As my age goes up, I feel I have more and more to write down. Now I realized why I was so bad at writing when I was a student. Well, of course, the biggest reason is that I was bad at it. But another one is that at that time I knew nothing and I didn’t have any experience.

Born and grew up to 14 in a small village, the next 3 years in a small town, then 4 years in a 3rd level city, then Nanjing, then Shanghai, Singapore, Europe. These 25, or more specifically the recent 11 years, is full of changes. So many changes that my mentality has to adapt to them and reflect well.

The first change is friend circle, I have different friends in each period. This is the biggest regret that I have for my changing life. My so many good friends, now I am so far away from them, having so different experience. Compared with some people who born and grew up in big cities, they have stable friends that they can claim with 10 or even 20 years of friendship. I don’t have that kind of friendship. I only have middle school friendship, high school friendship, college friendship, Mater's friendship, exchange school friendship, internship friendship. We had very good relationship when we were together, we liked each other and we talked a lot with each other. But as time goes and we need to say goodbye. And then we both have different friend circles. Some of them may stay in the same if they don’t need to move to another place or a big change in their life. For me, my life is always changing. My friends are changing and I really feel upset not being able to talk with my previous friends, not being able to even have one friend that I can talk and hang out with all the time. I am glad that I can have new friends, but with these new friends, our background is just so different. It is good as we can learn so much from each other, we can broaden our horizon. It is less pleasant because, for me, I have never come across anyone who bore poorer than me, or even bore in a village. It's not because I feel self-abased that I am poor but because I feel self-abased that I didn’t have as much good education as they did, that I didn’t have as diversified experience as they did, that I don’t have as good taste as they do, that I don’t have as many skills like drawing or dancing as they do. Don’t get me wrong, I am not ashamed of who I am or where I come from. I am pride for my parents and myself to be at the current status. I just feel this distance from them, which probably make me less likely to be close friends with them because we are just too different, our values are too different.

The second one would be with family. I don’t remember how many times I have dreamed of going back home recently, especially after Honey told me he is going back home by the end of June. I was angry that he didn’t keep his promise that if he is going back to China again next time, he would go to my home. But I do understand his feeling to be with his parents. It's been more than 1 year, yes more than 1 year. One year ago my little niece was still toddling and muttering some funny words. Now she can already run very fast and talk with people, and even has a younger sister. I never sensed many changes before if I don’t go home for a long time, longest time would be 11 months. Because at that time all my family members are grown-ups. I don’t see anything change in them. Now I see my little niece, getting bigger and more energetic, I can truly sense that my parents are getting older. I blame myself for being selfish, only want to enjoy but don’t want to take responsibility as a daughter. Seeing other people in my friend circle sharing their close relationship with their parents, taking funny pics together, making jokes on WeChat, showing their love for each other. I am really jealous of that. I haven't had many common topics with my parents since my second grade at primary school when they start being unable to help me with my study and couldn’t keep up with me growing. They didn't have enough education and more importantly, they didn't have enough time. They spent most of their time trying to make the very low salary to support me and my brother's education, and even my brother's marriage. I felt heartbreaking when my father was struggling with learning to type on his phone, not because he is too old to use electronic products, but because he is not familiar with Pinyin. Until now he only uses handwriting to type on the phone. I understand that for a lot of my old friends back during childhood, their parents might be the same. But now, as I have new friends, I have this new insight how people can be close to their parents, I feel sad to realize that I have been so far away from my parents, physically and mentally.

I know how hard it is to achieve the so called "class move-up". The life that I am having right now is never imagined by me even 3 years ago. I dreamed of going into supermarket and choose whatever I want to eat, now I can do. The only thing is that now there are not much things I want to eat. When I was shopping on Taobao, I realized that I once had this dream that I could have a 10% discount card so I could afford most of clothes I like, now it feels like that when I check Taobao. My biggest dream about appearance back at high school was to have a pink down jacket to knees, a knitted hat, and a pair of boots. And it only costed about 300-400 rmb to buy all of the stuff. Now I can buy a 1000+ rmb dress without much thinking…

I understand I do need to take sacrifices if I want something that I never have or even never dreamed of having. To fight for better life, for me and my family. I will continue to be positive, continue to work hard, continue to improve myself.