(a)

After returning from a holiday in Switzerland, my mother's condition suddenly took a turn for the worse and she was forced to be admitted to the hospital. Since then, she has never been able to get out of the hospital.

She became more and more exhausted, her face gradually lost its former luster, and her whole person became dull and drowsy, thin and weak.

I remember her last days, lying in bed all day, on a ventilator to survive, and even lifting her eyelids was in pain. She always felt that the bones in her body were shattered inch by inch, and her eyes were wandering, like a broken candle dying in the wind.

She often looked at my father and me with infinite affection.

My father began to smoke violently, and sometimes to take other, more stimulating narcotics to relieve the intense pain in his heart. He didn't meet true love until he was 41 years old, but he never expected that after only a few years together, he would be separated forever.

Seeing my father so sad, I often climbed up to his knees, put my arms around his neck, snuggled into his arms, and clung to the hem of his chest.

I was afraid that my father would be like my mother in the hospital and that he would leave me forever.

I feel that the days ahead are dark.

Whenever I snuggled up in my father's arms, he would hug me tightly and kiss me on the face, and the tears on his face were stained with my little face.

It was the first time I saw my father so sad and vulnerable, and saw his helplessness and despair in the face of death.

This irritated me deeply.

I used to think that my father was powerful and omnipotent.

Now I understand that in the face of birth, old age, sickness and death, even the most powerful human beings are as small as dust.

In the face of the sickle of death and the crushing of illness, even if I am as noble as my father, I can hardly do anything.

(b)

When I was 8 years old, my mother finally took her last breath and left my life forever.

Together with my relatives, I sent my mother to the cemetery, watched as people lowered her into the depths of the earth, and then shoveled earth to bury her.

The mother became a picture of an eternally young, eternally smiling picture on a white tombstone. She will never sing to me again, she will not tell me stories, she will not count the stars of the night with me.

Overnight, my father's hair turned white.

When I woke up in the morning, I saw him sitting on the sofa in the living room, completely unappetizing, and completely unresponsive to people's calls.

It took almost a month for my father to recover from this heavy blow.

For more than a year, he wore only black forever, and I rarely saw him smile.

Everyone could see that the father was disheartened by the affairs of men and women, and he would never move the idea of continuation.

In fact, my father was like this, and he never had sex with any woman again.

He also explicitly rejected all good intentions related to marriage, ostensibly because he didn't want me to have a stepmother. But everyone knows that the real reason is that the father decided that he could never find a better mate than his mother.

(c)

After my mother left, as an only daughter, I became the only bright color and hope in my father's life.

When I was 10 years old, my father officially changed my name to Esabelle Chen.

Esabelle is the name of her father's grandmother, who was raised by her grandmother and has a deep affection for her grandmother.

Chen is my mother's last name. My father received permission from the queen to nominally give up letting me inherit his surname and let me follow my mother's surname as a sign of his eternal remembrance of his mother.

My father took the names of the two most beloved women in his life as my name.

He poured all his love into me for the rest of his life, and loved and pityed me ten thousand times. Any request I make, as long as it is justified and not excessive, he will do everything possible to meet it.

I lost my mother's upbringing, and just like that, I was spoiled by his affection.

Although I still maintain the proper etiquette and humility on the outside, in my bones, I have become an arrogant and willful girl on the inside.

At the age of 12, I entered a small class of 8 at St. Paul's Girls' High School, where I mastered Greek, Latin, French and Spanish, and learned harp and flute, as well as painting and ballet.

At the age of 17, I went to Oxford University to study art and design, and then obtained a bachelor's degree.

At the age of 24, I obtained a master's degree from the University of the Arts London.

Subsequently, he worked in an art auction house for his father and participated in his father's business operation.

At the age of 27, he became a director of his father's business empire.

(c)

In my life as Esabelle Chen, I was a well-known avid travel enthusiast.

The wealth I had in my life could also support any trip I wanted.

In that small circle, everyone knew that I had been traveling around the world on my own since I was a teenager.

Even after joining my father's company and taking on a senior executive position there, I traveled everywhere in between jobs.

However, I don't want to visit everywhere.

I just like to go to the old places, the deserted places, the places that used to be prosperous and then withered, the places that used to be noisy and then silent.

I especially like to go to these places in East Asia.

I especially like to go to places in East Asia that are haunted by ancient legends, and especially where I am haunted by vague and specious legends.

Anyone who knows me knows that my travel is not the kind of business or leisure travel that pervades modern life, nor is it the kind of tour that involves plundering and possession, discovery and contention.

My travels have nothing to do with the rest of my life.

In a sense, my travel is more like a re-made choice of time and space.

I travel as a way to leave the plane I am in, as close as possible to a plane that I can't possibly enter.

When I travel, I never bring a camera or a camcorder, I never photograph what I see, and I don't use them as a background to photograph myself over and over again. After the trip, I never wrote a travelogue, and I never recorded my observations and experiences during the trip.

When I arrived at those tourist destinations, it felt like a long-wandering person returning to his familiar hometown.

What I really like is living my daily life in the vanished time and space hidden in those tourist destinations.

Kenny, my father's personal retinue and bodyguard, accompanied me on most of the tours I wasn't allowed to go alone.

Later, in old age, Kenny wrote in his published memoirs: "Esabelle's love of travel is unlike any other, and I often have a strange feeling in the process of following her around—I always feel that she is looking for something, I always feel that she is looking for something in the ruins and ruins of the world, that she is looking for something that she has lost, that she skims everything that is superficial, and that she is preoccupied with finding something." It was something that only she knew what it was. ”