated and entered the real world with more dangers and distractions than ever.
I don’t yet know when my next visit to SCIE will be, yet I am most assured that by then you will still be there. If no one has ever thanked you for your twelfth-ish year at a Chinese international high school, teaching writing to generations after generations of non-native speakers of English until they write like native speakers, remember that I do, and that I always will.
All the best. Te pai katoa.
Lu “Mary” Liu
21 April 2024
