By
April (Junhan) Huang
BA Media
On Arrival
Detergent, and a mixture of brewed coffee.
As I inhale the air in the corridor, I know I am back again, and the foggy land beneath me now becomes solid. Memories of this foreign place turn lucid, while those back home are blurred, as if they happened in another life.
Though I’ve been through this tiring ritual so many times now, this moment still feels somehow alien. The moment this specific smell of the United Kingdom welcomes me, then comes the endless line to cross the border.
This is a beautiful, grey country, the land of freedom.
On Bedroom, Imagination, and Dreams
Sometimes I struggled to wake up from the dreams within dreams. Sometimes I thought I’d woken up, but ended up seeing my mom sitting on one of the chairs by the dining table in my London flat. When I finally opened my sticky eyes, I couldn’t locate myself.
My childhood house, my high school dorm, the rented flat in southern China, the house that I moved into at the end of the pandemic with my parents, the student accommodation during my first year in London… They overlapped with each other. I closed my eyes again, trying to figure out which side I would be facing if I were lying on the bed in my home back in China. My parents’ bedroom is in front of me, the living room is on the left, and the kitchen is on the right…
Independence tastes like tonic water, refreshing, fizzling, then bitter.
Am I living a borrowed life?
On Everything that Needs to Have a Day to End
Halloween, my birthday, Christmas, Chinese New Year, Easter. We celebrate, invite our friends over, and the living room is filled with laughter. I’ve never felt this amount of heat in our home here.
Important days mark the passage of time. They repeat — up to three times — before we have to leave. There is no clock in our flat, but I always hear it ticking. “One, two, three.” Silence. These are all that we are permitted to count; we have to stop here, and we need to pack our stuff now. What will happen when all of this comes to an end? Who will live here after me? How long can the next person hold her ticket of luck?
The clock keeps on, ticking, ticking.
This piece is a response to Temporalities, the theme of our 2026 print issue, which you can read here.
Anthropolitan 